Yiddish Drinking Songs with Rokhl and Rabbi Drew

-

 Yiddish Drinking Songs with Rokhl and Rabbi Drew

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Ashkenazi Heritage Tutoring for B'nei Mitsve Students of All Ages

-
Image
About Rokhl ... Rokhl Kafrissen is a journalist, teacher, playwright, and 2022 winner of the prestigious Adrienne Cooper "Dreaming in Yiddish" prize.  Since 2017, her " Rokhl’s Golden City ” column has appeared monthly in Tablet magazine, covering the length and breadth of Yiddish culture.  For the past two years, she has brought her fan favorite Ashkenazi Folk Magic and Ritual classes to the Yiddish Book Center: “Between Heaven and Earth: Yiddish Women's Folklore, Rituals, & Magic” (Fall, 2023) and "Sacred Time and Liminal Space: Ashkenazi Folk Magic at the Threshold" (Fall, 2024). In 2024, she offered a series of classes on "Everyday Ashkenazi Magic" through the Congress for Jewish Culture . In addition to classes and lectures on Ashkenazi magic, she teaches Yiddish language and culture for private students in a one on one, personally tailored Jewish education experience.   Her Ashkenazi Heritage Tutoring package is a pe...
Read more

Spooky Season Class - Sex, Death, and Demons

-
Image
 Spooky Season in Yiddish :  October 15, 22, and 29th at 7:00 pm (EST) As September closes, a Yiddish goth's fancy turns to the strange and unusual.  If perhaps you don't think Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur are spooky, you may not be doing them right. I mean, we spend Rosh Hashanah thinking about 99 ways to die if Hashem doesn't write us into the Book of Life. On Yom Kippur we walk around in an approximation of our own burial shrouds!  For my own part, I'm putting together a new class for October, diving into the macabre and darker side of Yiddish. For the first time, I'll be teaching IL Peretz's " Monish " - a cri de coeur for modern Yiddish literature, wherein Peretz proves he can use Yiddish to write about sex and death . Our hero Monish is an innocent Talmud prodigy who is seduced by Satan and his most glamorous companion, Lilith. Ooh la la, as we say af yidish .    Vos nokh ? We'll learn some practical Ashkenazi magic in the form of protec...
Read more

Elul is a Spooky Place

-
Image
I present here another piece of spooky Yiddish folklore from the esteemed folklorist YL Cahan. This one has an intriguing Elul connection... 32. About the “Great Minyen” In Hrubeshoyv there was a minyen they called “the great minyen.” The men of the minyen were hidden tsadikim , or saints. Each one of them was a craftsman: tailor, shoemaker, porter, carpenter, blacksmith, and so on. After midnight, they used to meet in the small study house and occupy themselves with the holy Torah. One time they resolved that they must bring Moshiakh.  About this the people were of two minds: some said that one of them had made a mistake with the mystical names of God, and that instead of bringing Moshiakh, they had brought Samoel  [i.e. Satan the accuser or adversary] and thus their own damnation in fire. Others folks said that what happened was that the Baal Shem had found out about them and drove them away, as it wasn’t yet time, and Moshiakh mustn’t come yet.  Even today, people sa...
Read more