Clara Sumpf Yiddish Lecture Series with Anna Shternshis

Red Hagaddah – Passover on the Service to Soviet Regime   

Anna Shternshis, Al and Malka Green Associate Professor of Yiddish Studies at University of Toronto

This lecture is in Yiddish. There is another lecture in English at 12:00pm.

Right after the Russian Revolution, Bolshevik ideologues recruited former priests, mullahs, and rabbis in order to help them to combat religious beliefs of new Soviet citizens. As a result, a number of anti-religious publications, written by experts from “within” appeared in press. The lecture examines one example of such propaganda, Yiddish-language “The Red Hagaddah”, written in 1923 by Moshe Altshuler, one of the leading ideologues of Soviet anti-Religious movements.