Some 3,000 people belong to the about 70 organizations affiliated with the International Association of Yiddish Clubs, according IAYC president Harold Black of Bethesda, Md.
If Paul Melrood has his way, at least 300 of them will appear in town next month.
For the first time in its nine-year history, the IAYC will have its conference in the Midwest, specifically in Milwaukee. If all goes well, from April 12-15, participants will gather at the Park East Hotel to hear some 25 people — scholars, translators, playwrights, community activists, musicians — celebrate the heritage of Yiddish.
“We’re trying to keep Yiddish alive,” said Melrood, conference chair and prime mover in bringing the event to Milwaukee. He and the other club members and participants “feel very strongly about the Yiddish language and that it should be maintained.”
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This is a very exciting conference,” said Irv Saposnik, who teaches at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Mosse/Weinstein Center for Jewish Studies and is the conference’s Madison liaison. “To have a group getting together who are involved with Yiddish shows there is still vitality left.”
The conference’s theme is “Mame Loshn and the Shoah,” or “mother tongue” Yiddish and the Holocaust. Melrood said the theme was chosen primarily because it hadn’t been used before, and the weekend of the conference coincides with the Milwaukee community Yom HaShoah commemoration, which will be held at Beth El Ner Tamid Synagogue during the afternoon of Sunday, April 14.
But the theme also reflects how “the last words of most of the people who died in the Holocaust were Yiddish,” said Melrood. And it was the Holocaust that “bankrupted the Yiddish language” by destroying millions of people who spoke it and the culture that spawned it. “That’s something we shouldn’t forget.”
Tribute to Weinshel
Yiddish also continued to influence the lives of survivors and their children, said Sandra Hoffman, daughter of Holocaust survivors, president of Milwaukee’s Generation After organization, and the secretary and Yom HaShoah chair for the IAYC conference.
For her, Yiddish was “the language that was always in the background” as it was spoken by her parents and their survivor friends, she said. “A lot of sentimentality goes with it for me…. It’s very nostalgic to be someplace where Yiddish is being spoken.”
Saposnik, however, emphasized that the Holocaust will not be the only subject treated by the presenters. He himself will preside over the opening event, where he will pay tribute to Howard Weinshel, who died last October, and the Perhift Players, Milwaukee’s Yiddish theater company, which Weinshel helped found and which still exists.
Other topics will include Yiddish in Israel and other parts of the world, Yiddish and the Internet, translating and teaching Yiddish, and aspects of Yiddish literature.
Several of the presenters will be local people, including Rabbi Jay R. Brickman, emeritus spiritual leader of Congregation Sinai; Penny Deshur, founder and president of the Wisconsin Genealogical Society; Jody Hirsh, Judaic director of the Harry & Rose Samson Family JCC; Prof. Richard Lux of the Sacred Heart School of Theology and an interfaith relations activist; and Melvin S. Zaret, executive vice president emeritus of the Milwaukee Jewish Federation.
The conference also will provide entertainment. Klezmer clarinetist Kurt Bjorling will appear with the Chicago Klezmer Ensemble and singer Sima Miller on April 13; and local musicians Joe and Rick Aaron will perform with Melrood (himself an actor and member of Perhift) on April 14.
According to Black, who is one of the IAYC’s founders, the organization started about 1993 in the Washington, D.C., area, and was an outgrowth of the club he belonged to, Yiddish of Greater Washington.
“Sometime in 1992 … a couple of us were thinking about what we could do that was unique and different,” Black said in a telephone interview. “We realized that there were Yiddish clubs around the U.S. and Canada and all over the world; and they didn’t know each other existed…. So we thought, ‘Why not hold a Yiddish club conference and see what happens?’”
The first conference proved so successful that plans were made for others. At a conference in 1995, the IAYC was officially incorporated.
The conferences are held every year-and-a-half or so, and until now they have been in larger cities on the U.S. east and west coasts and in Toronto.
Milwaukee was chosen this year because “Melrood was at the last conference. He showed great interest, he had a good committee that he put together quickly,” Black said. Moreover, Black and other IAYC members visited and “we were impressed by Milwaukee….”
Melrood said he has been a member of the IAYC since 1996 — before a Yiddish club organized in Milwaukee. That club started about a year-and-a-half ago, Melrood said, and meets once at month at Congregation Shalom.
But his love of Yiddish goes back much further — all the way to his parents, who came to Milwaukee from Ukraine in 1921, and especially his father, who taught Yiddish in Milwaukee until 1971.
Registration for the conference is open through the end of March. For further information, call the conference’s Milwaukee office, 414-223-3443.
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