Menachem Yankl Ejdelman, 24 Chairman of Yugntruf, a Yiddish speakers’organization
Two years out of college, Menachem Yankl Ejdelman was dutifully on his way in the world of communal Jewish life. After graduating from Rutgers University in 2005, he studied for a year at the Pardes Institute in Jerusalem. The next year, he worked for Taglit-Birthright, doing financial work. But when he began his current job as program coordinator at YIVO-Institute for Jewish Research, things changed—mainly, his grandfather, the renowned Yiddish linguist Mordkhe Schaechter, died. “I decided I had to do something,” says Ejdelman.
So in April 2007, two months after his grandfather’s death, he organized Yiddish Break, a weekend conference for young Yiddish speakers at Brandeis’ campus. “It was as grassroots as it
gets,” Ejdelman says, telling how he scoured Facebook profiles and called college Hillels, looking for any Yiddish learners he could find.
The event went well, drawing 45 people. Several months later, many of the middle-aged board members at the Yiddish organization his grandfather founded—Yugntruf — resigned, calling for a newer generation to take the lead. They chose a new board of around 10 Yiddish speakers, most in their 20s; those members elected Ejdelman as their chairman. “It’s forzitser in Yiddish,” Ejdelman says. “But ‘chairman,’ it’s so much more sexy.”
Not that he has let the title get to his head. Ejdelman and his board expanded Yiddish Break earlier this year to 60 participants and built a Web site for the organization (www.yiddishweek.com). They also added regular Yiddish social events for younger speakers, called Svives, and beefed up the long-standing Yugntruf tradition called Yiddish Vokh, a week-long summer retreat in the Berkshires, which draws 200 visitors each year.
The revamped, digitized Yugntruf has enabled the 45-year-old organization to connect with hundreds more Yiddish learners in their youth. This, Ejdelman believes, will only add to the year’s seminal event, the Yiddish Vokh. But he knows the value of continuity: “It’s not my intent to have only young people,” he says. “There’s a lot we can learn from” the previous generations.
Favorite Yiddish author: Der Tunkeler, a semi-obscure satirist Dreams in?: English mostly, but Yiddish “25 percent of the time”
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