Happy Passover! ‫אַ זיסן און כּשרן פּסח!‬

Happy Passover and thanks to friends, participants, and sponsors of this show:

Featured Interview: Hy Wolfe, executive director of CYCO Yiddish Bookstore and Publishing House, talks about the organization's campaign to survive and thrive as New York City's last secular Yiddish book store, helped by Friends of CYCO Books, a new organization and web site, and thanks to recent publicity such as the New York Review of Books article The Joy of Yiddish Books. Besides heading up CYCO, Wolfe is a veteran actor, director, and singer, both in English and Yiddish. More info at HyWolfe.com.

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Air Date: April 6, 2022

Air Date: March 30, 2022

Hear all about the upcoming 2022 YIVO Summer Program from Dovid Braun, the summer program's academic director. There's still time to register, for in person or online classes. For more info, check out their web site: https://summerprogram.yivo.org

Hear an interview with Lilly Segelstein, an Auschwitz survivor who was born in Klitsherkes (קליטשערקעס), then in Czechoslovakia, and today's Kliucharky, a village in Ukraine, near Mukacheve in Zakarpattia Oblast. Lilly is the mother of Cookie Segelstein, who assists her mother on this interview. Cookie is the acclaimed Klezmer violinist of Veretski Pass, whose music is featured in the latter part of the show.

Hear greetings for Pesach from sponsors and friends!

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Air Date: March 23, 2022

Interview with Gennady Estraikh discussing the war in Ukraine. Estraikh, who was born in Zaporizhzhia, Ukraine, is a professor at NYU who specializes in Jewish intellectual history, Yiddish language and literature, and Soviet Jewish history. He has written numerous books, academic papers, and journal and newspaper articles in English, Russian, Ukrainian, and Yiddish, notably for the Yiddish Forverts. He served as managing editor of the famed Yiddish literary journal Sovetish Heymland from 1988 to 1991. His books include Yiddish Culture in Ukraine (Kyiv: Dukh i Litera, 2016, in Ukrainian) and Transatlantic Russian Jewishness: Ideological Voyages of the Yiddish Daily Forverts in the First Half of the Twentieth Century (Academic Studies Press, 2020). The interview took place over Zoom on Friday March 4, 2022, and was led by Sholem Beinfeld, regular contributor to The Yiddish Voice, co-Editor in Chief of the Comprehensive Yiddish-English Dictionary, and Professor of History, Emeritus, Washington University in St. Louis.

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Air date: March 9, 2022

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Air Date: March 2, 2022

The show presents an interview with Eddie (Avrum) Hoffman, who survived Auschwitz, slave labor at a Krupp factory in Breslau (Wrocław), a death march, and the last days at Ebensee, the brutal Mathausen subcamp.Eddie Hoffman was born in February, 1929, in Sevluš, Czechoslovakia, one of three brothers. The town was in the Subcarpathian Ruthenia part of Czechoslovakia and was also known in Yiddish as Seylesh (סעליש) and in Hungarian as Nagyszőlős. It is now called Vynohradiv and is in Ukraine. His father ran a small shoe manufacturing business, and his mother ran a small general store. In 1944 his father left the family to join the partisans fighting against the Nazis, never to be heard from again, and he and his mother and brothers were deported to Auschwitz. He was the only immediate family member to survive the Holocaust. He eventually settled in Los Angeles, where he owned and managed several bars and restaurants. He now resides with his wife in Orange County, near Los Angeles. The interview took place at his home in October, 2021.

The interview with Eddie is dedicated to the memory of Arthur Machlovitz ע״ה, also an Auschwitz survivor from Subcarpathian Ruthenia, from the town of Iza. He was long-time friends and a former business partner with Eddie and was friendly with Yiddish Voice host Meyer Dovid, and so he introduced them in a way: they met at Arthur's funeral in the summer of 2021.

