(New York Jewish Week) – The true story of a Baltimore Hasidic elder who encouraged Jews to convert to Christianity during the Holocaust serves as an unlikely starting point for a new Yiddish play that begins previews this week in Manhattan.
“The Gospel According to Chaim” is based on the life of missionary Chaim Einspruch, who was born into a Hasidic family in Szanzer, Poland and “found” Christianity before emigrating to the United States in 1913. Einspruch eventually translated the New Testament in Yiddish and self-published it in 1941 after a Yiddish printing company refused the work.
A production of New Yiddish Rep, a New York-based theater company dedicated to Yiddish language theater, “Gospel” is billed as the first new Yiddish dramatic feature film written in the United States in 70 years. According to David Mandelbaum, artistic director of the company, the last original Yiddish drama in this country was written in the 1950s by the famous Yiddish writer Leivick Halpernauthor of the dramatic poem “The Golem”.
“The Gospel According to Chaim” is also the first complete play in Yiddish by Mikhl Yashinsky, a 33-year-old who made a name for himself in New York as a Yiddish writer, actor, teacher and translator.
Yachinski came across Einspruch’s story in 2016 while serving as a fellow at the National Yiddish Book Center in Amherst, Massachusetts. Fellows are required to conduct tours of the center, and as such, Yashinsky becomes familiar with the type of Yiddish printing that Einspruch’s widow gifted to the institution, which is on display in a recreated but nonfunctional Yiddish printing press. Some printed characters from Einspruch will be used as accessories in the room.
“It made me think about the irony inherent in this singular individual,” Yashinsky told New York Jewish Week. “He was a Christian who believed in the divinity of Jesus but was also a very culturally proud Jew. It made me want to dig deeper into this person.
Yashinsky wrote the first act of “Gospel” while at Amherst, naming one of the play’s characters Sadie after a colleague there. He completed the piece in 2020 in Charleston, South Carolina, where he lived for a time during the pandemic before returning to New York more than a year ago.
Yiddish translation of the New Testament by Chaim Einspruch. (Jon Kalish)
In the 1940s, Chaim “Henry” Einspruch angered Baltimore Jews by standing outside Orthodox synagogues and preaching Christianity in Yiddish to Jews leaving Shabbat services. In addition to his translation of the New Testament, Einspruch also translated 100 Christian hymns into Yiddish in a collection entitled “Hymns to Faith (Lider fun gloybn).”
Many Jews view efforts to encourage Jews to embrace Christianity as offensive, even anti-Semitic, similar to Jews for Jesus and other contemporary messianic movements. arouse particular contempt. But Yashinsky said he felt none of that as he sought to bring Einspruch to life.
“I wasn’t interested in just portraying him as a villain and having the play be a piece of propaganda against the missionaries,” Yashinsky told the New York Jewish Week of his inspiration. “I really tried to understand why he was doing that. I don’t think Einspruch felt like he was malicious in anything he did.”
Fascinatingly, Einspruch never formally converted to Christianity, “seeing his allegiance to evangelical Lutheranism as a true fulfillment of his Judaism rather than as an apostasy or betrayal,” writes Naomi Seidman, a professor of humanities at the University of Toronto, whose scholarly article on New Testament translations in Yiddish was published in the Berkeley Journal of Religion and Theology. After Einspruch immigrated to the United States, he earned a doctorate in theology from Gettysburg College in Pennsylvania. (Seidman goes give a lecture Thursday at YIVO, “A Very Jewish Christmas: When Jesus Spoke Yiddish” discussing Einspruch’s translation of the New Testament, among other things.)
“His native language was Yiddish and he loved Yiddish literature,” Yashinsky said of Einspruch. “His innovation was to write this (translation of the New Testament) in a truly refined, literary, poetic and idiomatic Yiddish. It reads beautifully.
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Indeed, as Einspruch states in a scene from the play – set during Hanukkah and Christmas in 1940 and continuing into 1941: “The holy Yiddish language is very precious to me. »
Yashinsky plays Einspruch in the production, but that was not his original intention. A potential actor who grew up as a Lubavitcher Hasid was in rehearsals to play Einspruch in a reading performed last March, but was not up to the task, Yashinsky said. The playwright therefore decided to play the role himself. “The role felt good,” he said.
The play’s two other characters are Gabe, a printer whom Einspruch approaches to print the Yiddish New Testament, and Sadie, a friend of the printer and an anti-fascist activist who alerts Jews to the atrocities committed during the Holocaust in Europe. During the play, Sadie, whose father converted to Christianity, urges Gabe to refuse the job in the New Testament; Gabe, meanwhile, needs the company but is reflexively repelled by the idea of Jews converting to Christianity.
