Yiddish Culture Festival

That world was destroyed. But the language survived. And now, in 2026, it is coming back to life in Berlin—and the Shtetl Berlin Festival is the loudest proof of that.

The Shtetl Berlin Festival 2026 will take place from June 9 to 14 at various venues, including the Grüner Salon, the KulturKirche Nikodemus, and the UfaFabrik. It is the largest edition yet of an event that has quietly built something extraordinary over nearly a decade: a vibrant Yiddish community in the heart of the German capital.

A language born between German and Hebrew

To understand Yiddish is to grasp something essential about the relationship between Jews and the German-speaking world. The language emerged in the medieval Rhineland—in communities in Worms, Mainz, and Speyer—from a fusion of Middle High German, Hebrew, and Aramaic, and was later enriched by Slavic languages as Jewish communities spread eastward across Europe. Yiddish is, in the truest sense of the word, a Germanic language: its grammar, its sounds, its oldest words bear the traces of a thousand-year encounter between Jewish and German-speaking cultures.

This encounter was rich and creative long before it turned tragic. Ashkenaz—the Hebrew name for the German lands—gave its name to an entire civilization: Ashkenazi Jewish culture with its distinctive music, cuisine, literature, humor, and religious customs. And at the heart of this civilization stood a language whose origins the German-speaking world has largely forgotten.

The Shtetl Berlin Festival exists, among other things, to remember—and to show that history is not over.

Six days, five centuries of music

The festival’s concert program is deliberately broad in its historical scope. It begins on Tuesday, June 9, at the Grüner Salon with an evening that looks toward the present and the near future: a concert featuring new Yiddish poetry and new music, with performances by Berlin-based artists Patrick Farrell, Yael Merlini, and Di Shkatulkelekh. Berlin has been a stronghold of Yiddish poetry since the interwar period, when figures such as Moyshe Kulbak and Dovid Bergelson turned the city into a center of Yiddish literary modernism. This opening night poses the question: Who is writing these poems today, and how do they sound when set to music by composers currently living in this city?

On Thursday, June 11, the festival takes a step in the opposite direction—all the way back to the Renaissance. simkhat hanefesh and the Ensemble Lucidarium will perform at the KulturKirche Nikodemus, bringing to life the songs, dances, and melodies of early modern Ashkenazi Europe: music from the 16th and 17th centuries that almost no one else in the world performs. This serves as a reminder that Yiddish culture did not begin with klezmer and that the roots of Ashkenazi musical life lie deep in a shared European past.

On Friday, “Shabes in Shtetl” takes place, the festival’s traditional Friday evening gathering—this year a “Melting Pot Dinner” in collaboration with the Intercultural Center Neukölln, open to the entire community and true to the spirit of Jewish Neukölln past and present.

The weekend at the UfaFabrik, with its two headliner concerts, marks the highlight of the festival. On Saturday, June 13, the legendary Hungarian ensemble Muzsikás will perform its acclaimed program “Máramaros – The Lost Jewish Music of Transylvania”—their only performance in Germany this year. For more than fifty years, Muzsikás has been saving musical traditions from oblivion; their program of Jewish folk music from the vanished communities of Transylvania is one of the most moving concert experiences in contemporary folk music.

And on Sunday, June 14, the festival concludes with a collaboration between the Berlin duo Khupe—comprising Christian Dawid and Sanne Möricke, two of the most distinctive voices in European klezmer—and the Lerner Moguilevsky Duo from Buenos Aires, which brings the sounds of the Argentine-Jewish diaspora into dialogue with those of Berlin. The evening ends, like all good things in the Yiddish world, with an open jam session.

Learning at all levels

The festival’s weekend workshop and lecture program, which also takes place at the UfaFabrik, is designed to meet people where they are. For musicians and singers, there are practical workshops on Klezmer and Yiddish songs led by some of the guest artists—a rare opportunity to learn directly from the best practitioners in their field. For everyone else, a lecture series traces the history of the Yiddish language and culture in Germany and specifically in Berlin: how the language developed here, how it migrated east and then west and back again, and what it means that it is being spoken and sung in this city once more. No prior knowledge is required or assumed.

The Next Generation

Perhaps the most significant new element of the Shtetl Berlin Festival 2026 is the children’s program—two full days of creative workshops on June 13 and 14, led by the interdisciplinary artists Eyal Davidovitch and Yeva Lapsker. Through stories, songs, movement, and imagination, the children encounter Yiddish culture in a way that is entirely their own.

The program is open to children from Jewish families who wish to pass on a living connection to the Yiddish language and tradition to the next generation—as well as to children of all backgrounds. Shtetl Berlin has always believed that a society in which children learn about other cultures from an early age is a better society, and the children’s program embodies this belief directly. The workshop alternates between English, German, Russian, and a little Yiddish—a small echo of the multilingual world from which Yiddish itself emerged.

About Shtetl Berlin e.V.

Shtetl Berlin e.V. is a Berlin-based nonprofit association dedicated to the Yiddish language and culture as a living, community-rooted practice. Through a year-round program in Neukölln—including the monthly Neukölln Klezmer Sessions (which have now taken place over 125 times), the Zingeray community sing-along, and the annual Driter Seder—Shtetl Berlin has built one of the most active Yiddish cultural communities in Europe. The festival is its annual centerpiece.

Festival: June 9–14, 2026

Venues: Grüner Salon / KulturKirche Nikodemus / Oblomov Kreuzkoelln / UfaFabrik Berlin