No subject

[Harold F. Schiffman]

New York Times, February 16, 2007

Mordkhe Schaechter, 79, Leading Yiddish Linguist, Dies

By WOLFGANG SAXON

Mordkhe Schaechter, a leading Yiddish linguist who spent a lifetime
studying, standardizing and teaching the language, died yesterday in the
Bronx. He was 79 and lived in Yonkers. His death, at Montefiore Medical
Center, followed a long illness, his daughter Rukhl Schaechter said. Dr.
Schaechter, whose passion for Yiddish dated to his boyhood in Romania,
dedicated his life to reclaiming Yiddish as a living language for the
descendants of its first speakers, the Ashkenazic Jewry of central and
eastern Europe. Written in the Hebrew alphabet and containing Semitic,
Germanic and other components, it is one of the three major literary
languages in Jewish history, the others being Hebrew and Aramaic.

In addition to being a teacher, Dr. Schaechter was an author and promoter,
founding organizations devoted to furthering the use of Yiddish. He wrote
dictionaries intending to standardize it. Dr. Schaechter was a senior
lecturer in Yiddish studies at Columbia from 1981 to 1993. He also taught
in the Weinreich Program in Yiddish Language, Literature and Culture from
its beginning in 1968 until 2004; the program is a joint project of
Columbia and the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in New York, which is
prominent in the study of Ashkenazic Jewry. Dr. Schaechter started
contributing to YIVO then based in Poland as an archival collector in
Austria in 1947, four years before he came to the United States. Over the
years he also gave Yiddish courses at the Jewish Theological Seminary of
America, the Jewish Teachers Seminary-Herzliah and Yeshiva University, all
in New York.

In the 1980s, he was associate editor of The Great Dictionary of the
Yiddish Language and, from 1961 to 1972, he was associate editor of The
Language and Culture Atlas of Ashkenazic Jewry. From the 1970s until 1986
he was a bibliographer, proofreader and finally editor of YIVOs Yiddishe
Shprakh, a journal devoted to the pronunciation, grammar and vocabulary of
standard Yiddish. Itsye Mordkhe Schaechter was born on Dec. 1, 1927, in
what was then the Romanian town of Cernauti but is now Chernivtsi in
Ukraine, or Czernowitz to its Yiddish speakers. He became fascinated with
Yiddish as a pupil and later studied linguistics at the University of
Bucharest. He received his doctorate at the University of Vienna in 1951
with a dissertation in Yiddish. Dr. Schaechter arrived in New York that
year. After serving in military intelligence in the United States Army
during the Korean War, he resumed his association with YIVO and began
teaching and writing.

He founded the Committee for the Implementation of the Standardized
Yiddish Orthography in 1958. Six years later, with two students, he
founded Yugntruf (Call to Youth), a worldwide organization devoted to
teaching Yiddish to new generations. (It has a Web site at
www.Yugntruf.org.) Dr. Schaechter founded the Task Force for Yiddish
Terminology in 1970 and the League for Yiddish, based in New York, in
1979. He served as its executive director until 2004. In 1994, Dr.
Schaechter received the Itzik Manger Prize, the most prestigious Yiddish
literary award. His books, all in Yiddish, include Authentic Yiddish
(1986), Pregnancy, Childbirth and Early Childhood: An English-Yiddish
Dictionary (1991), The History of the Standardized Yiddish Spelling
(1999), Yiddish II: An Intermediate and Advanced Textbook (2004), and
Plant Names in Yiddish: A Handbook of Botanical Terminology (2005).

Dr. Schaechter is survived by his wife of 50 years, Charne Schaechter;
three daughters, Rukhl Schaechter of Yonkers, Gitl Viswanath of Teaneck,
N.J., and Eydl Reznik of Safed, or Tsfat, Israel; a son, Binyumen of
Manhattan; a sister, Bella Schaechter-Gottesman of the Bronx; and 16
grandchildren, with whom he spoke only in Yiddish, his son said.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/16/obituaries/16schaechter.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

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