Yentl’s masterstroke takes Yiddish theatre from fiasco to Opera House

The Kadimah Yiddish Theatre’s production of Yentl marks a new chapter in the storied history of Yiddish theatre in Australia. After two acclaimed seasons in Melbourne, it is apt that the play has made it to the Sydney Opera House, a short stroll from Circular Quay, one of the ports that received Jewish immigrants on our shores. 

Indeed, the first Yiddish play performed in Australia was staged in Sydney in 1905, when Warsaw-born actor, Chaim Reinholz, produced the biblical operetta Shulamis, written by the so-called “father” of Yiddish theatre, Avram Goldfaden. Reinholz directed the play with a cast of non-Jewish actors. It is said the opening night was a fiasco. The actors either forgot their lines or spoke a pidgin Yiddish best described as Yinglish. 

In November 1908, the Yiddish actor Samuel Weissberg stepped ashore in Port Melbourne from the steamship Vulcania. That afternoon he made his way to a boarding house in Carlton, where Jewish immigrants would gather after a day’s work.

By the following afternoon — Melbourne Cup day Hag Ha’susim, the Holy Day of the Horses, as a Yiddish poet has called it — a committee was formed and plans were laid for the creation of the first of many Yiddish theatre ensembles in Melbourne. This initiative can be seen as marking the beginnings of Yiddish theatre in Australia.

By the 1920s, there were at least three companies performing to Yiddish-speaking audiences in Melbourne, among them the Kadimah Drama Circle. Founded in 1911 as a library and Jewish cultural centre, the Kadimah marked the grand opening of its new premises in Lygon Street, in 1933, with a production of a classic Yiddish play, Green Fields.