The Nights Before Christmas
It was two hours before the Off-Broadway opening of The Gospel According to Chaim, and there was shiml on the bread: that’s Yiddish for mold.
Melissa Weisz, one of three actors in the performance, needed the two slices of rye as part of a prop sandwich for a scene during the play’s second act. But even tucked in paper wrappings and stored in the fridge of the theater lobby, she noticed that time and neglect had turned the slices a bluish-green hue. She snickered as they threw the bread into the trash.
Before the cast could even stop laughing, the show’s director, Dmitri Barcomi, marched to the bodega across the street to retrieve a fresh loaf of bread for the show. The situation evoked an old Yiddish saying: “Mann Tracht, Un Gott Lacht.” Men plan, and God laughs.
With the impending first preview of their play just a few hours away, every potential hiccup needed to be accounted for, and not even a moldy slice of broyt could stop the show.
Three days later, on Christmas Eve, 2023, The New Yiddish Rep staged their opening night performance of Di Psure Loyte Khaim, or The Gospel According To Chaim, at the Theater For The New City in Manhattan.
The play recalls the real life story of Chaim Einspruch: a Jewish-American immigrant living in Baltimore who became a Christian missionary and translated the New Testament into Yiddish in 1941. When no Yiddish printer would agree to print his text, Einspruch decided to print it himself.
The Gospel According To Chaim dramatizes the story of Einspruch’s thwarted efforts to convince a Jewish printer in Baltimore to publish his translation in the 1940s. As in real life, Einspruch meets rejection and even accusations of blasphemy from his fellow Jews, who view Einspruch’s embrace of the New Testament as a heinous betrayal of his faith and peoplehood.
The twist? True to Einspruch’s time, the entire play was written and performed in Yiddish. According to its producers at the New Yiddish Rep, The Gospel According To Chaim is the first entirely original, full-length Yiddish-language drama to be produced in America in over 70 years.
“It’s tricky having done so much,” Mikhl Yashinsky, the writer of the piece and the actor playing the title character confessed, pacing before the first preview. “Like today I had to bring a rag from home because we were still missing our rag for Gabe’s print shop. There’s been little things like that on top of acting that have made it all Einspruch, all the time,” he said.
And while the Christmas Eve opening was still a few days away, that didn’t stop Yashinsky’s pre-show jitters. “People coming tonight expect a performance like any other,” he said. Once he stepped onto stage and into Einspruch’s type shop, Yashinsky would be staging – and making – Yiddish history.
An Immaculate Conception
But before there was a Yiddish play, there was a Yiddishist.
For 33-year-old artist Mikhl Yashinsky, the idea to write The Gospel According To Chaim was the culmination of a lifetime immersed in Yiddish culture and theater.
“My grandparents spoke Yiddish,” explained Yashinsky at a coffee shop by Battery Park in mid-November, over a month before the debut of his play. “One of my grandparents is an immigrant from what is now Belarus. She spoke Yiddish with her parents, who immigrated to Windsor, Ontario.” On the other side of Yashinsky’s family, his grandparents were born in the United States, but they spoke Yiddish too.
Yashinsky grew up steeped in a community of Yiddish-speaking artists in his home city of Detroit, Michigan. His grandparents on his mother’s side, Elizabeth and Rubin Weiss, were esteemed actors in the city’s theater and radio scene, acting in countless plays and commercials in both English and Yiddish. When Elizabeth died in 2015, The Detroit Free Press published an obituary describing her as “a woman of 1,000 voices.”
“She was both an actress and, really, a Yiddishist,” explained Yashinsky, speaking of his grandmother’s legacy. When he was a child, Yashinsky said she would lend him books and movies about Yiddish and speak to him about Jewish history. “She introduced me to the world of modern Yiddish culture,” he said.
After graduating with a degree in European history from Harvard, Yashinsky took creative writing courses at the Yiddish Book Center in Amherst, Massachusetts.
There, he picked up a textbook on Yiddish and committed himself to becoming fluent in the language on his own. He returned to the Yiddish Book Center for organized courses the next summer, eventually mastering the language.
Ever since that fateful post-grad course, “I’ve been on a track of working in Yiddish and creating in Yiddish,” Yashinsky said.
