ERC > LEXICON OF THE YIDDISH THEATRE  >  VOLUME 5  >  CHAIM VAYSBEYN


Lexicon of the Yiddish Theatre
BIOGRAPHIES OF THOSE WHO WERE ONCE INVOLVED IN THE Yiddish THEATRE;
aS FEATURED IN zALMEN zYLBERCWEIG'S  "lEKSIKON FUN YIDISHN TEATER"


VOLUME 5: THE KDOYSHIM (MARTYRS) EDITION, 1967, Mexico City

 

 

Chaim Vaysbeyn


V. was born in 1881 in Vitebsk, White Russia. At the age of fifteen he was connected with the Yiddish theatre. He began his musical career as a chorus director in the opera and at the same time in a school, afterwards in Riga in the chorus-school on Petergasse.

When there was founded in Riga the State Yiddish Theatre, he, together with Getzl Tal, were given to the committee as a director.

On 4 January 1936 in the hall of the Riga State Yiddish Theatre he was celebrated by a committee of actors, writers and social activists, their thirty-year jubilee.

His wife, Berta Sverdlin (born 1891 in Riga), had studied music in Germany, had a magnificent mezzo-soprano voice and used to perform in general and Yiddish concerts in Riga and across the Latvian province.

According to Yona Radinov V. was a fine musician and had a beautiful tenor voice. In the cruel ghetto environment, he was one of the initiators of a Sholem Aleichem evening in the ghetto, and also of other classical activities. The Nazis had him appointed as a heytser in a [bathhouse=bod], and they had him murdered in 1943 in a cruel death. His wife was also killed by the Nazis near Riga, in a mass grave of some three thousand Jewish Nazi destructions.


Sh. E. from Yona Radinov and M. E. from Max Perlman.

 

 

 


 

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Adapted from the original Yiddish text found within the  "Lexicon of the Yiddish Theatre" by Zalmen Zylbercweig, Volume 5, page 4556.
 

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