https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eYL_tlKzsNQ
Important Locations:
The Yiddish Art Theater what is now the Village East Cinema: 181-189 Second Avenue
Yiddish Walk of Fame: The corner of 10th Street and Second Avenue
The Grand Theater: Corner of Bowery and Canal Street
The Jewish Rialto: Corner of Houston Street and Second Avenue
The Lower East Side was the center of the Yiddish theater world. Second Avenue was known as the jewish rialto or the Yiddish Broadway.
Today’s Village East Cinema located at 181-189 Second Avenue used to be the Yiddish Art Theater. According to its website, it originally opened up in 1926 and was opened up by lawyer and jewish community leader Louis Jaffe. It was built for Maurice Schwartz who was a prominent member of the Yiddish Theater community. The inside of the theater was designed to look like that of a synagogue. It put on many of Schwartz’s plays such as “The Tenth Commandment”(1926) and “Yolshe Kahn”(1932), which ran for an unheard of 300 performances.
Found on eastvillage.thelocal.nytimes.com
The Yiddish walk of fame was once outside of the famous Second Avenue Deli and was created by its owner. It pays homage to the famous Yiddish actors and actresses who started out on the Yiddish Broadway and then went off to do work on the big screen in Hollywood and also television. George and Stella Adler are remembered on the walk of fame. They have an interesting story because the two were married and then were divorced and when they were divorced they opened up theaters that would compete with one another simultaneously.
Yiddish Broadway, or Yiddish theater district also known as the Jewish rialto was the Center of Yiddish Theater in the 1920s. It was located primarily on Second Avenue in the lower east side. The theater district was home to Yiddish theaters that performed Yiddish adaptations of Shakespeare, famously classic plays, original new plays, dramas, operettas, comedies, and even vaudeville, burlesque and musical shows. The Yiddish theater district was a rival of Broadway at the time in terms of the types of productions and the audiences for the time. Not only was the Yiddish Theater district a leading theater district in New York, it was also the leading Yiddish theater district in the world. The theaters in the district would put on as many as 20 to 30 shows a night. During the late 1940’s and early 1950s after World War two the Yiddish theater in New York City began to slowly die out and became less of a prominent presence. This is in part because after World War Two, the Yiddish speaking population in Europe began to grow older, and as they grew older the amount of Yiddish speaking people in new york began to slowly deplete. During the mid 50’s Yiddish theaters began to disappear and only a few were left in the once thriving district.
Source: New York Public Library
The grand theater was one of the first Yiddish theaters on the Jewish broadway. It was opened in 1903 and was founded by Adler but also by Sophia Karp with Jacob Fischel and the playwright Joseph Lateiner. It was the city’s first theater built specifically for Yiddish productions. It was similar to other theaters of its time because it was run and managed mostly by artists. In addition to Karp and lateiner the directors included Morris Finkel and comedian Bernard Bernstein. 3 years Prior to the opening of the grand theater the Hebrew actors union was founded. The opening of the grand theater as a Yiddish theater turned out to not only have Jewish audiences but a diverse audience. The theater was opened at a pivotal time in the New York Yiddish Community because three years prior the Hebrew actors guild was founded. This was a time when Yiddish theater was actively being performed and becoming popular.
