Both Ground and Plow: Looking for Vilne

Annual Nusakh Vilne Memorial Program Sponsored by Nusakh Vilne

Join us in commemorating the Jewish community of Vilna through poetry, music and presentation. This year, Ruth Baran-Gerold and Ellen Perecman recite poetry; Yelena Shmulenson and Binyumen Schaechter perform music; and poet, memoirist and reporter Rita Gabis (Hunter College) delivers “Both Ground and Plow: Looking for Vilne” about her personal quest to recover Vilna through poetry and personal memory. Chaired by Elliott Palevsky.

About the Participants

Rita Gabis is an award winning poet and prose writer. Her memoir: A Guest at the Shooters’ Banquet: My Grandfather and the SS, My Jewish Family, A Search for the Truth (Bloomsbury US/UK) will be out in September 2015.  In a starred review Kirkus called it: “An eloquent testimony to the war’s enduring, violent impact.” She lives and teaches in New York City.

Elliott (Elye) Palevsky has taught Yiddish Language and culture at the Yiddish Institute, Vilnius University and at Queens College, CUNY. He is the active Emeritus CEO of the River Garden Senior Service system which he developed in Jacksonville, Florida. Elye is the son of Chayele (Porus) and the late Simon Palevsky; both were Partisans in the woods near Vilna.  In New York they became founders and leaders of Nusakh Vilna and of Camp Hemshekh of which Elye is also a “son.”

Ellen Perecman is founder and Producing Artistic Director of New Worlds Theatre Project, a theatre company dedicated to bringing early 20th-century Yiddish plays to diverse, contemporary audiences in English. Perecman trained as an actor with Julie Bovasso and Vivian Matalon.  She holds a Ph.D. in Linguistics from The Graduate Center, CUNY and a B.A. in Liberal Arts from Sarah Lawrence College.

Binyumen Schaechter is an award-winning composer and arranger, conductor and pianist, both of American musical theater as well as Yiddish music. He is the conductor of the Jewish People's Philharmonic Chorus that performs exclusively in Yiddish. He is also the music director (and father) of Di Shekhter-Tekhter/The Schaechter Sisters, the teenaged Yiddish singing duo which has performed on several continents. Schaechter leads workshops and lectures on Yiddish music and culture and growing up speaking Yiddish in contemporary America. 

Yelena Shmulenson was born in Belarus, spent her early childhood in Siberia, her adolescence in Ukraine, and emigrated to the U.S. in 1993. She’s perhaps best known for her performance in the Coen brothers’ Oscar-nominated A Serious Man. Other film and TV credits include Boardwalk Empire, Robert De Niro’s The Good Shepherd, Romeo & Juliet in Yiddish, and Chinese Puzzle (with Audrey Tautou). Stage credits include five seasons Off-Broadway with the Folksbiene, two at the Ellis Island Theatre, The Golem of Havana, The Essence: A Yiddish Theater Dim Sum (Fringe/tour), Covers (New York and Moscow), and others. She’s won three Earphones Awards for her recorded books, and is fluent in five languages.