On November 8-11, 2018 the WJC Yiddish Center representative, Anna Sorokina-Ginzburg, provided 6 lectures at the Jewish Joint Distribution Committee's Active Jewish Teens (AJT) conference which took place in Kiev, the capital of Ukraine.
More than 300 Jewish teens gathered at this annual conference. The participants came from 9 countries, including Ukraine, Russia, Moldova, and Belarus.
Sorokina-Ginzburg organized and presented educational workshops for 6 groups of 17-22 participants in each. Her presentations based on the subject "Yiddishlands: from Ashkenaz to Birobijan, or There and back again", aiming to teach youngsters the history of Yiddish language using Yiddish children folklore, texts by Yiddish classical writers and short videos. All in all, about 120 teenagers participated in the workshops dedicated to Yiddish language and culture.
Participants discussed problems of modern interpretation of various Yiddish linguistic and cultural aspects. They learned about confrontation of lingual ideologies (Yiddishism vs Hebraism) in the 20th century and its consequences in the 21st century.
At the conference we tried to analyse the role of linguistic heritage of Eastern European Jews played and its impact on the global Jewish culture and community life.