About Paper Bridges

Simon Dubnow, one of the founding figures of modern Jewish history, advocated throughout his life for Yiddish-speaking Jews to collect and record their own stories. A perhaps legendary story of his own death in the Riga ghetto in 1941 reports his final words: "If you survive, never forget what is happening here, give evidence, write and rewrite, keep alive each word and each gesture, each cry and each tear!" Many heeded this call to record. Yiddish writers like Rokhl Auerbach, Chava Rosenfarb, and Avrom Sutzkever wrote both poetry and prose in the ghetto, in the camps, and as partisans in the forest, and continued writing throughout their lives, for many decades thereafter. 

Inspired by Dubnow’s call, the Yiddish Book Center is proud to launch a new professional learning program for high school teachers. Using high-quality English translations taught by experts in the field of Yiddish literature and Holocaust studies, Paper Bridges gives educators the resources and training to teach these texts and to put them in the context of Yiddish as a language and culture that persevered before, during, and after the Holocaust. Paper Bridges will support today’s educators in helping students form their own answers to the questions posed by the Holocaust, genocide, and the seismic changes of the 20th century.

Paper Bridges: Teaching the Holocaust Through Yiddish Literature is a new professional learning program that provides a framework for high school teachers (grades 9–12) for teaching translations of Yiddish poetry, short stories, and memoirs from writers who experienced the Holocaust and recorded their impressions during and after the war.

Accepted participants will attend a six-day seminar, July 20–25, 2025, at the Yiddish Book Center, and after that will meet regularly online with the seminar cohort throughout the year. They will receive mentorship and resource support to develop and implement lesson plans incorporating Yiddish literature into their existing classes. 

Summer Seminar

During the six-day seminar, participants will attend seminar-style classes taught by scholars of the Holocaust and of Yiddish literature. They will immerse themselves in the poetry and prose of writers such as Rokhl Auerbach, Avrom Sutzkever, Chava Rosenfarb, Yankev Glatshteyn, and Kadya Molodowsky, while engaging in discussions and text study that will illuminate ways to share these authors’ works with students. These classes will provide historical and cultural context on the authors and on Yiddish language, culture, and literature before, during, and after the Holocaust.  

Cohort Meetings, Support, and Feedback

Throughout the 2025–26 school year, the Paper Bridges learning cohort will meet once a month online, via Zoom, to share feedback and reflections, and to discuss guidance and best practices with the program's consultants and faculty.  Each participant will be given mentorship and resources to assist them in developing their own lesson plan appropriate to their specific teaching, incorporating one or more of the Yiddish sources introduced in the seminar. Teachers will present their lesson as a demonstration to the cohort. These presentations will be used to help curate a new Holocaust education teaching and learning library that will be available to other teachers on the Yiddish Book Center’s website. Participants will receive a stipend of $1,000, half of which they will receive after the seminar, and half of which they will receive after final program materials are submitted by the end of June 2026.