Introducing Yiddish Barcelona: An Interview Ahead of its First Year

Dinah Megibow-Taylor: So, to start, I would love it if you could tell me about your role in the development of the Yiddish Barcelona program, and then walk me through what the creation of this program was like.

Malena Chinski: This initiative results from the collaboration between Golda van der Meer, myself, and Violeta Bronstein, the third member of the organizing team. Even though for years I had had an abstract idea of organizing a Yiddish program in Spain, the idea began to take shape when Violeta and I first visited Casa Adret in June 2025 and met the Mozaika Association organizers. [Editorial note: Mozaika is a Barcelona-based Jewish cultural initiative that began as a magazine and has since expanded into a broad-based cultural organization; its headquarters are in Casa Adret, a medieval home in the ancient Jewish quarter that now houses a four-story Jewish cultural center.] A few days later I met Golda in Barcelona. When we saw each other again at “Yiddish in Paris,” the summer school organized by the Maison de la culture yiddish where I was working then, we began to discuss the concrete possibility of running a new Yiddish program in Barcelona in summer 2026. Once Violeta, Golda, and I became a team, we reached an agreement with Mozaika to host the program at Casa Adret, and this is how Yiddish Barcelona was born. From there, we began to develop the program’s goals, pedagogical content and cultural agenda based on Golda’s and my professional expertise, experience in the field, and personal research. Violeta’s extensive experience in cultural project management has been instrumental in turning our ideas into reality.

Personally speaking, the idea came to my mind around six years ago, when I encountered a Yiddish testimony written by a Holocaust survivor who had crossed from France to Spain through the Pyrenees, and who evoked the surprising feeling of finding himself in the same land where Jews had been forced to flee the Inquisition. Upon arrival, the author was caught by the Spanish police and incarcerated in the Zaragoza prison. This piece was published in 1948 in the Naye prese, the French Yiddish communist daily, within the framework of a writing contest, which is the object of a research project that I have been working on in collaboration with French historians Constance Pâris de Bollardière and Simon Perego. When I read this story, I thought, there is an unexplored chapter of Yiddish culture related to Spain. This awareness led to the idea of organizing some day a Yiddish program in Spain in order to incorporate this geography into the Yiddish map, and the day arrived! Of course, such an initiative is a continuation of previous efforts made by other people like Golda to make Yiddish culture better known in Spain, and particularly in Catalonia. I know she had also envisioned the idea of organizing an intensive Yiddish week program in Barcelona.

Golda van der Meer: Together with Mozaika, [Malena Chinski and I] had planned quite some time ago the first Yiddish-intensive weekend in Barcelona, but unfortunately for various reasons it could not take place. Still, the desire to make it happen remained strong. I teach Yiddish literature at the University of Barcelona’s Institut de Formació Contínua (Institute of Lifelong Learning), and I began to notice that there was considerable interest in learning Yiddish among students enrolled in these courses. Some of them would come up to me afterwards to ask, “Where can I learn Yiddish?”

This new Intensive Yiddish program we are launching this summer in Barcelona is designed to introduce the Yiddish language and culture to local audiences. In addition to language instruction, the program offers workshops, lectures, and cultural events, all centered on different aspects of Yiddish history, literature, and culture.

Another interesting aspect of running the program in Barcelona is that, in recent years, a number of Yiddish literary works have been translated into Catalan bringing Yiddish literature to Catalan readers and generating new interests in the language and its cultural heritage. When people think of Yiddish, they usually think of Poland and other Eastern European countries, as well as Latin America, the United States and Canada. However, there was also a Yiddish-speaking presence in Spain, particularly during the Spanish Civil War and, as Malena mentioned earlier, during the Second World War, when thousands of Polish-Jewish refugees fled through France to Spain, over the Pyrenees and into Barcelona. There are documented records of shops where Jewish refugees worked, and where Yiddish was spoken. ^{1 1} This information can be found in a book called “Voces caídas del cielo: Historia del exilio judío en Barcelona (1881-1954)” by Manu Valentín. So, while the Yiddish presence in Barcelona was relatively small, it was nevertheless significant, and it remains a subject of interest today. I have seen that interest firsthand in my own Yiddish literature classes.

I also wanted to add that Casa Adret is, I think, a wonderful place to host the program. Casa Adret is a cultural center managed by Mozaika, contributing to the revitalization of Jewish cultural life in Barcelona. It is located in what was, historically, the house of Solomo Ben Adret, a medieval Jewish doctor, and it's one of the oldest medieval houses in Barcelona, still preserving much of its original structure despite later adaptations.

