"O Canada" Sung by 150 in Yiddish Choir to Celebrate Canada's 150th Anniversary

On Tuesday, June 6, 2017, Moses Znaimer, Founder of ZoomerMedia and Executive Producer of VisionTV, hosted a group of multi- generational and multi-cultural choristers in the singing of Canada’s national anthem, O Canada, in an unprecedented Yiddish version by Hindy Nosek-Abelson, a lyrical translator of Yiddish poetry and songs, lecturer and Yiddish dialect coach for stage and film.

As Dan Bloom wrote in the San Diego Jewish World,

”Yiddish was the first language of most Jewish immigrants to Canada from the late 1800s on,” Nosek-Abelson recently told San Diego Jewish World. “While it isn’t spoken as a daily language as frequently as it once was, there remains a powerful love for the language shared by many thousands of Canadian people for whom Yiddish was either their own mother-tongue or that of their parents and grandparents.

That explains the overwhelmingly enthusiastic response by a Jewish community eager to pay tribute to the Canada that welcomed them or their ancestors and gave them their very first taste of freedom from Nazi persecution.  To do it in the language they lived, loved, created and flourished in represents a particularly meaningful expression of the gratitude and love for this country that Jewish Canadians share.

Here is a behind-the-scenes video with interviews of some of the principals who were instrumental in the creation of the official music video of O Kaneda in Yiddish. The complete song is sung at the end of the video.

If you want to see just the resulting video of O Kaneda without the backstory and interviews, you can skip to the video at the bottom of this post.

Enjoy!

A SPECIAL NOTE FOR NEW EMAIL SUBSCRIBERS:  THE VIDEO MAY NOT BE VIEWABLE DIRECTLY FROM THE EMAIL THAT YOU GET EACH DAY ON SOME COMPUTERS AND TABLETS.  YOU MUST CLICK ON THE TITLE AT THE TOP OF THE EMAIL TO REACH THE JEWISH HUMOR CENTRAL WEBSITE, FROM WHICH YOU CLICK ON THE PLAY BUTTON IN THE VIDEO IMAGE TO START THE VIDEO.

THE MAKING OF "O KANEDA"


"O KANEDA"