shtetl
“I wrote in Yiddish. I studied at a Yiddish school. I finished six grades, in Yiddish. I can write in Yiddish. I love Yiddish”
Yosl Kogan born in Bershad,1927
“Our children’s children’s children’s children must know”
Moyshe Kupershmidt born in Bratslav,1914
“And this is my autobiography”
David Furman born in Berdychiv,1919
“And Hitler took and murdered these people”
Beyle Vaisman born in Berdychiv,1925
The Archives of Historical and Ethnographic Yiddish Memories explores Jewish life in Eastern Europe before, during and after World War II. The archive consists of nearly 400 interviews, conducted primarily in Yiddish, and mostly in small towns throughout Ukraine, Moldova, Romania, Hungary and Slovakia. The interviews focus on language, religious customs and beliefs, songs, and Holocaust testimony and present a variety of perspectives on how ordinary Jews experienced the twentieth-century. Recorded in situ, or on the site of memory itself, these testimonies bring to life the story of those Jews who not only survived, but rebuilt their lives in the very places where some of the most tumultuous events of the 20th century occurred.
 

Yosl Kogan performs the song "Aheym," about his hopes for the Jewish future. He explained that he wrote the song during World War II, when he was a prisoner in the Bershad ghetto under Romanian occupation.