In a musty basement hall of an unassuming building nestled among modern high-rises in the heart of Tel Aviv, a few hundred spectators are kindly requested to turn off their cellphones. What makes the typical scene surreal is that they are asked to do so in Yiddish — the playful, lyrical language of Diaspora European Jews.
In its first performance in Israel, a Grammy-nominated concert had arrived to play the lost songs of lost Jews in a nearly lost language. More than 70 years after the purged poems of Holocaust survivors, victims and Jewish Red Army soldiers were first composed and curated, a Canadian historian has brought back to life works thought to be long gone.
The result is "Yiddish Glory," a collection of songs describing the harrowing World War II experience of Soviet Jews. Even amid the horrors of the Holocaust, Jewish musicians created a vibrant cultural life in camps and ghettos, with the arts providing a refuge, a sense of meaning and even a form of resistance.
"The last thing a lot of Yiddish speaking people did was to write a song," said Anna Shternshis, the University of Toronto professor behind the project. "Before Yiddish was killed, it was sung."
Yiddish is a lot more vibrant than most people realize.
I'm not only talking about the popularity of the Yiddish language "Fiddler on the Roof" in New York. I'm not talking about the huge international hit, Shtisel.
In the chareidi communities of Israel, New York and elsewhere, Yiddish is still the dominant everyday language of hundreds of thousands of Jews.
Here is the latest cover of Kindlein, a weekly Yiddish magazine for children, which includes comics, stories, and puzzles.
The publishing house Kinder Shpiel has hundreds of Yiddish books for children and teens - here are some of their novels for young adults:
Children's books aren't nostalgia-driven. These children's publications, as well as many Yiddish language magazines, newspapers and books for adults, exist because there is a real demand for them from the chareidi community.
It is true that chareidim are insular, but that is not an excuse for reporters or scholars to ignore their existence. Nostalgia for the shtetl will not keep Yiddish alive - it is being kept alive by real Jews who speak the language every day, in shops and in parks and at work.
These are Jews that for some reason the larger Jewish community doesn't want to think about.