DMT: That's incredible. I was going to ask about the house, but your comments make me wonder, is there a special connection that you find between Spanish, Catalan, and Yiddish? And then, how does that relate to the connection between Ashkenazi and Sephardic culture?

MC: For me there is a special connection between Yiddish and Spanish. As a consequence of mass migration, Yiddish culture flourished in Spanish-speaking countries in Latin America in the twentieth century, and this resulted in a wide range of institutions, school movements, newspapers, literary works, etcetera. I am from Argentina, where I learned Yiddish at the Fundación IWO in downtown Buenos Aires with Argentine teachers Ester Szwarc and Avrom Lichtenbaum. The Argentine IWO was founded as a branch of the YIVO in Vilna but quickly became an independent research and educational institution dedicated to collecting archival materials focused on Jewish life in Latin America.

From my perspective, creating a new intensive Yiddish program in Spain means opening the door to a large corpus of Yiddish writings produced in the Latin American diasporas that are usually neglected when it comes to teaching Yiddish in Europe. My motivation was precisely to create a new address for Yiddish in a Spanish-speaking context in Europe.

As for the connections between Ashkenazi and Sephardic cultures, I would say that Yiddish literary works created in Latin America are especially interesting to appreciate the influence of Sephardic history in Yiddish literature, and how the expulsion of Spanish Jews is evoked. For example, a little known aspect of Aaron Zeitlin’s trajectory, as studied by my colleague Alan Astro, is that Aaron Zeitlin spent six months in Cuba in 1939 before he was granted a visa to settle permanently in New York. In that context, he wrote a cycle of poems titled In goles-Kuba (In Cuban exile), in which we can see the way Zeitlin perceived the environment as marked by traces of a Sephardic past, and the way he recognized possible descendants of Sephardic Jews around him. The connection with a Spanish past is a central aspect of Latin American Yiddish literature.

GVDM: Without a doubt! The influence of Spain and Spanish literature is certainly present in Yiddish literature. As Malena mentioned, this is one of the themes we hope to explore in this new program. For example, one of our talks, to be given by Arnaud Bikard, teacher of the intermediate class, will examine the influence of Don Quixote on Yiddish literature. Other Yiddish writers also engaged with Spanish literature traditions. Jacob Glatstein, for instance, wrote about Ramón del Valle-Inclán in The Glatstein Chronicles, while Aaron Glanz-Leyeles dedicated a poem to Yehuda Halevi. More broadly, there was a period during which the poetry of the Sephardic Golden Age became especially influential among Ashkenazi writers. Poets such as Hayyim Nahman Bialik produced Yiddish adaptations of Yehuda Halevi’s poetry, helping to introduce his work to new audiences. This fascination with the cultural legacy of medieval Spain is one example of the broader intellectual and literary connections that developed between Ashkenazi and Sephardic traditions.

Another connection relating Judeo-Spanish (Ladino), Yiddish, and Catalan is their shared status as minoritized languages shaped by displacement, repression, and linguistic activism. Although their historical experiences are not directly comparable, all three languages faced periods of marginalization and suppression. These parallels attracted the attention of Yiddish intellectuals and linguists, who saw in the Catalan language an example of language revitalization through literature and culture. One example is Ber Borochov, who referred to the Catalan language in his essay “Di Oyfgabn fun der Yidisher Filologye” (The Tasks of Yiddish Philology), published in Vilnius in 1913. The connections between Yiddish and Catalan can be seen not only through translation and literary revitalization, but also through shared reflections on minoritized languages, cultural survival, and linguistic activism.

MC: Both languages sought recognition and legitimacy. These shared struggles are one of the most significant connections between Catalan and Yiddish, which have run parallel paths over time.

