Ot Azoy! JMI's Yiddish Crash Course August
2004
posted 14 September 2004
An Appreciation from Professor Gideon Shimoni, Jerusalem :
We were the only Israelis in the Ot Azoy Yiddish crash course of August 2004; my wife, Toni, in the intermediate and I in the advanced course. Writing this appreciation a few weeks later, we are still feeling elated by the experience, sporadically breaking into Yiddish conversation. Our background knowledge was not the same. I had spoken Yiddish as a child and, as a university student and later professor in the field of modern Jewish history (at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem), had occasion to read many Yiddish texts. But my speech was very rusty, I had never attempted to write, and I hadn't a clue about Yiddish grammar. Toni had never spoken Yiddish but completed a beginner's course at the Hebrew University way back in the 1960s. Yet, we were equally excited by the Ot Azoy! course, which, although only of one week's duration, revived and enhanced whatever residues of vocabulary, syntax and speech -- not to speak of songs -- still lay hidden in our conscious and subconscious minds.
Not the least appreciated was our meeting with 60 other enthusiastic pupils from so many countries. But most valued by us was the exposure to the beautifully articulated Yiddish of our teachers, Khayele Beer, Peysakh Fiszman, Sonia Pinkusowitz accompanied by the lovely Yiddish singing of Shura Lipovsky. Their infectious love of Yiddish and the cultural heritage it conveys admirably complemented the friendly teaching methods they deployed, and all with remarkable effect, given the very brief span of teaching hours at our disposal.
Any doubts I harboured, as one who is himself a teacher of sorts, about the value of a 'crash' course have been dispelled. This experience has proven that it works just fine -- ot azoy! A hartzik yosher ko'akh to the Jewish Music Summer Schools programme.
