Olga Avigail Mieleszczuk is a singer, accordion player, and researcher of Eastern European musical folklore. She is known for singing Ashkenazi Jewish songs in Yiddish. [1] [2] [3] [4] In 2012, Olga Mieleszczuk converted to Orthodox Judaism and acquired the first name Avigail. She currently lives in Israel. [1]
Mieleszczuk was born in Warsaw to a Polish Catholic family. She received a Bachelor of Arts in classical music from the Chopin University of Music in Warsaw and an Master of Science in cultural anthropology from the University of Warsaw. [1] After enrolling in a course on Yiddish music created by Warsaw's Shalom Foundation, [1] she focused on Ashkenazi Jewish music, particularly that from the Eastern Borderlands of Poland. She also studied Chassidic music, Yiddish folk songs, and Jewish songs in different languages. [5] Her interest in Jewish culture was sparked by an interfaith visit to Auschwitz. [1]
Her musical projects include Jewish Polesye , [6] Li-La-Lo (based on the Yiddish-language cabarets of Poland called kleynkunst and Tel Aviv [7] ), and Jewish Tango . [5]
She has had two children with her husband, Shlomi, who is of Kurdish descent. [1]
L. L. Zamenhof was the creator of Esperanto, the most widely used constructed international auxiliary language.
Klezmer is an instrumental musical tradition of the Ashkenazi Jews of Central and Eastern Europe. The essential elements of the tradition include dance tunes, ritual melodies, and virtuosic improvisations played for listening; these would have been played at weddings and other social functions. The musical genre incorporated elements of many other musical genres including Ottoman music, Baroque music, German and Slavic folk dances, and religious Jewish music. As the music arrived in the United States, it lost some of its traditional ritual elements and adopted elements of American big band and popular music. Among the European-born klezmers who popularized the genre in the United States in the 1910s and 1920s were Dave Tarras and Naftule Brandwein; they were followed by American-born musicians such as Max Epstein, Sid Beckerman and Ray Musiker.
Shtetl or shtetel is a Yiddish term for small towns with predominantly Ashkenazi Jewish populations which existed in Eastern Europe before the Holocaust. The term is used in the context of former East European Jewish societies as mandated islands within the surrounding non-Jewish populace, and thus bears certain connotations of discrimination. Shtetls were mainly found in the areas that constituted the 19th-century Pale of Settlement in the Russian Empire, as well as in Congress Poland, Austrian Galicia, the Kingdom of Romania and the Kingdom of Hungary.
Yiddish theatre consists of plays written and performed primarily by Jews in Yiddish, the language of the Ashkenazi Jewish community. The range of Yiddish theatre is broad: operetta, musical comedy, and satiric or nostalgic revues; melodrama; naturalist drama; expressionist and modernist plays. At its height, its geographical scope was comparably broad: from the late 19th century until just before World War II, professional Yiddish theatre could be found throughout the heavily Jewish areas of Eastern and East Central Europe, but also in Berlin, London, Paris, Buenos Aires and New York City.
YIVO is an organization that preserves, studies, and teaches the cultural history of Jewish life throughout Eastern Europe, Germany, and Russia as well as orthography, lexicography, and other studies related to Yiddish. Established in 1925 in Wilno in the Second Polish Republic as the Yiddish Scientific Institute.
Jerzy Petersburski was a Jewish Polish pianist and composer of popular music, renowned mostly for his Tangos, some of which were milestones in popularization of the musical genre in Poland and are still widely known today, more than half a century after their creation.
Yiddishkeit literally means "Jewishness". It can refer broadly to Judaism or specifically to forms of Orthodox Judaism when used particularly by religious and Orthodox Ashkenazi. In a more general sense, it has come to mean the "Jewishness" or "Jewish essence" of Ashkenazi Jews in general and the traditional Yiddish-speaking Jews of Eastern and Central Europe in particular.
Itzik Manger was a prominent Yiddish poet and playwright, a self-proclaimed folk bard, visionary, and 'master tailor' of the written word. A Jew from Bucovina, Manger lived in Romania, Poland, France, England, the US, Canada (Montreal) and finally Israel.
This article describes the principal types of religious Jewish music from the days of the Temple to modern times.
Wiera Gran, real name Dwojra Grynberg was a Polish singer and actress of Jewish ancestry.
Polish culture in the interwar period witnessed the rebirth of Polish sovereignty. The nationhood along with its cultural heritage was no longer suppressed by the three foreign partitioners. The cultural development saw the retreat of the 19th century elite cultures of nobility as well as the traditional folk culture, and the rise of a new mass culture integrating Polish society closer to the new intelligentsia educated in the practice of democracy.
Mina Bern was a Polish and American actress. She was a star of the Yiddish theater.
Rajzel Żychlińsky was a Polish-born writer of poetry in Yiddish. She published seven collections over six decades. Her first two collections were published in Warsaw, Poland in 1936 and 1939, just prior to World War II. She survived the war by fleeing eastward to the Soviet Union, but many members of her immediate family were murdered in the Holocaust. Her postwar poetry, mostly written in the United States, was strongly influenced by these events.
Isabelle Yakovlevna Kremer was a soprano of Russian Jewish descent who at various times of her life held citizenship in Russia, the United States, and Argentina. She first drew notice as a teenager for her revolutionary poetry which was published in an Odessa newspaper. She began her professional singing career as an opera singer in Europe during the second decade of the 20th century. By the time of her relocation to the United States in 1924, she had abandoned her opera career in favor of performing as a concert soloist and recitalist.
Zygmunt Białostocki was a Polish Jewish musician and composer. He composed many popular Polish pre-war songs, and worked as conductor and a première pianist in Warsaw between the World Wars.
Henryk Gold was a Polish-American composer, arranger, and orchestra director.
Lea Koenig is an Israeli actress, nicknamed The First Lady of Israeli Theatre.
Clara Young was a Yiddish theatrical actor. Born to parents who loved the stage, she spent her early years in a home that housed rehearsals of traveling Yiddish theater troupes. After her father's death, the family went to America, where she soon joined the Tantsman company and went to Boston, there to Zolotarevski's troupe in Montreal, thence to Toronto and to Morris Finkel's theater in Philadelphia.
Igor S. Korntayer was a Polish Jewish actor, lyricist, poet, and coupletist. He is best known for the Yiddish Tango song Vu ahin zol ikh geyn? , for which he is usually credited for writing new Yiddish lyrics.
Samuel Zvi Hirsh "Henryk" Peltyn was a Polish Jewish writer, translator, and publisher.