In 2017, Yashinsky had his first professional stint in New York City acting in a production at the National Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene. Later he was cast in the company’s Yiddish-language production of Fiddler on the Roof, which made international headlines. The semester Chaim premiered, he was juggling acting in a different Folksbiene production, Amid Falling Walls, starring in his new play and teaching university-level Yiddish courses at Columbia.
“I never would’ve imagined the things one could do with Yiddish,” he said.“It is kind of my career at this point.”
Yashinsky’s story of falling in love with Yiddish may seem extraordinary, but he is far from the only young person taking a contemporary interest in the study of the historic Jewish language.
Prior to the onset of World War II, there were approximately 13 million Yiddish speakers in the world, according to a 2014 pamphlet published by The Yivo Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe.
The Holocaust killed a third of global Jewry, which decimated Europe’s Yiddish speakers. In the U.S, assimilation and a desire to hide Jewish identity amidst rising antisemitism led to fewer people passing Yiddish onto the next generation.
Today, Yashinsky estimates there are between “500,000 and a million” Yiddish-speakers in the world — a statistic corroborated by the Yivo Encyclopedia. Remaining Yiddish speakers are scattered across Israel and the Jewish diaspora in the United States, Canada and Europe.
Yiddish in the United States today survives mostly in the ultra-Orthodox, Haredi community, who speak the language as part of an ideological duty to maintain the customs of Eastern European Jewry. According to data compiled by the Endangered Language Alliance, there are around 90,000 Yiddish-speakers in New York City alone, mostly in ultra-Orthodox enclaves in Brooklyn.
Then secular Yiddish – the kind spoken by Ashkenazi Jewish immigrants when they first moved to America – started making a comeback. One place to thank for that revival? The Yiddish Book Center in Amherst, Massachusetts: one of the largest collections of Yiddish books in the world, founded by a graduate student and Yiddishist named Aaron Lansky.
That’s where Maya González works as a fellow. I caught up with them on a tour.
Beginning in the 1980s, universities and colleges began offering Yiddish classes for students, providing those who had never encountered the language at home an opportunity to learn, González explained. The pandemic accelerated another wave of Yiddish learners.
“Since the pandemic, there’s been this explosion of Yiddish learners online because a lot of these places — the Yiddish Book Center, YIVO, The Worker’s Circle — they’ve started offering online classes,” they said.
A lot of people taking an interest in Yiddish today are politically progressive, González added, citing how the Yiddish-speakers in 20th century America were historically involved in unions and other forms of left-wing activism.
González also mentioned how many of the people in their Yiddish classes also identified as queer, and they drew parallels between LGBTQ+ groups and Yiddishists as different forms of “chosen community.”
“It’s something that you have to seek out more than something that is necessarily imbued in institutional mainstream Jewish communities,” they said. “That draws queer people or LGBTQ people to it because of its association with leftist thought and a kind of alternativeness at the same time.”
As a member of this wave of budding young Yiddishists, Yashinsky first encountered the story of Chaim Einspruch while leading tours while himself a fellow at the Yiddish Book Center in 2016. In the center, there was a fake print shop set up for visitors to peruse. In his training, Yashinsky was told that one of the types belonged to Einspruch, which piqued Yashinsky’s curiosity.
“I just thought it was extraordinary,” said Yashinsky, “That story, that conflict, that idea of faith within one person. He was Christian by faith but by language and ethnic identification, this is what he knew. He was a talented Yiddish writer.”
He recalled flipping through Einspruch’s Der Bris Hadoshe at the book center and then researching his story. While Jewish critics may have found Einspruch’s version of the New Testament heretical, “they said it’s been rendered into such a fine literary Yiddish,” said Yashinsky, smiling.
“I just found so many ironies in it,” said Yashinsky. “And, well, I thought I could make a drama out of that!”
Yashinsky completed the script in the summer of 2021, far away from the Yiddish scene in Charleston.
With a first draft of his Einspruch play complete, Yashinsky would next need to find a home to stage his work. Luckily, he knew just who to ask.
Gut Company
When David Mandelbaum first got the phone call from Yashinsky to read the script for his new play, Mandelbaum said he was thrilled at the chance for his company to perform an original work of Yiddish theater.
“His play is the first Yiddish drama to be written in the United States in the last 70 years,” he said, “which is one of the best reasons for doing it.”
