Mordkhe Schaechter, who dedicated his life to preserving Yiddish as a living language, has died in the United States, aged 79, the New York Times reported on February 17.
Schaechter, who was born in Romania, died in a hospital in the north Bronx after a long illness, his daughter Rukhl Schaechter told the United States daily.
According to his biography on the website for the League for Yiddish, which he founded, Schaechter moved to the US in 1951, where he devoted his life to studying, standardising and teaching Yiddish.
He was a senior lecturer in Yiddish studies at Columbia University in New York from 1981 until his retirement in 1993.
He had also taught in the Weinreich Programme on Yiddish Language, a joint project by Columbia and New York’s Yivo Institute for Jewish Research, from its beginnings in 1968 until 2002.
“It would be safe to say that almost any Yiddish teacher or scholar in North America in the last 40 years, and many from other continents, as well, have studied under Mordkhe Schaechter,” the League for Yiddish said in its biography.
His passion for Yiddish began when he was just a boy, and he had already started working with the Yivo Institute in 1947, before he left for the US, collecting archive material in the post-war camps in Austria. — AFP