In 2025 we witnessed with horror and revulsion the advance of authoritarianism throughout the world. Shocking crimes against civilian populations, repression, and Orwellian Newspeak that seemed unthinkable just a few years ago have now become everyday realities in many parts of the world.

I’m reminded of Edgar Mayer’s 1955 non-fiction book, “They Thought They Were Free,” a study of “how political tyranny is established” based on interviews he conducted with 10 men in Marburg, Germany, in 1953. As summarized by Wikipedia: “The author determined that his interviewees had fond memories of the Nazi period and did not see Adolf Hitler as evil, and they perceived themselves as having a high degree of personal freedom during Nazi rule…”
A 1955 reviewer of the book wrote that it “suggests how easy it is for human beings in any society to fall prey to a dynamic political movement, provided their lives are sufficiently insecure, frustrated or empty." (my emphasis, see Wikipedia).

The main mission of the OMA is, and has always been, to counter such insecurity, frustration, and emptiness with opportunities for community, connection, creativity, and meaning, which is how we understand “empowerment.”  That starts simply by being a place where people feel safe enough to share thoughts and feelings with each other without fear of being discounted, ridiculed, gaslighted, or canceled, in contrast to the often adversarial, judgmental, dangerous space of public discourse. All OMA projects strive to increase this kind of empowerment, working with different communities, topics, and methods. 

If you’re reading this newsletter, you probably already know how Yiddish Summer Weimar brings people together every summer to learn about and celebrate diversity and creativity in the context of Yiddish and related cultures. But you may not be aware of many other OMA projects that are active locally, nationally and internationally. I invite you to read about some of those projects in this newsletter, including “Wir am Wasser in Aken,” “#openpavillon,” “Caravan Orchestra & Choir,” “Come Closer,” “YAM Ensemble,” “OMA Café,” ”Generation J,” and many others, and to meet some of the people behind these wonderful projects.

Having celebrated 25 years of Yiddish Summer Weimar in 2025, we launch 2026 with a very special and long overdue topic:

“Yiddish Wo:men - Another Story of Modernity.”

Three new projects curated by Dr. Diana Matut and funded by the German Federal Cultural Foundation are at the center of YSW26, surrounded by a diverse program of workshops, concerts, international youth projects, and much more. Read all about it in this newsletter and check the YSW website for the latest updates.

In the midst of the unspeakable violence, greed, and cynicism that directly threatens all life on Earth today, it can be easy to lose sight of the phenomenal idealism, resilience, and creativity of countless individuals and organizations throughout the world who do inspiring, life-affirming work every day in the arts, sciences, and social movements. We are profoundly grateful to this virtual community and hope that the OMA can contribute to its impact.

Dr. Alan Bern

Generation J is back!
Now in its fourth edition, the Yiddish culture program for young adults will take place from April 6-19, 2026. We’ll spend part of that time in Paris and the rest in Weimar. This time, thanks to generous EU funding through Erasmus+, Generation J is a three-country cooperation between the OMA, the Maison de la Culture Yiddish - Bibliothèque Medem in Paris, and the Grodzka Gate Theater in Lublin.

So what is Generation J?
Creative community, summer camp, language school – you name it. It’s all of these, and yet it’s something else. Generation J brings together arts and learning, debate and friendship. Participants won’t just learn about Yiddish language and culture; they’ll build a Yiddish world together, each developing their own creative project. Along the way, they’ll explore topics like language, identity, beauty, politics, music, history, literature, film, resistance, vulnerability, and their own relationship to Yiddish – whatever it might look like.

Young people ages 18-30 living in Poland, France, or Germany (with any nationality) are invited to sign up! If you’re not sure whether you qualify, but you'd still like to participate, please get in touch at generationj@othermusicacademy.eu and let's talk about it. 

Registration opens soon – keep an eye on generationj.eu and our Instagram page @generationj_ for upcoming announcements on the faculty, programming, and how to sign up!

Rosamond van Wingerden

Golesdike Lider explores exile and diaspora through electroacoustic Yiddish songs
Combining Yiddish song with live electronics is something I’ve been exploring for the past couple of years, inspired by klezmer musicians like Fran&Flora as well as artists from other musical traditions. So Jordan White and I started a project we’re tentatively calling Golesdike Lider, which ambiguously means exile or diaspora songs, to create a whole program of new Yiddish songs that layer acoustic performances and live electronics. Thematically, the program explores the idea of exile from all different angles – physical migration, diasporic community, “exile” through exclusion from community or tradition, and the experience of otherness. 

