The Rylands Ashkenazi Haggadah (Hebrew MS 7)
Image provided by The John Rylands Research Institute and Library, The University of Manchester

In an incredible, knowledgeable and sensual collaboration between scholarship, art and design, Yiddish Summer Weimar is proud to present its online project on Yiddish Wo:men and the Story of the Book. 

Since the medieval period up to the 21st century, women have been a driving force of the Yiddish book market – as customers and readers whose taste shaped literary production, as patronesses who supported the printing of books, as women for whom manuscripts were copied, as printers with their own publishing houses, as typesetters and proofreaders, typists and finally, writers. 

This exhibition follows the traces women left for us: as names on title pages and in dedications, in their own words or those of others. Yiddish-reading women had access to the literature of the world in Yiddish translation and adaptation. We see how women were, and are, connected through the centuries as readers. 

Designer-curator Eyal Davidovitch, visual artist Ella Ponizovsky Bergelson and researcher-curators Dr. Diana Matut and Alma Roggenbuck are creating a portal that will allow viewers to pass through into the long history that connects Yiddish women with the book. 

On Saturday, the 1st of August, we will present this project, and we eagerly look forward to inspiring conversations with you.

Part of the presentation connects Yiddish women of the past and the present via Ella Bergelson’s artistic intervention. On the walls of the Other Music Academy, Ella will create visual art that connects us as modern Yiddish wo:men not only with this very place but also with those who came before us in the creation of Yiddish words and letters.