Professor Wolf Moskovich awarded highest prize for the study of Yiddish

Israel's National Authority for Yiddish Culture bestowed a Lifetime Achievement Award for 2023 on Wolf Moskovich, Professor Emeritus of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and member of the Board of Directors of the Canadian charitable organization Ukrainian Jewish Encounter (UJE).

Prof. Moskovich is one of the world's preeminent Yiddish specialists, who, over many decades, has carried out large-scale projects focused on the study of Yiddish, including the compilation of The Great Dictionary of the Yiddish Language.

Prof. Moskovich taught Yiddish at Oxford University for ten years, and for many years taught this language at summer schools scattered throughout the world. He is a Foreign Member of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine and the editor of the multivolume series Jews & Slavs published by the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Professor Moskvich's organizational and academic contributions to holding major international conferences and projects on the Yiddish language in Ukraine, including the memorial conferences of 2008 and 2018 in honor of the anniversaries of the 1908 conference in Chernivtsi, were recognized at the awards ceremony.

The awards ceremony was held in Tel Aviv on 4 December 2023, an evening filled with music performed by klezmer musicians and young artists singing in Yiddish.

The guests were shown a video clip about the life and work of Prof. Wolf Moskovich.

Text, photos, and video: Shimon Briman (Israel)

Translated from the Ukrainian by Marta D. Olynyk