Also on this show we sadly announced the passing of Mrs. Margaret (Matele) Friedman ע״ה, who died just two days earlier (Feb. 21, 2022). She was friends with Yiddish Voice host Meyer Dovid, had been featured on several of our broadcasts over the years, and was known in the community for her wonderful singing ability, especially in Yiddish. Also an Auschwitz survivor from Subcarpathian Ruthenia, after the way she returned to the area and married and started a family in Seylesh, and lived there for more than twenty-five years under the Soviets, before the family moved to the US in the 1970's. ‮געבענטשט זאָל זײַן איר אָנדענק!‬

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Extended episode: this episode is slightly longer than 1 hr 23 minutes. Thanks to the generosity of our radio station WUNR 1600 AM (Brookline, MA) for allowing us to exceed our usual one-hour time slot.

Air Date: February 23, 2022

This show features an interview with Efraim (Froyim) Kessler, who, at age 105, is the oldest person ever interviewed on The Yiddish Voice. In the interview Kessler, who was born in Bilgoray, Poland, in 1916, recalls various aspects of his youth, including encounters with the Nobel Prize-winning author Isaac Bashevis Singer and Rabbi Aharon Rokeach, the Belzer Rebbe. He also recalls surviving the Spanish flu. (We learned after the interview that he also survived Covid-19.)

Efraim Kieslowicz was born and raised in Bilgoray (Polish spelling: Biłgoraj) on July 27, 1916, one of nine siblings. His father was a rabbi and also ran a grain mill and grocery store. He became an electrician in prewar Poland. He spent the war years in various places in the Soviet Union, including Chukotka in the Russian Far East and Samarkand and Tashkent in Uzbekistan. After the war, he spent several years in a DP camp in Ebensee, Austria. He arrived in the USA in 1952, spending several years in New York and elsewhere before arriving in Los Angeles, where he has lived until now. Along the way, he anglicized his name to be Fred Kessler. In 1960, he started his own electrical contracting business, Fred Kessler Electric, later called Robert Kessler Electric when his son took over the business. He was for decades a member of the shtibl known as "Rabbi Moskovitz's shul" on Fairfax St. in Los Angeles, and has been a member of Young Israel of Los Angeles for over 40 years. He now resides with his son Michael in Los Angeles. The interview took place in September 2021.

Also on tonight's show, Kolya Borodulin, director of Yiddish Programming at Workers Circle in New York, talks about the upcoming virtual program, Vinter in Yidishland. We'll also hear the Yiddish Voice debut of a new Yiddish version of the Dolly Parton song Jolene, performed by the Israeli singer and actress Ronit Asheri. Finally, to observe Tu Bishvat, which fell two days ago, from our archives: Miriam Libenson Z"L: a talk in honor of the holiday Tu Bishvat, the holiday of the trees, originally broadcast in 1994, followed by music related to Tu Bishvat and/or to trees, generally.

Air date: January 19, 2022

This show is a special Shloyshim program in memory of Israel (Izzy) Arbeiter ז״ל, Holocaust survivor and founder and former long-time president of the American Association of Jewish Holocaust Survivors of Greater Boston, who passed away Oct. 29, 2021, at the age of 96. This show is sponsored by The American Association of Jewish Holocaust Survivors of Greater Boston and Descendants.

The first part features remarks in memory of Izzy, while the second contains excerpts of his recordings for The Yiddish Voice.

Remarks:

Janet Stein Calm, President The American Association of Jewish Holocaust Survivors of Greater Boston and Descendants (with remarks read in Yiddish by Dovid Braun);

Tania Lefman, Holocaust survivor, long-time friend of Arbeiter's, and treasurer of the American Association of Jewish Holocaust Survivors of Greater Boston;

Rabbi Moshe Waldoks of Temple Beth Zion, Boston, who officiated at Arbeiter's funeral; and

Dovid Braun, a co-host of The Yiddish Voice and director of the YIVO Yiddish Summer Program

Recordings of Izzy Arbeiter for The Yiddish Voice:

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Air date: December 8, 2021

The Yiddish Voice/דאָס ייִדישע קול lost a great friend. Izzy Arbeiter passed away this past Friday, Oct 29 2021, at the age of 96. To mark this sad loss, we are replaying our 2005 interview that was led by our late cohost Iosif Lakhman.

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