Mandelbaum, 76, is the founder and artistic director of the New Yiddish Rep, a theater company based in Manhattan that puts on performances in Yiddish. It is one of only two Yiddish theaters still active in New York City today.
The larger and more famous one is the National Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene. Founded in 1915, the Folskbiene is the largest, continuously running Yiddish theater in the world, according to The Museum of Yiddish Theater.
After acting in a few main-stage productions at the Folksbiene in the early 2000s, Mandelbaum noticed that the downtown theater was moving towards exclusively producing big-budget musicals. He wanted to create a space devoted to smaller scale Yiddish dramas, which he believed that the Folksbiene was overlooking to focus on more commercial endeavors.
“I thought, ‘Why not start a Yiddish theater?’” Mandelbaum said. “I do things a little differently than they did.”
Mandelbaum founded the New Yiddish Rep in 2007 to focus on Yiddish straight plays — plays without singing or dancing — and at a much more intimate level. Operating in a single corner office in the Garment District, the New Yiddish Rep’s office doubles as their rehearsal area, as well as a cozy venue for readings and cabarets.
Framed posters of past productions adorn the walls of the New Yiddish Rep, which showcase 17 years of Mandelbaum’s vision having come to fruition. The company staged world premiere Yiddish translations of famous plays like Waiting For Godot and Death of a Salesman. A poster from the New Yiddish Rep’s 2016 production of Shalom Asch’s God of Vengeance boasts a New York Times Critic’s Pick sticker.
Mandelbaum explained how his company chooses to stage dramas with serious and oftentimes controversial themes, such as gender roles in the Hasidic community, homosexuality within Judaism and the Israeli occupation of the West Bank.
“If Yiddish theater is going to remain viable, it can’t just be based on nostalgia,” he said. “We can’t just have Fiddler on the Roof ad nauseum.”
Mandelbaum first met Yashinsky in 2022, when he staged a reading of a 20-minute play he wrote about two Yeshiva boys falling in love. He was excited to see a young person take an interest in Yiddish playwriting, especially to tell an original, boundary-pushing story.
Months later, Yashinsky returned to Mandelbaum with the script for his first full-length play, The Gospel According To Chaim, which Mandelbaum read and loved.
“The fact that it was written by a young person in Yiddish after so many, so many years of no one writing a Yiddish play,” said Mandelbaum, who decided to produce the play after two staged readings in early 2023. “This was a first and an important milestone.”
A Hanukkah of Rehearsals
By December, rehearsals were in full-swing. The cast met in the New Yiddish Rep office nearly every day of Hanukkah, usually working from late morning until past sundown. Yashinsky said that the cast once stayed so late, they lit a Menorah together.
The show’s director, Dmitri Barcomi, 30, explained his excitement when Mandelbaum reached out to him over the summer to bring him onto the project. Barcomi had directed numerous shows off-Broadway and for theater festivals in New York and Europe, and he was finishing a Master of Fine Arts in directing at Columbia.
Barcomi worked at the New Yiddish Rep as a stage manager in 2016, which introduced him to the language. While not totally fluent in Yiddish, he said he was excited about the challenge of directing a play in a language that spoke to his Jewish heritage.
“One of my areas of interest as a director is using my art to shine light on hidden subject matters, so I really love the niche historical element to this play,” Barcomi said.
In contrast, the show’s stage manager, Alé Herreros, 22, while a seasoned theater artist, was completely new to the Yiddish language. She discovered the job through a Facebook posting. Nevertheless, she enjoyed learning about both the language and Judaism throughout the process.
“Everything has intrigued me,” said Herreros. “I do a word of the day in Yiddish, which has allowed me to get to know about the culture.”
On a mid-December Saturday morning, the company was too busy rehearsing to rest on the Sabbath.
Yashinsky arrived early and worked with Barcomi and Herreros to review lines on his closing monologue. Yashinsky performed a speech at the end of the play where Einspruch tries to convince the Yiddish community in Baltimore to buy his New Testament, but passersby continuously ignore him. Yashinsky repeated the monologue, occasionally flubbing the words he wrote.
Barcomi and Herreros followed along in a transliterated version of the script — with Yiddish in English characters on top, English on the bottom — allowing them to focus on acting and stage cues, rather than the language. Barcomi suggested Yashinsky channel his inner salesman to capture the desperation of a missionary, and he repeated the monologue with more evangelical zeal.
