Yiddish is a language of emotion — a tongue that carries memories from our homes: memories steeped in the aroma of fried onions and chicken soup from a mother’s kitchen, the taste of chopped liver from the holiday table, snowy winters in little towns along the riverbanks, and juicy gossip after prayers in the synagogue.
Yiddish, like an ellaborate cake, is the product of ingredients poured into a single bowl and, after a thorough mixing, transformed into something new, warm, and sweet. This cake — a blend of European languages shaped by the tongues of Jews in many communities, infused with their cultures and customs — has managed to endure to this day, even as so many of those communities faded or were destroyed in the horrors of pogroms and the Holocaust.

This concert, true to its name, is a nostalgic link to our childhood: to the choir in which we grew up and the songs we sang under the guidance of our beloved conductor, who came from there as well and left his musical imprint on us forever. It is an expression of the eternal bond between art and life, even when confined behind the walls of the ghetto, and of the Jewish soul which — even in moments of suffering and despite the pain of destruction — preserved, through those Yiddish songs, a hope for renewal. For, as is well known, everything sounds better in Yiddish.