JMI Ot Azoy! Faculty 2009
modified 3 February 2009

Pesakh Fiszman (died Jan 2009) was a superb Yiddish teacher and storyteller from New York City. He was born in Argentina to parents of Ukrainian-Jewish descent but since the early 1980s he lived in the USA. He worked as a lecturer at several major New York institutions, including Columbia University, the Jewish Theological Seminary and the Workmen’s Circle.

Pesakh Fiszman taught in his native tongue, Yiddish, throughout North America as well as all over Europe. As well as Ot Azoy in London, Pesakh was a regular teacher at KlezKamp (USA), KlezKanada, Oxford and Weimar and taught Yiddish for two years in Moscow and Kiev. He was universally respected by his pupils as a charismatic and devoted champion of Yiddish.

While instructing his students in Yiddish, he added storytelling as a necessary feature to his classroom instruction: "I wanted to give my students the opportunity to also use that which they had learnt. Therefore I simply create for them stories. Frequently they would come to me at the end of class and say: "Pesakh, I have understood every word!", even though they were still beginners and didn’t truly understand the language yet."

Such reactions on the part of his audience are commonplace. Pesakh Fiszman doesn’t just tell his stories but lives them with gesticulation, intonation and his total personality. Even people with little understanding of Yiddish are able to follow him. His very unique and captivating style and elocution catapults his audiences, almost magically into the unique, far flung Jewish worlds of Eastern Europe and America.

It is with great saddness that we mourn the loss of our dear Pesakh Fiszman, who has been a stalwart of the faculty of Ot Azoy since its inception, who died earlier this year.

Pesakh in full flow, telling the story of the frog and the woodpecker.

Picture to arrive.

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