GVDM: Exactly. Actually, last summer an academic journal, Haide, invited me to write a comparative article on the renowned Catalan author Joan Maragall and a Yiddish author of my choice. I chose to write about Isaac Leib Peretz. ^{2 2} van der Meer, Golda. «Joan Maragall I Isaac Leib Peretz: Deliberacions Sobre El Llenguatge». Haidé. Estudis Maragallians. Butlletí De l’Arxiu Joan Maragall, núm. 13, desembre 2024, p. 31-39, doi:10.60940/Haide2024.13.2. https://doaj.org/article/e04b62b28b024af8849b4c85babac598. To my surprise, I discovered a remarkable number of parallels between the two. They were born only a few years apart and lived through the same historical period at the turn of the twentieth century. They also died within a relatively short time of one another. The similarities became even more striking when I looked at their cultural and linguistic activism. Joan Maragall participated in the First International Congress of the Catalan language, held in Barcelona in 1906, while Peretz was a central figure at the Czernowitz [modern-day Chernivtsi, Ukraine] Conference on the Yiddish language in 1908. Both delivered influential speeches, both were deeply committed to literary creation in their respective languages, and both played a crucial role in promoting and legitimizing those languages as vehicles of modern culture. Although they lived in very different geographical and political contexts, they were, in many ways, engaged in similar struggles for the recognition, prestige and dignity of their languages. Their legacy is still visible today as schools and streets bear their names, reflecting the lasting impact they had on their literary traditions and on the cultural life of their communities. For me, this comparison was a fascinating example of the unexpected connection that can emerge between Catalan and Yiddish cultures.

DMT: Moving back to the Yiddish summer program itself. I'm really curious to hear about what is on the docket. We have an analysis of Cervantes' work, or a comparison with how it affected Yiddish, but what else? What other scholars are participating in the program? What will they be teaching?

MC: The program for registered participants includes Yiddish language classes at three levels in the morning, taught by Arnaud Bikard, Tamara Micner, and me, one-to-one tutoring sessions in the afternoon, and a theater and song workshop led by Tamara Micner, co-director of the Yiddish theater company The London Shpilers. We are also offering a guided tour of Barcelona’s historic Jewish quarter, the Call, led by local experts. On Friday, participants will have the opportunity to take part in a cooking workshop led by Monica Buzali, who will introduce a selection of medieval Sephardic recipes reinterpreted with an Ashkenazi twist. This workshop offers another way of exploring Jewish cultural heritage through food and culinary traditions.

In addition, the program features an evening cultural agenda open to the general public , which includes lectures and discussion panels designed to connect with the local community. We want our house to be an integral part of the neighborhood, rooted in its surroundings, and open to all. In this sense, we have adopted the letter “beys,” which means “house” in Hebrew, as a symbol of the project. The letter evokes not only Barcelona but also Casa Adret, our home. We aspire to create a new address for Yiddish open to anyone who may be interested in learning about Yiddish culture.

As one of the public events, Arnaud Bikard, who is a professor at the Institute of Oriental Languages in Paris, will deliver a talk about the influence of Don Quixote in Yiddish literature, as Golda already mentioned. In my case, I will deliver a lecture related to Yiddish in Latin America, which will commemorate the 80th anniversary of the Yiddish book collection Dos poylishe yidntum (The Polish Jewry), inaugurated in 1946 in Buenos Aires under the editorial leadership of the Warsaw-born journalist and community activist Mark Turkow. The first volume of this collection has recently been translated into English by Sandra Chiritescu and published under the title Malka Owsiany Recounts… A Chronicle of Our Time (Academic Studies Press, 2025), with a new preface I have authored. It features the wartime story of one of the first survivors who arrived in Buenos Aires in the aftermath of the Second World War from a refugee camp in Sweden. Fifty years later, Malka Owsiany was interviewed both by the Fortunoff Video Archive of Holocaust Testimonies and by the USC Shoah Foundation. So this case study connects the realms of Yiddish in Latin America, khurbn-literatur (Holocaust literature), and the dynamic nature of Holocaust testimonies.

Precisely, one of the main supporters of our program is the Fortunoff Archive for Holocaust Testimonies at Yale University. One of the program’s major public events will be a presentation of the archive at the University of Barcelona.[Editorial note: In geveb readers may already be familiar with this archive because of our ongoing partnership through our In geveb/Fortunoff Archive fellowship, which you can read about here.] We have invited a guest speaker from Vienna, Lida Maria Dodu, who will discuss the archive’s Judeo-Spanish testimonies, a corpus that remains relatively little known to researchers. We will also present, in partnership with the Jewish Film Festival in Barcelona, a short documentary directed by Asaf Galay titled You Have Courage, Madam, which has been created from fragments of a Yiddish testimony drawn from the Fortunoff Archive. The film traces the story of Polish Jewish photographer Julia Pirotte in occupied France. We believe that Holocaust education is vital when teaching Yiddish, regardless of the languages of the testimonies.