Francesca Ter-Berg and Daniel Kahn will compose a program of new songs based on Yiddish poems – with an emphasis on including female and contemporary Yiddish poets – and then a six-person ensemble, including Anna Lowenstein, Pieter Sint Nicolaas, Malik Schilling, and me, will arrange the songs together during an intensive rehearsal period in the OMA in May 2026. Then we’ll present the new program in concerts in Weimar, Erfurt, Gera, and Berlin. We just got the exciting news that the project received generous grants from both the Musikfonds e.V. and the Szloma-Albam-Stiftung, and we’re looking forward to bringing these songs to life!

Rosamond van Wingerden

Present-Time Composition (PTC) returns to the OMA!
Back in the early 2000s, I began to create a new method for collective music improvisation. What made it new? Well, I’d been involved in “free improvisation” since the late 1970s, and I’d come to feel that, although the experience of music making felt free, the musical results for listeners were often repetitive and full of clichés, and all in all not nearly as satisfying as some of my favorite composed music. So I started to examine my favorite pieces, passages or even moments of composed music with two questions in mind: “Is it conceivable that this could be improvised?” and “If yes, what knowledge and skills would musicians need to have to be able to improvise it?” Out of this grew a very systematic, step-by-step learning method, and parallel to that a clearer understanding of the musical aesthetic that could be realized with this method. Since then, I’ve given close to 100 workshops on what I eventually called Present-Time Composition (PTC) , and I can honestly say that each workshop revealed surprising new horizons, insights, and methods. In fact, there are even some offshoots of PTC now for movement, dance, and other performance arts. PTC is independent of style, and many artists in the Yiddish Summer Weimar community studied PTC with me 15 years ago, including Ilya Shneyveys, Sasha Lurje, Sveta Kundish, Mark Kovnatskiy, Marcelo Moguilevsky, César Lerner, Tcha Limberger, and many others. PTC is also one of the anchors of the OMA Improvisation Project, which got put on the back burner back in 2020 due to the pandemic.

So I’m delighted to finally be able to bring PTC back to life in the OMA in 2026! Erasmus+ funding has already been approved for a PTC workshop to take place sometime in the autumn, and PTC is also part of at least one other project that is waiting for a funding decision. The dates of these workshops have not yet been set, but we’ll make them public as soon as possible on the OMA website, social media, and in the OMA newsletter. If you’d like to know more about PTC, feel free to write to me, alan.bern@othermusicacademy.eu. Thanks!

Dr. Alan Bern

Yiddish Summer Weimar 2026 will celebrate Yiddish-speaking women
July 11 - August 15, 2026
The whole OMA team is celebrating! For the third time, Yiddish Summer Weimar (YSW) is the recipient of a major grant from the German Federal Cultural Foundation designed to support new, path-breaking projects.

The special topic of the world-renowned festival’s 26th edition will be

“Yiddish Wo:men - Another Story of Modernity”

Three new projects will premier in the summer of 2026, conceived and curated by guest curator Dr. Diana Matut.

“Togbukh. Rose Shoshana Kahan – A Yiddish Story of Shanghai” is a one-woman musical theater piece with a libretto by Dr. Matut and music by Dr. Alan Bern.

“Her:Kol – Yiddish Women’s Song Cultures” showcases new musical settings of Yiddish women’s poetry by contemporary women composers/performers of Yiddish music.

And the online exhibition “Yiddish Wo:men and the Story of the Book: A Different Path to Modernity,” curated by Alma Roggenbuck and Dr. Matut with design by Eyal Davidovich and calligraphy by Ella Ponizovsky Bergelson, explores the history of Jewish wo:men’s engagement with literature and the medium of the book from the medieval period to the 21st century.

All three projects will debut during the YSW26 Festival Week, August 1-8, 2026.

Yiddish Hoyz @ Yiddish Summer Weimar 2026
Hi! I’m Jake Schneider, a Berlin-based Yiddish poet and organizer of various projects around living Yiddish language and culture. You might remember me from the festival week in Weimar.

I’m excited that the new Yiddish Hoyz program, where participants live together in Yiddish during Yiddish Summer Weimar, will be returning to the festival from 31 July to 10 August – and Adrien Smith, who co-taught "The New Zamlers" Oral Histories workshop (see later in the newsletter) with me, will be joining us all the way from Texas.

