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Young Scholar

Michael Yashinsky is bringing his love of Yiddish back to Detroit.

Barbara Lewis | Contributing Writer

H

e’s been a Spanish teacher, a play-
wright and opera director — and
now he’s a Yiddish scholar as well.
Michael Yashinsky, who grew up in
Farmington Hills, is in the midst of a one-
year stint as the first Applebaum Fellow
at the national Yiddish Book Center in
Amherst, Mass. He will return to Detroit
later this month to speak
about his work at several
public events (see box).
Aaron Lansky, presi-
dent of the Yiddish Book
Center, will introduce
Yashinsky at events mid-
month. Lansky founded
the center in 1980 when
Aaron Lansky
he was a 24-year-old
graduate student in
Yiddish literature.
Yashinsky, 27, attended Hillel Day School
and Frankel Jewish Academy and then went
to Harvard University.
As an undergraduate he directed plays,
operas and operettas on campus and for
professional ensembles. He did a summer
internship with the Michigan Opera Theatre
(MOT).
As part of his major in the history and
literature of modern Europe, he gained
proficiency in several languages, including
Spanish, German and Russian.
After college, Yashinsky returned to the
Michigan Opera Theatre, serving as a stage
director, community engagement special-
ist and assistant director for several opera
productions. In 2015, he directed MOT’s
production of Brundibar, a children’s opera
created in the Theresienstadt concentration
camp during World War II.
The production included two performers
Yashinsky describes as “quite special.” One
was Ela Stein Weissberger, who was in the
Theresienstadt production as a young girl
and was one of only a few of the original
performers to survive the Holocaust.
The other was Yashinsky’s grandmother,
Elizabeth Elkin Weiss, whom he credits for
his interest in Yiddish. Before the curtain
rose on Brundibar, she recited a tragic
Yiddish poem, written during World War II
in the Kovno ghetto, about a mother looking
for her lost child.
Yashinsky says all his grandparents spoke
Yiddish, but Weiss, especially, was “a pas-
sionate Yiddishist,” he said.
“Her house was filled with Yiddish books,
films and cookbooks that I constantly bor-

10 April 7 • 2016

Michael Yashinsky sorts through Yiddish books he helped rescue in Mexico City.

Michael Yashinsky’s Detroit Programs

• On Wednesday, April 13, at noon, Yashinsky will speak about homegrown
Yiddish literature and theater in Detroit at the Hillel Center in the Student Union
at Wayne State University. The event is sponsored by Wayne State’s Cohn-Haddow
Center for Judaic Studies. Aaron Lansky of the Yiddish Book Center will introduce
Yashinsky.
• On Thursday, April 14, at 7 p.m., Yashinsky will speak at Congregation Shaarey
Zedek’s Berman Center for Jewish Education in Southfield about his work with the
congregation’s archives of Yiddish and Hebrew books.

rowed from her. I was well aware of the
beauty and vitality of the language,” he said.
Weiss and her husband, Rube, acted in
Yiddish plays in Detroit. Yashinsky has fam-
ily ties in music, too. His uncle, David Weiss,
is better known as David Was of the rock
group Was (Not Was).

LOVE OF YIDDISH
Yashinsky gained formal knowledge of
Yiddish through a summer program at
the Yiddish Book Center. He put his new-

found skill to good use soon after, when he
returned to FJA as a Spanish teacher.
“It was very sweet to return to my old
high school, using the same textbooks I had
used only a few years before, but now as a
teacher,” he said. “To teach this new genera-
tion was likewise a mechaye, a life-giving
pleasure.”
That year, Yashinsky received a grant
from the Fishman Foundation for Yiddish
Culture to produce After Midnight, a Yiddish
play by Samuel Daixel. FJA students per-

formed entirely in Yiddish, with English
subtitles projected over the stage.
This year, Yashinsky is immersing
himself in Yiddish as the first recipient of
the Applebaum Fellowship at the Yiddish
Book Center. The fellowship was made
possible by a grant from the Eugene and
Marcia Applebaum Family Foundation in
Bloomfield Hills. The Applebaums are long-
time supporters of the center.
“Michael is doing a splendid job as a
fellow at the Yiddish Book Center, and we
are delighted he has strong connections to
Detroit’s Jewish community,” said Eugene
Driker of Detroit, the center’s board chair
since 2011. His term ends in November.
Founder Lansky
agreed. “Michael is
everything we hoped
we would find when
we started the fellow-
ship program,” he said.
“He can do absolutely
everything. He’s the most
sought-after person at
the center; everyone
Eugene Driker
wants him to work on
their projects.”
Yashinsky said the fellowship has been
a wonderful opportunity to throw himself
into the study of Yiddish without having to
worry about supporting himself financially.
His work includes making the center’s col-
lection more accessible, translating, writing
articles and teaching Yiddish to high school
students.
In October, Yashinsky and a colleague
traveled to Mexico City to rescue a cache of
Yiddish books.
A Jewish day school there had taught
Yiddish in the past but was no longer doing
so, and they had thousands of Yiddish
books they no longer needed, he said.
“We went through about 10,000 books,”
he said. “We categorized them, boxed and
labeled the ones we wanted, and prepared
them for shipment.” Among their finds were
now-rare books published in South and
Central America.
“The most interesting thing to me were
yearbooks from the school, where the
students scribbled notes in the margins in
Yiddish,” he said.
When his fellowship ends in August,
Yashinsky said he hopes to find work that
will let him combine his love of Yiddish and
his love of theater.
“I don’t want to give up on any of my
passions,” he said. “We’ll see where things
take me.”

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