In the afternoon, the rest of the cast arrived for their first off-book run-through. Until long after sundown, the cast rehearsed the story, sometimes forgetting lines or mixing up their Yiddish phrases. In the background, Mariah Carey’s “All I Want For Christmas Is You” blasted from the Christmas parade across the street.
To tell the story of Einspruch’s attempt to publish his Yiddish New Testament, the company brought on actors to play the roles of Sadie and Gabe — both original characters based on real figures in Einspruch’s life.
For actor Melissa Weisz, 40, playing Sadie, taking on the role of a complex female character in Yiddish was nothing new. She was a full-time performer, and Yiddish was their first language.
Weisz grew up in Borough Park, Brooklyn to a Satmar Hasidic family. In Weisz’s home neighborhood, there are over 41,000 Yiddish speakers, according to the Endangered Language Alliance. In 2022, the NYC Civic Engagement Commission found that a quarter of Yiddish speakers in the neighborhood have limited English proficiency.
Growing up in this insular community, Weisz attended school in Yiddish, and they spoke the language at home. While studying psychology in college, she discovered theater when they took on the titular role in a Yiddish translation of Romeo and Juliet.
“I fell in love with it,” said Weisz. Eventually, she decided to make acting their career.
Weisz stumbled upon Mandelbaum and the New Yiddish Rep while taking acting classes in the city. Since then, creating in Yiddish has become their niche. She starred in the company’s God of Vengeance in 2016, and they later helped write an adaptation of a play about Hasidic women discussing abuse in their communities in 2021.
Today, Weisz said they identify as “Hasid-ish.” “Even though I’m not religious in the same way as I was raised, it’s my culture,” they explained.
In The Gospel According To Chaim, Sadie is a fiery, American-born anti-fascist activist trying to raise awareness of the Holocaust overseas. In the play, Sadie criticizes Einspruch’s missionary activities, which she views as a betrayal of Jewish peoplehood.
“I think she’s like an activist that’s very goal-oriented,” said Weisz of her character. “People are dying and this is what she does. She gets information out and she fights.”
While Sadie is confrontational and standoffish in the play, Weisz believes her behavior comes from a genuine desire to protect her community. Weisz said they found that trait relatable.
“I definitely am a fighter,” Weisz said. “She’s a louder activist than I am. I do things more quietly. I don’t go to marches and organize things like that. I do share my perspective through work.”
For example, since the October 7th Hamas attacks on Israel, Weisz said they have been volunteering on security shifts at a synagogue. They have also been using social media to try to educate non-Jewish friends about the dangers of conflating the actions of the Israeli government with all Israelis or Jewish people, and she also uses their platform to dispel stereotypes about the Hasidic community.
“I think it’s fascinating with Jewish responses today,” Weisz said. She compared the dynamic between Chaim and Sadie in the play to how Jews across the political spectrum are responding to the war today. She said that both in the drama and in real life, people respond to trauma in different ways. “Both of them make choices that are terrible, but both of them want to help,” Weisz said.
For the role of Gabe, the Yiddish printer who Einspruch unsuccessfully tries to convince to print his work, Barcomi double-cast two actors, both new to the world of Yiddish theater.
Why two? Sruli Rosenberg, 30, the actor playing Gabe for half the production, was Shomer Shabbat and would not be able to perform on Friday nights.
Josh Horowitz, 22, playing Gabe for the other half of the production, was neither Satmar Hasidic, nor the child of native Yiddish speakers like Rosenberg. Growing up in a Reconstructionist home in New Jersey, Horowitz saw learning Yiddish as an adult as a way to connect with his Ashkenazi Jewish heritage.
“I started learning last summer,” said Horowitz. He took courses in an eight-week intensive at the Worker’s Circle and then studied the language again in college the subsequent semester, eventually becoming proficient.
When he moved to New York City for his studies, Horowitz said learning Yiddish helped him understand the experiences of Jewish-American immigrants that came before him.
“So much of Yiddish art is about the experience of moving to New York and being, like, bewildered and confused and entranced by this same place, which I related to,” said Horowitz. He cited poets like Celia Dropkin and Moishe-Leyb Halpern, who wrote about places like the Hudson River or the New York City subway system.