Jake Schneider

From 2022-24, the special topic of Yiddish Summer Weimar was Yiddish culture in the Ottoman context. Building on pioneering scholarship by Dr. Walter Zev Feldman, Dr. Martin Schwartz, Dr. Joel Rubin and others, many of us gained a whole new appreciation for the incredibly beautiful and moving connections between Greco-Turkish, Yiddish, Sephardic and related musical traditions. One of the ways “into” this topic was the YAM Ensemble, which brought together early-career musicians from Turkey, Greece and Germany for a three-week project in Istanbul, Agios Lavrentios and Weimar and was brilliantly led by Cantor Sarah Myerson and Ilya Shneyveys. I’ve asked Sarah to reflect on some of her experiences with the YAM Ensemble below.

Dr. Alan Bern

Can we bring together thirty young musicians from Germany, Greece and Turkey, and within two weeks build a common repertoire that we then perform in multiple countries? What if we sing in five languages? YAM Ensemble says, inşaAllah/Isalla/Mirtsashem/Si Dios Kiere! (if God wills it)

In Istanbul, we jammed with local musicians, sang with native Ladino speakers and visited numerous Jewish sites usually inaccessible to the public. In Greece, we participated in a mountain village family celebration and were hosted for Shabbat dinner in a Jewish community. In Germany, we opened the YSW festival and studied with world-class experts. We persevered through border crossings, challenging logistics, and extreme conditions (both weather and geopolitical). Our concerts were just as fun for us onstage as for those in the audience; some even joined us in singing and dancing. 

I'm so proud of each of our participants, our volunteers and our staff for bringing their whole selves to our time together; we could not have made this work as well without any one person's contributions. My co-musical director Ilya Shneyveys is truly a fount of Yiddish, Greek and Turkish music. His ability to teach and play every instrument in every style meant that I could focus more intensively on our singers. It was a joy to co-teach, arrange and direct YAM 2025, and we are already full of ideas for 2026! I'd also like to thank my teachers Dilek Türkan, Eftihia Mitritsa, Sofia Papazoglou and Tayfun Guttstadt; their workshops at Yiddish Summer Weimar were my introduction to singing in Greek and Turkish. Without them I would never have grown the confidence to agree when Alan and Andreas asked me to take a lead on this project.

Ke tou chronou! Gelecek yıl görüşürüz! Leshono habo! (Until next year!)

Sarah Myerson

2025 witnessed a spectacular and deeply moving edition of the Caravan Orchestra & Choir.
Founded in 2017, the CO&C is an exchange project between Yiddish Summer Weimar and the Department of Music of the University of Haifa (Israel), in cooperation with the University of Music FRANZ LISZT Weimar (Germany).

Every year, the orchestra and choir invite 45-50 university-aged musicians from Israel and Germany to apply for a 3-week residency in Haifa and Weimar, with an intensive rehearsal period and concerts in both countries, as well as fun social activities, workshops, and excursions. Together with the artistic directors, participants explore East European Jewish (Yiddish), East Mediterranean, and Middle Eastern music traditions. It is the synthesis of those cultures that makes the sound of the CO&C so unique. And the very fact that young people from political environments locked in bitter conflict can still find common ground through music is profoundly inspiring year after year.

I’ve asked Anna Grünhardt, manager of Caravan Orchestra & Choir in 2025, to share with us below some of their thoughts and feelings about the project.

Dr. Alan Bern

This year’s project unfolded at a very difficult political moment, and learning together under these circumstances required a great deal of sensitivity and courage. The fact that the group navigated this time with so much openness and respect shaped our collaboration in a very real way.

Even though we invite a different group of musicians every year, some people have been part of Caravan for as long as six years. By 2025, in its eighth year, the Caravan Orchestra & Choir felt more than ever like a big family. 

To me, it is a huge honor to witness the Caravan musicians learn from one another, share their creativity, and dedicate so much heart and energy to the project.

This year, we invited three talented musicians – who were long-time Caravan participants – to join the ensemble as junior teachers. During YSW, we watched them step into these roles, bringing their own repertoire, teaching it to the ensemble, and then conducting it on stage.

Seeing people grow year by year, take ownership, and become more professional within the project is one of the most beautiful parts of Caravan. The diversity of backgrounds and experiences in the ensemble also inevitably pushes the music on stage in interesting directions. 

Of course, the rehearsals and concerts are powerful, but so much of the magic happens in the “in-between” spaces: the bus rides, spontaneous jam sessions, late-night conversations, shared meals, small moments of curiosity and care. These are the moments where unexpected connections emerge and where the idea of exchange begins to take shape long before anyone sees what we’re doing on stage. 

