Archive | FAQs

We like to help people who’ve half-remembered a Yiddish expression they heard in their family. Here’s one example. There is a saying my family and I can’t find and hope you can give us the meaning. I’ll try to get it out….sounds like goota or guta nishuma. Can you help? Guteh neshomeh (or neshumeh) means

Sometimes I don’t always get it the first time… I have heard of a Yiddish expression that in English means “It saves two others.” However, I have never been able to find it or hear it in Yiddish. Can you provide the expression in Yiddish? Sorry, but

Here’s a lovely request we had from England recently: I am trying to translate the term ‘Welcome’ into Yiddish for a conference banner City and Hackney Mind are producing in London very soon! Can you help? If ‘Welcome’ is inappropriate please feel free to advice another similar term. We want people to feel welcome when [...]

Jews are superstitious. What’s up with that? I think that this is a tradition, but I do not know how it came about. Why when we wish to avoid ain horah do we extend the pointer finger and the tall finger when we spit three times and then say poo, poo, poo? My guess (and [...]

We get a lot of pronunciation queries. Here’s one: I’m currently in a production of ‘Ragtime’ in Chicago, and we’ve got a question about the pronunciation of the word “Tateh”. Given that he’s a Latvian Jewish immigrant in the early 1900s, how would “Tateh” be pronounced? We’ve had two Tatehs and one pronounced it “Tah-tuh” [...]