Sholem Aleichem Museum in Kyiv: Life of a Yiddish Classic

Sholem Aleichem (real name Sholem Rabinovich) is one of the greatest Jewish writers, the man who turned the everyday language of his people into a language of literature and became the acknowledged national writer of Eastern European Jewry. In the public mind his name is closely tied to Yiddish, yet he actually began his literary career writing in Hebrew.

The museum dedicated to the great writer opened on March 2, 2009, to mark his 150th birthday, and became the first state museum in modern Ukraine devoted to Jewish themes.

One of the exhibition's main themes is Sholem Aleichem and Kyiv, Sholem Aleichem and Ukraine. The writer was born in Pereiaslav, but from a young age he was drawn to Kyiv, where he lived in 1887–1890 and again in 1893–1905. The tragic events of 1905 — the Jewish pogrom — forced him to leave the city, with which one of his most productive literary periods is connected. In his works he would later portray Kyiv as "Yehupetz."

The exhibition focuses on the writer's life and work, but visitors can also learn about the spiritual and material culture of the Jewish people. Tours include a display of ritual objects from traditional Jewish life. Screens in the hall show excerpts from films and stage productions based on Sholem Aleichem's works, as well as Jewish architecture, the unique art of Jewish stone carvers — the carved tombstones known as matzevot — ancient Jewish books, manuscripts, examples of Hebrew calligraphy and much more.

The museum is located in the building at 5A Velyka Vasylkivska Street, where the writer had an apartment in his Kyiv years. It was during this period that works such as "Menachem-Mendl," "In the Small World of Little People," "All of Berdychiv" and others were written. In addition to the main exhibition, the museum has a hall for temporary exhibitions, which regularly hosts shows by other artists whose work reflects Jewish themes.

The museum runs a lecture program called "Pages of Jewish History and Culture" and hosts seminars, conferences, and meetings with well-known figures from culture, science and the arts.

Sholem Aleichem's work spans the period from the 1870s–1880s to the beginning of World War I. He died in the United States in 1916. Public interest in the writer endures to this day — he told the story of life in the Jewish shtetl and of the people of Yiddish culture, the language spoken by about 97 percent of the Jews of the vast Russian Empire at the end of the 19th century.

Sholem Aleichem is a cult figure in Jewish culture — a Taras Shevchenko for the Jewish community, who sought to capture and preserve the everyday life and culture of his people in his writing.

If you want to learn more about Jewish culture and about this remarkable writer (who, by the way, called himself a chronicler), the exhibitions of the Sholem Aleichem Museum are waiting for you!

Address: 5A Velyka Vasylkivska Street, Kyiv.