UJA Committee for Yiddish is excited to take part in this year's IGNITE! Tikkun Leil Chanukah Festival of Jewish Culture & Learning

 

Thursday December 18, 2025

 

Festival runs from 6:30 to 11:30 pm

Holy Blossom Temple, 1950 Bathurst Street, Toronto

CLICK HERE for Festival Schedule & Registration

 

CFY's own Cyrel Troster and Sheine Mankovsky will present

YIDDISH CHANUKAH BINGO!

9:10 - 10:00 pm

 

Intergenerational, songful candle-lighting and Horah
Music- and Arts-based workshops
Chanukah study sessions
Latkes and dreidels
Big, bold concert curated by the Ashkenaz Festival

Adult and Teens Track: Suggested $20 per person
Family Track: $30 per family of up to four people

IGNITE: Tikkun Leil Chanukah returns with light, joy and jolliness! Join the community for an intergenerational, songful candle-lighting and Horah, then break into a choose-your-own-adventure of arts-based workshops, performances and Chanukah study sessions. Enjoy a big, bold concert inspired by the season’s themes, curated by the Ashkenaz Festival. Come early or late, stay a little or stay the whole time! Limited hybrid options available.

Christina & The Zamlers: Reimagining the Lost Klezmer Music from the An-ski Expeditions
Discover a rare treasure trove of previously unknown Ashkenazic musical heritage in this very special concert featuring accordionist Christina Crowder, joined by violinist Keryn Kleiman and tsimbler Daniel Kunda Thagard. The musicians will perform repertoire from a unique corpus of musical manuscripts unearthed from the Vernadsky National Library of Ukraine in 2017. Over the last few years, volunteers around the world have worked together to digitally notate and translate these manuscripts as part of the Kiselgof-Makonovetsky Digital Manuscript Project (KMDMP). This international project has connected participants with the work of important klezmer musicians from late-19th and early-20th centuries, allowing this rare repertoire to be brought back to life. The project and this concert also explores legendary ethnographer S. An-ski’s radical vision that the folklore of the Jewish people is an oral Torah as important as the Talmud of the sages. An-ski hoped that the Jewish people would become Zamlers (collectors) who would continue to engage with Ashkenazic folklore as a living, breathing legacy. This concert, and the preceding lecture (7pm), bring that bold vision to life.