Thanks to one of our participants, we have a new Instagram profile and our own YouTube channel now - if you’re curious about Caravan, please follow!

Anna Grünhardt

The New Zamlers: Yiddish Oral Histories for the 2020s
Over the past two months, Adrien Smith – an assistant professor of Yiddish at the University of Texas at Austin – and I have been trying out a new experiment with a group of sixteen intermediate and advanced Yiddish students across Europe and the US, co-hosted by the Other Music Academy.

Together, we co-taught an online workshop (in Yiddish, of course) on interview techniques from oral history and journalism to help students capture the “history of today” on a small, personal scale. For their final projects, each student interviewed a classmate and created a five-minute video portrait. 

Last week, the group shared and celebrated these pieces at an in-person watch party in Berlin and a virtual one attended by participants and guests in Germany, Belgium, France, and the US.

The project concluded on December 10th this year, but you can read more about it here on the YSW website:

Come Closer Jazz Festival 2025
Come Closer looks back on a hot jazz autumn. We were able to organize workshops and concerts with renowned musicians such as Olga Amelchenko (Paris) and Nick Dunsten (NY) in cooperation with the Institute for New Music and Jazz at the University of Music.

Our concert series returned to its former glory, with memorable performances by the Silke Eberhard Trio, Christian Lillinger's solo concert, and Conni Trieder's trio concert.

The 5th Come Closer Festival once again brought big names from the German and European jazz scene to Weimar and Kranichfeld this year. Five concerts, a workshop, and a jam session over three days at the OMA, St. Michaelis Church in Kranichfeld, and the Ateliercafe Kranichfeld attracted a larger audience than ever before!

The focus of Come Closer is both on bringing jazz and improvised music of the highest international standard to the stage and on presenting new discoveries from the Thuringian jazz scene to Thuringian audiences. If all goes well, we’ll be back next year to continue this mission!

Jordan White

#openpavillon: We are building a garden! – Planting action at the OMA
Our #openpavillon project series is back! In 2025 and 2026, we will be building together again. In socio-cultural construction sites between art and craft, we will learn, design, and ask ourselves the question

„What can we learn about resilience and coexistence from a garden?”

The first of three integrative project phases took place at the OMA at the end of October. In inclusive planting and building activities, we designed the first elements of the garden with participants from the Landenberger Förderzentrum and the Diakonie Weimar. Together, we learned important things about soil health, designed signs, carved pumpkins (thanks to Biohof Scharf!), welded and cut metal, and prepared everything for the big day: planting new trees and shrubs for our emerging Garden for All!

Accompanied by a beautiful ritual, we planted a field maple, a Katsura tree, a Butter Pear tree, and several berry bushes. All the participants also learned a Yiddish song by Alan Bern based on a poem by Kadya Molodowsky (1920s) about pears, patience, and inner growth. We wrote down wishes for ourselves, our families, and the world on ribbons and gave them to the trees to take with them to their new home.

Please take a look at the announcements and dates on the website –  www.openpavillon.eu.

And mark May 11-24, 2026 in your calendars – we'll be busy at the OMA for two weeks with a diverse group of European volunteers and participants from various schools and institutions, holding workshops, working on construction sites, and taking cultural history tours around the question “What can we learn about resilience and coexistence from a garden?”

Valentin Schmehl
—
Funded and supported by Aktion Mensch, Young Impact Fund, European Solidarity Corps, Stadtwerke Weimar and many more.

Review of the 2025 Vacation Project by “Wir am Wasser” ("Us by the Water") in Aken –
“Dusted off and brought to light: We’re bringing pictures to life!”

This year, the OMA once again organized a vacation project in Aken with the Mary Jane culture boat! At the kids' request, we put together an exhibition in just one week – and one that’s worth seeing! Together, we took a close look, transferred poses to our own bodies, made costumes from recycled materials, and recreated paintings from European and non-European art history. We also developed frames and clever collages. “Tableaux Vivants” – in Aken for everyone who wanted to spend their vacation week creatively and collaboratively.

The festive finale was a vernissage on October 24 in the Marienkirche Aken, attended by many parents, city councilors, the mayor, and, of course, even more kids from the elementary school and daycare center! Led by young museum guides, with professional postcard printing and snacks à la Gallery Weekend... the exhibition may go on tour in the region in 2026, and inquiries are already coming in!