Now, with a major role in Chaim, Horowitz was becoming part of that Yiddish cultural history, too.
Returning Yiddish Theater To Its Rialto Roots
After three weeks of rehearsal, the crew moved into their performance space at the Theater For The New City in the East Village. The New Yiddish Rep booked a black-box theater near the lobby for the next three weeks with room for 100 theater goers.
A few blocks away from the Theater For The New City is the Second Avenue Walk of Fame. A series of Hollywood-style stars are carved into the ground, celebrating the greatest names in Yiddish-American theater. The Walk of Fame was originally situated in front of the popular Second Avenue Deli. Today, a Chase Bank takes its place.
Across the street from the Walk of Fame, the Yiddish Art Theater stood until the mid-1940s, entertaining thousands of immigrants and their children. Today, the building is an arthouse cinema, but Yiddish lettering carved onto the side of the theater spelling out the name of the building’s developer, Louis Jaffe, reminds passersby of the building’s historic roots.
“I think there’s something appropriate about the first new Yiddish drama being staged in the ancestral homeland of Yiddish drama,” Barcomi said. With a rich legacy of theater surrounding them, the team had large shoes to fill.
Six days before opening night, the company spent the day loading set pieces into the performance space. The crew gathered tables and chairs from a maze of set pieces downstairs. Then, the scenic design team got to work with drills, paint and wooden planks.
Barcomi climbed onto a ladder to install a projector onto the ceiling of the theater. The projector would screen English supertitles during the show so people who could not speak Yiddish could follow along. Every night, whichever actor not playing Gabe would sit at the back of the stage operating the supertitles via Google Slides.
Scene designer Meng yi-Liu’s vision for the set included large Yiddish letters made out of wood hung onto the walls, a tall door shaped like a giant Hebrew “Chet,” and a table with a wooden typewriter in the center of the stage.
By the day of the first preview, a Yiddish print shop had opened its doors in the Theater For The New City, and actors were ready to step back stage into their 1940s-era outfits.
A Very Chaim Christmas
On December 21st, about 60 people attended the first preview of The Gospel According To Chaim. There were some bumps in the performance. Sometimes the supertitles moved too slowly for the characters’ words. In another scene, Horowitz opened a bottle of soda that had been shaken too forcibly and it spilled onto the stage.
But the crowd laughed at jokes about Baltimore crabs and quips about Einspruch’s “goyishe Torah.” Most audience members lingered in the lobby long after the show to congratulate the cast.
“I really enjoyed the show,” said audience member Chloe Finder, 24. “It had a lot of darkness and ambiguity to it that I wasn’t expecting, but I enjoyed it,” they said.
Finder, a music teacher, saw the show with a group of friends from their Yiddish class at The Worker’s Circle. They initially came just to support their former classmate, Horowitz, but they were surprised at how much they resonated with the subject matter.
“In this current time there’s a lot of messaging about what it means to be Jewish and what other people’s opinions are about what it means to be Jewish, compared to what you feel to be true,” said Finder. “I think that’s something to think about.”
Some people in the crowd wore Palestinian keffiyehs and floral yarmulkes. Others arrived wearing Tallit, others in yellow hostage ribbon pins. All seemed fascinated by Yiddish theater.
Elie Benhiyoun, 36, a Yiddish actor, said he respected how the play provided a rare example of a modern work that takes antisemitism seriously.
“To feel validated about antisemitism feels very unique today,” said Benhiyoun. “To be in a space that talks about Jewish persecution and our history in a way that is believable. So many people don’t see us as persecuted people.”
Benhiyoun said he resonated most with Weisz’s character, Sadie, and her desire to raise awareness about antisemitism.
“Something that feels very relevant to today is the need to underline the truth that’s taking place,” he said, referencing the rise of disinformation amidst the Israel-Hamas war. “It seems like nothing has changed over the past 80 years, this whole fight between truth and not truth.”
Moishe Holleb, 34, said he also found the play relevant to the Israel-Hamas war, but from a totally different perspective.
“The play was about the tension between Jewish and Christian culture and the way that those things mingle, and how uncomfortable it is, and I just kept thinking about how uncomfortable I am with Christian Zionists,” said Holleb, a writer who identified as an anti-Zionist Jew.
