The three-day event, now in its second year, kicked off on Sunday with a cantorial concert by world-class cantor Yaakov Lemmer and Frank London, a Grammy Award-winning klezmer trumpeter.
The concert was followed with a performance of Humesh Lider, a comedy by Jewish playwright Itzik Manger which features biblical figures living in a small city in Poland before World War II.
Singer’s New York also featured the work of the writer it is named after, Isaac Bashevis Singer.
At “Singer Storytime,” children and adults were able to hear the author’s stories read by Polish and American film actors at several New York public library branches.
The festival was set to conclude on Tuesday with A Wall, a monodrama performed in Polish by actress Ewa Dąbrowska.
It based on the story of Irena Sendler, a Polish nurse who saved thousands of children by smuggling them out of the Warsaw Ghetto during World War II.
The events were accompanied by film screenings and plays by the Jewish Theatre in Warsaw, one of only two Jewish theatres in Europe.
Isaac Bashevis Singer (1902-1991) grew up in Warsaw and in Biłgoraj in the Lublin region. Biłgoraj and its surroundings play an important part in his work, in which he vividly described the Jewish communities of the period.
He emigrated to the United States in 1935. In 1978, he won the Nobel Prize for Literature.
(jh/pk)
Source: IAR/shalom.org.pl