Yiddish culture festival brings 12,000 people to Germany's Weimar

Around 12,000 visitors attended this year's Yiddish culture festival in the eastern German city of Weimar, organizers said of the event that ended on Saturday evening.

The organizers said they were extremely pleased with the response to the 26th edition of the Yiddish Summer Weimar festival, celebrating Yiddish and related cultures.

More than 300 people from around the world took part in workshops on Yiddish language, music and dance as well as youth projects, they said.

The festival, which culminated on Saturday evening in a traditional ball, focused this year on women in Yiddish culture.

Guest artistic curator Diana Matut said the festival week had become a celebration of Jewish life and Yiddish culture.

Yiddish Summer Weimar presented an overall 97 events this year in Weimar, Erfurt, Eisenach and other towns and municipalities in the state of Thuringia, as well as in Istanbul, Agios Lavrentios in Greece and the German town of Zittau.

According to the organizers, Yiddish Summer Weimar is considered Europe's largest summer institute and festival for Yiddish and related cultures.

The Yiddish language emerged in the Middle Ages in the German-speaking regions of Europe and was spoken as a vernacular in the 1930s by around 11 million Central and Eastern European Jews.

Today it has a steadily growing number of between 500,000 and 1 million speakers.