The role of Gabe the Printer will be shared by actors Sruli Rosenberg and Joshua Horowitz. Rosenberg, 30, grew up as a Satmar Hasid in Williamsburg and now lives in Monsey, another Upstate Hasidic community. He describes himself as a “Reformed Hasidische” and says that most of the time he does not wear a yarmulke but he continues to observe Shabbat – meaning Horowitz will then play the role of printer.
In an effort to master the English language, Rosenberg stopped reading and writing Yiddish as a teenager. He had little contact with the Yiddish arts revival until spring 2021, when he attended Generation J, a Yiddish arts program in Germany, thinking he might want to become a writer. While there, Rosenberg was disconcerted when other attendees informed him of the Yiddish theater scene in New York. “I’m like, ‘No, there isn’t. I would have known,” he recalls.
Inspired, Rosenberg returned to New York and got a job as New Yiddish representative Mandelbaum’s assistant, helping him move sets into the office and driving him around town. As Rosenberg gave lines to actors auditioning for “The Gospel of Chaim,” Yashinsky asked him why he didn’t audition himself. Today, Rosenberg makes his professional acting debut in the play.
Sadie, a fiery anti-facist organizer, is played by 40-year-old Melissa Weisz. In the play, on Christmas Day, she asks Einspruch: “And what are you going to give him as a gift, your messiah, eh? It’s his birthday, after all. Maybe a barrel of Jewish blood? A suitable gift. Perhaps the extermination of another shtetl of Jews in Europe? His followers have been giving him such gifts for thousands of years, and it seems he never tires of them.
Weisz also grew up as Satmar Hasid in Borough Park and made her acting debut in 2010 playing Juliette in the feature film. “Romeo and Juliet in Yiddish” who staged the Shakespearean tale in the Hasidic neighborhood of Brooklyn. She also had one of the main roles in a Production in the New Yiddish Republic of “God of Vengeance” the Sholem Asch play about lesbian love.
“These two characters come from very different places but they’re both trying to find a way to save people,” she said of the bond between protagonists Sadie and Chaim.
Yashinsky said he sees a broad audience for the show, despite its niche subject matter and language.
“Many will come, drawn by Yiddish, by the various dramas, emotions and curious personalities that are part of its tumultuous 20th century history,” he said. “But I hope that everyone who has ever wondered about the entanglements of opposing religions, the holiday wars in America, the confluence of ethnicity, faith, identity and human ambition will also come .”
The recent Yiddish-language version of “Fiddler on the Roof,” which had a revival last year after a first broadcast interrupted by the pandemic, presented to the general public the “supertitles” – English translations projected behind the actors. Surtitles will be used for “Gospel,” but Yashinsky said even people who don’t know Yiddish would benefit from hearing it on stage.
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“Language should not hold anyone back,” he said. “On the contrary, I hope it will attract them.”
A more important question is whether the city’s native Yiddish speakers will be likely to see the show. Rosenberg acknowledged that his Hasidic mother was not crazy about his professional career. “Isn’t that the universal quarrel that parents have with their children who go into the arts? he said. “She certainly didn’t like it. She does not understand. I do not blame him.
And Mandelbaum, the new Yiddish representative, laughed when asked if there might be chartered buses bringing spectators from Borough Park to see the play. But he thinks Yiddish plays can appeal to the Orthodox Hasidic community, as well as a more secular community: during Folksbiene’s 2019 production of Leon Kobrin’s classic Yiddish comedy “Di Next-Door’ike (The Lady of next door),” Mandelbaum said there were shows filled with young Hasidic Jews who had played hooky from their yeshivas.
Well aware of the revival of Yiddish music which is doing well in New York and abroad, Mandelbaum concedes that Yiddish theater has not experienced the same kind of renaissance.
“If Yiddish theater really wants to have a life, then it’s essential that there are people writing plays in Yiddish,” he said during a rehearsal break. “Yiddish theater should not limit itself to staging things from the past. We need young Yiddish writers who write plays.
Then he said: “Let there be a lot of Yashinsky. »
“The Gospel according to Haim (Di psure Loyt Khaim)” is performed in Yiddish with English supertitles. Previews begin Thursday, December 21; the world premiere will take place on Sunday, December 24 at 7:30 p.m. There will be a total of 21 performances through Sunday, January 7 at Theater for the New City (155 First Ave.).
