2010 faculty:

Prof. Dov-Ber Kerler
(Indiana University)

Born in Moscow in 1958, he emigrated to Jerusalem with the family in 1971 after a protracted struggle with Soviet authorities, led by his late father, the famed Yiddish poet Josef Kerler. Dov-Ber Kerler graduated from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1983 (joint honors BA in Yiddish Literature and General and Indo-European Linguistics). He went on to doctoral studies at Oxford University where he wrote his doctoral thesis under the supervision of Professor Dovid Katz, now the VYI’s director of research. Kerler taught at Oxford for sixteen years, before taking up the Dr. Alice Field Cohn Chair in Yiddish Studies at Indiana University at Bloomington in 2001. For many years, Professor Kerler taught at the Oxford Summer Program in Yiddish, and he was one of the instructors in 1998 here in Vilnius, the year in which the program was relocated to Lithuania.

In addition to his many scholarly publications, Professor Dov-Ber Kerler is a renowned Yiddish poet, who will be signing copies of his newest book for this year’s summer program participants. He is widely considered to be one of the top Yiddish teachers and scholars in the world today, and his return to Vilnius could not be more timely.

Dr. Natalia Krynicka
(MEDEM Yiddish Center, Paris) 

Natalia Krynicka completed secondary school (Liceum) in her native Poland in 1989 and then pursued Jewish Studies at Frankfurt University from 1989 to 1993.  Thereafter, she earned the master’s degree in Yiddish, at the Institut National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales in Paris, where she also obtained the Diploma in Russian. Subsequently, she commenced doctoral studies in Yiddish at the University of Paris VII, writing on the history and problems of translation of Polish literature into Yiddish. She has completed a doctoral dissertation on cross-cultural relationships between Yiddish and Polish literature, the defence of which will be held shortly. Since 2001, Natalia has served as librarian of the Medem Library in Paris and taught Yiddish at the Sorbonne. In addition, she teaches Yiddish at the Paris Yiddish Center (Maison de la culture Yiddish).

Since 1995, Natalia has coedited Der yidisher tam-tam, the pedagogical bulletin produced by the Paris Yiddish Center. The year 2003 saw the publication of her bilingual edition of Miryam Ulinover’s collected poems, A Grus fun der alter heym/ Un bonjour du pays natal (Paris, Bibliothèque Medem).

Prof. Abraham Lichtenbaum
(IWO Foundation, Buenos Aires) 

Prof. Abraham Lichtenbaum is the Executive Director of the IWO Foundation (Institute of Jewish Research) since 1994. He has taught Yiddish in New York, Warsaw, Buenos Aires and Vilnius. Prof. Lichtenbaum is also the lecturer and the author of texts about Jewish history and culture.

Prof. Anna Verschik (Levels I & II)
(Tallinn University, Estonia & University of Helsinki, Finland)

In 1990, Anna Verschik earned the B.A. degree in Finno-Ugric languages at Tartu University (Estonia), where she went on to study general linguistics, specializing in Yiddish. In 1996, she completed the M.A. degree with a thesis on the multilingualism of Estonian Jews; and in 2000 she received her Ph.D. with a dissertation titled "Estonian Yiddish and its Contacts with Coterritorial Languages." During this period she also studied Yiddish in the Vilnius Summer Program and at Bar Ilan University (Israel), and Jewish Studies for a year at the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies (U.K.).

Anna's long list of publications contains numerous articles on the history, grammatical usage, and sociolinguistics of Yiddish in Estonia. Among her several translations from Yiddish into Estonian, undertaken to acquaint Estonians and young assimilated Jews with Yiddish culture, are Sholem-Aleichem's Marienbad, Dovid Bergelson's When All is Said and Done, stories by I.B. Singer, and, for stage performance, S. An-ski's The Dibbuk.

Among other courses, Anna has taught Introduction to Yiddish Culture, Introduction to Judaism, and a general course in Yiddish literature, all at the Estonian Institute of Humanities. Further, she has taught Elementary Yiddish at the University of Tartu, where she headed the Department of Estonian Language and Literature, at Uppsala University (Sweden), and was docent in Yiddish Studies at Helsinki University (Finland). In June 2006, she was named Professor of Estonian as a Foreign Language at Tallinn University. Each summer since 1998 she has taught Yiddish in the Vilnius Summer Program.