Here’s a small glimpse of the masterpieces.
We’re hoping for another, final year of “Wir am Wasser – River Stories from Near and Far” in 2026 <3

Valentin Schmehl
—
Wir am Wasser 2025 is a regional network project in the “Engagiertes Land” program of @engagement_und_ehrenamt, with the kind support of the city of Aken and a large number of regional and national partners.

A greeting from our project manager and artist Valentin Schmehl
Another year full of collaborative and socio-cultural projects is coming to an end. I’ve been involved with the OMA for over 14 years now, and I’m still constantly learning new things.

The projects I’ve been developing at the OMA for several years are all platforms for bringing together as diverse a group of people as possible and working together towards a common, practical goal: learning from and with each other!

In our OMA projects, we always interweave artistic and scientific approaches to address social issues. The reasons for this are as varied and colorful as the projects we regularly present to you here and on our social media channels.

For several years now, the focus has been on “art and craft in interaction” and long-term, community-oriented work in rural areas. For me and for us as project teams, these projects are always rays of hope because we experience firsthand how little it actually takes for us as humans to interact honestly, creatively, and openly – creating meaning is something we do together, especially when we are in exchange with “others,” people who are different from ourselves.
We are so much more connected than the common narrative would have us believe (and feel).

You can support our projects – with ideas, with events, as volunteers, or through donations.
Feel free to write to me at valentin.schmehl@othermusicacademy.eu.

Valentin Schmehl

Voluntary Social Year (FSJ) in Culture
The FSJ in Culture is a great opportunity for young people to gain insight into career fields that interest them but are still unfamiliar to them after finishing secondary school. The focus here is on actively participating in the work and learning new skills. Great importance is placed not only on working alongside others, but also on contributing and implementing your own ideas. The goal should be to plan and carry out your own project during this year.

I, too, wanted to take advantage of the opportunity to have a certain transition after school and experience a little bit of the “working world.” I wanted to gain new experiences and learn what I could achieve and create in life outside of music. So far, the OMA has provided the perfect space for me and my goals. The most important factor here are probably my kind colleagues, who made it easy for me to settle in and get up to speed. They create a pleasant working atmosphere, which, for me, is the basis for a successful FSJ. I am also very happy with the distribution of work and tasks. For the most part, I am very flexible in this regard. This is also because, in addition to volunteers from Thuringia, the OMA also employs European volunteers, and the tasks are shared with them. But what I find most exciting are the many different events, people, and concerts that attract people to the OMA and that you get to know here. One of my favourite highlights was probably the samba evening in September. The OMA Café was packed to the rafters and the atmosphere was fantastic.

So far, I have had almost exclusively positive experiences. Whether at the OMA or at a different location – to anyone who’s thinking about doing an FSJ, I can recommend it!

In Thuringia, many of these FSJs are run by the LKJ (Landesvereinigung Kultureller Jugendbildung, State Association for Cultural Youth Education), which is the sponsoring organization. The LKJ supports the volunteers and offers many additional training opportunities. The best example of this are the seminar trips that take place about three times a year. All the volunteers from Thuringia come together in seminar groups to network and participate in educational seminars.

We would like to thank the LKJ for its extensive help, as well as the Sparkassen-Kulturstiftung Hessen-Thüringen for its support in financing our FSJ positions at the OMA.

Jakob Peupelmann

European Volunteering in the OMA
Hello! My name is Uroš and I started my volunteering journey at the Other Music Academy almost exactly a year ago through the European Solidarity Corps project, which allows young people from all over Europe (the EU and associated countries) to work abroad and experience a new place and culture.

The ESC project at the OMA has allowed me to express myself and my personality, work on my music, my art, my management skills, my language skills, to meet people I would have never had the opportunity to meet had I not decided to volunteer here, and, of course, to learn from all of this and grow as a person.

I’ve worked with the OMA and Yiddish Summer Weimar throughout 2025, I’ve supported the festival itself as well as regular OMA events and concerts, and I’ve worked with the Caravan Chamber Orchestra & Choir, YAM Ensemble, The Come Closer Jazz Festival and with many more great people and projects.

I am proud and happy to have been able to meet so many amazing people and to have been a part of the events, the music, the dancing and merrymaking with the OMA and YSW.

Uroš Milicevic

Thank you for being an OMA Newsletter subscriber! We hope you’ve enjoyed learning a bit more about us.

And the whole OMA team wishes you a restful transition to 2026, as well as good health, love and friendship, creativity and resilience in the coming year!

And we hope to see you in Weimar, or wherever else in the world we may meet!