How “Fiddler on the Roof” Came to Israel in Yiddish

This summer, a Yiddish-language production of Fiddler on the Roof—itself an adaptation of the Yiddish author Sholem Aleichem’s series of stories about Tevye the Milkman—will debut in New York. Alisa Solomon tells the improbable story of the first time the musical was rendered into Yiddish:

The production was the brainchild of Giora Godik, the flamboyant, Polish-born impresario famous for bringing lavish American-style musicals to the Israeli stage. He had presided over the first foreign production of Fiddler, presented in Hebrew at the grand Alhambra Theater in Jaffa, which he refurbished after it had stood derelict for two decades, damaged in a 1947 mortar bombardment.

The Hebrew-language production met with tremendously popular success, running for fifteen months and seen, producers estimated, by a full quarter of Israel’s population. Kanar al ha-Gag opened in 1965 with the comic actor Bomba Tzur in the role of Tevye, though Tzur was replaced after about six months by Shmuel Rodensky, a sensitive and nuanced multilingual actor who’d been born in Vilna.

Godik, whose father had been an actor in the Polish theater, saw that Rodensky’s Yiddish abilities presented an opportunity to build on the Jewish Israeli public’s surprising enthusiasm for Fiddler—and also to sell more tickets. Shraga Friedman prepared quickly a brilliant translation of Fiddler into Yiddish (working in part from Dan Almagor’s Hebrew version). Among many glorious touches, Friedman evokes other Sholem Aleichem works.

For one delicious example, he begins [the song] “If I Were a Rich Man” with “If I were a Rothschild,” the title and theme of [Sholem Aleichem’s] short story about a shtetl Jew who can’t scrape together enough money for the Sabbath imagining how charitable he would be if he had the fortunes of the financier. And for another, Friedman turns the argument in the middle of the song “Tradition” over whether one Anatevka resident sold a horse or a mule to his neighbor into whether it was a billy goat or a she-goat—the issue at the heart of Sholem Aleichem’s short story “The Enchanted Tailor.”

Read more at Forward

More about: Arts & Culture, Fiddler on the Roof, Israeli culture, Sholem Aleichem, Yiddish literature, Yiddish theater

It’s Time for Haredi Jews to Become Part of Israel’s Story

Unless the Supreme Court grants an extension from a recent ruling, on Monday the Israeli government will be required to withhold state funds from all yeshivas whose students don’t enlist in the IDF. The issue of draft exemptions for Haredim was already becoming more contentious than ever last year; it grew even more urgent after the beginning of the war, as the army for the first time in decades found itself suffering from a manpower crunch. Yehoshua Pfeffer, a haredi rabbi and writer, argues that haredi opposition to army service has become entirely disconnected from its original rationale:

The old imperative of “those outside of full-time Torah study must go to the army” was all but forgotten. . . . The fact that we do not enlist, all of us, regardless of how deeply we might be immersed in the sea of Torah, brings the wrath of Israeli society upon us, gives a bad name to all of haredi society, and desecrates the Name of Heaven. It might still bring harsh decrees upon the yeshiva world. It is time for us to engage in damage limitation.

In Pfeffer’s analysis, today’s haredi leaders, by declaring that they will fight the draft tooth and nail, are violating the explicit teachings of the very rabbis who created and supported the exemptions. He finds the current attempts by haredi publications to justify the status quo not only unconvincing but insincere. At the heart of the matter, according to Pfeffer, is a lack of haredi identification with Israel as a whole, a lack of feeling that the Israeli story is also the haredi story:

Today, it is high time we changed our tune. The new response to the demand for enlistment needs to state, first and foremost to ourselves, that this is our story. On the one hand, it is crucial to maintain and even strengthen our isolation from secular values and culture. . . . On the other hand, this cultural isolationism must not create alienation from our shared story with our fellow brethren living in the Holy Land. Participation in the army is one crucial element of this belonging.

Read more at Tzarich Iyun

More about: Haredim, IDF, Israeli society