On Christmas Eve, the cast gathered again for the opening night performance. This time, the house was even emptier. Hours before the performance, Mandelbaum admitted that despite the relatively accessible price-point for live theater — tickets for performances started at $25! — only seven people purchased tickets in advance.
Even with a small audience turnout, the opening performance dazzled. After three previews, the show had ironed out its original problems. The subtitles followed apace with the actors’ words. Sruli Rosenberg made his debut performance as Gabe, bringing a wiliness and dry humor to the role.
Speaking over the phone midway through the run, Mandelbaum said he was happy with the show’s first few performances, but he wished more people with no former connection to Yiddish came to support the production. In fact, most of the audience members at the first few performances were either Yiddish actors or writers themselves, or young people who were already studying the language.
“One has to be realistic about things,” said Mandelbaum, his voice dejected. “I would like it to create an impression in the larger pond,” he said.
Yashinsky, reflecting on the play a few weeks later, revealed that he too struggled sometimes in the first few days of the performances. There was a matinee early into the run that only had seven audience members. Yashinsky found the small turnout disheartening.
“It was hard for us actors to play to seven people in the middle of the day,” Yashinsky admitted. “You need to do so much to muster up the drama and the energy that the audience deserves when it’s not the most exciting of environments.”
As the run went on, it seemed that The Gospel According To Chaim was becoming more polished and was resonating with audience members, but the play was never going to break through and achieve more mainstream recognition, or even fill the 100 seats of the theater.
That was, until journalists began publishing their opinions about the show online, and word got out about Yashinsky’s groundbreaking new show.
And an Einspruch New Year
During the final performance of The Gospel According To Chaim on January 7th, the house was packed. The crew added another row of chairs in the back row just to fit the number of audience members who came to see the show.
Mandelbaum attributed the rise in attendance to positive press appearing in news media outlets both within the Jewish world and general theater blogs online. Writing for The Forward, culture reporter PJ Grisar called the play “the perfect way to spend a Jewish Christmas.”
On the online blog New York Theatre Wire, theater critic Larry Littany Litt praised the writing and direction. “Yashinsky as playwright shines like a Chanukah menorah,” he wrote. They also compared Barcomi’s direction to someone spinning “dreidl actors to their inevitable fall.”
As I watched the show in the back row of the theater, I thought about my own personal journey watching the play evolve throughout the month-long rehearsal process. When I first began sitting in on rehearsals of The Gospel According To Chaim in early December, actors stumbled through lines and struggled to understand their character’s intentions.
Now, Weisz, Rosenberg, and Yashinsky in their final performances, had matured into their roles. They played off each other’s energy and brought to life a tense, entertaining story with sharp comedic timing and wit. Every confrontation between Sadie, Gabe, and Chaim Einspruch felt high stakes, as if the entire fate of Jewish peoplehood sat in these three characters’ fingertips.
At the final performance, the audience cackled at jokes about Jewish identity and assimilation, and they applauded uproariously at the cast’s final bows. The crowd also appeared older than in previous performances — mostly people in their fifties and sixties — likely due to the Sunday matinee timing.
A few weeks later, speaking after a Yiddish class at Columbia, Yashinsky would share that he considered the run of his first full-length play to be a success. He was already working on his next project: an original Yiddish musical about sin, and he said he had been receiving interest in performing The Gospel According To Chaim in Berlin.
But on the night of the closing performance, Yashinsky and company were not thinking about the future. Instead, they were reveling in their final moments of their run and meeting the many familiar faces in the lobby who congratulated them on their hard work.
There was one special audience member in the lobby that night. The playwright’s mother, Debra Yashinsky, 69, flew in from Detroit for the weekend to catch the final performances of the show.
To Debra, watching Mikhl’s show was a bona fide moment of “LeDor Va Dor,” from generation to generation. Her parents were respected Yiddish theater artists in the Detroit community. Now the baton was being passed on to her son, who was adding a new chapter to a long family history.
“My husband and I sat there in awe,” she said. “Even though we know of his gifts and his passion we sat there like everybody else. We ‘went in fresh,’ to borrow a Seinfeld quote. And we were just awed by the drama, the heart, the story.”
When asked if she was proud of her son, Debra evoked an apt Yiddish phrase.
“I’m kvelling for sure,” Debra said. “That’s the definition of it.”