GVDM: Related to what Malena just explained, we will also dedicate a public event to the translation from Yiddish into Judeo-Spanish of Yitskhok Katzenelson’s Dos lid fun oysgehargetn yidishn folk (The Song of the Murdered Jewish People), published by Herder in a bilingual edition translated by Arnau Pons, a translator best known for his work from German into Catalan, and who has also specialized in Ladino. What makes this translation especially compelling is that it invites us to think about the relationships between minoritized languages and the way they can interact through translation. Rather than passing through a dominant language, this translation creates a direct dialogue between two Jewish languages. This remarkable project is discussed by Cynthia Gabbay in an article that explores many of these issues in greater depth. ^{3 3} Gabbay’s article “Exponential Minor Literatures: A Yiddish Poem of the Shoah in Judeo-Spanish Translation,” published in Interventions (2024), was distinguished as “Article of the Year” (2024) by the Yiddish section of The Year’s Work in Modern Language Studies (Vol. 86, Issue 1, 2026).

MC: Yes, translation is an essential aspect of the program as well. What's the future for Yiddish? Transmitting the language and translation. And Golda is one of only two translators from Yiddish into Catalan in the world.

GVDM: There are currently only two translators from Yiddish into Catalan, for now, Joan Ferrarons and myself. In the program, we will include a roundtable to discuss recent translations from Yiddish into Catalan and what these translations represent. With this Yiddish program in Barcelona we are hoping to spark local interest and, ideally, the emergence of more translators in the future.

DMT: My last question for you has to do with how you would like to see the program grow over the next iterations. What are you hoping to see as the program launches, and what are you hoping to see in the program’s future?

MC: We would like to see the program grow in terms of levels offered next year. This year we limited the program to three levels because it's the first iteration, and our primary audience at this point is locals who have had little access to Yiddish language instruction. For this reason, besides one intermediate level addressed to students with more experience, we created two separate beginner levels, one for full beginners and one for beginners with prior knowledge of the Hebrew alphabet, thinking that Hebrew learners or even Hebrew professionals in Spain might be interested in learning Yiddish. Having advanced levels would open the possibility of studying many of the texts that we have referred to here.

GVDM: We would also like to strengthen our network of local collaborators, as one of our main goals is for the program to engage meaningfully with the cultural life of the city and its neighborhoods. We have already mentioned Mozaika and the Fortunoff Archive for Holocaust Testimonies at Yale University, which are key partners supporting the initiative, but we are also very grateful for the support and collaboration of the University of Barcelona, the Institut d’Estudis Jueus de Barcelona, the Barcelona Jewish Film Festival, Toldot, the Goethe-Institut, and the Patronat Call de Girona. Looking ahead, we hope to expand the program in the future by offering additional concerts, lectures, workshops, and cultural events throughout the city. Our vision is not only to establish Barcelona as a new center for Yiddish learning, but also to bring Yiddish into the cultural life of the city and make it visible to broader audiences.

IG: And then just a word about the weekend program. So Yiddish Barcelona is not organizing that. Who is organizing?

MC: We are organizing the tours in partnership with the Toldot association. [Editorial note: Toldot organizes Jewish heritage tours in Barcelona.] We discuss what the program is going to be with them, but we don't run the excursions.

GVDM: At the end of the program, on Saturday, there's going to be a visit to Girona, with its well-preserved historic Jewish quarter and the Jewish Museum, and then on Sunday there will be a trip to Tossa de Mar (Costa Brava). There was a Jewish community in Tossa de Mar in the 1930s, mostly Jewish refugees fleeing from occupied France. There were a lot of artists, including Marc Chagall, who stayed for short periods of time in Tossa de Mar. These are amazing places to visit during the summer, but the idea is not to go there just as a leisure trip but to show how these sites are related to Jewish history. Some of the local cuisine you can find today in Tossa de Mar was influenced by Jewish recipes of Jewish refugees who were living there during the 1930s.

MC: These excursions are described with more detail on our website.

GVDM: We also just started the Instagram account for the summer program, so we’re going to start posting more things as we go along.

MC: And so much more to come! As a team, Golda and I, together with Violeta Bronstein (the Cultural Programs Project Manager), have worked to establish meaningful collaborations with local and international institutions, and transform what began as an idea into a vibrant and ambitious Yiddish program.

IG: Fantastic! Well, thank you so very much for your time.