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Winners of Israel’s Yiddish Short Story Contests, 2019-2021

Israel’s National Authority for Yiddish Culture launched the first government-sponsored Yiddish-language writing contest ever held in the Jewish state.

In 2019, Ethel Niborsky, age 17, won the first prize for her story “Letters to a Blind Grandfather,” for which she received an award of 3,000 shekels. The second prize, with an award of 1,500 shekels, went to Shira Shapira, 31, for her story “Three Widows.” Raphael Halff, 25, got the third prize: 1,000 shekels for “A Letter to the Mail.”

Niborsky, who lives in Jerusalem, made her debut in the Forverts at the age of eight and beat out a field of mostly adult writers to win Yugntruf’s writing contest at age 10. One of her short stories was awarded a prize by Der Veker, a Hasidic journal of literature and current affairs. She also published two novellas in Yiddish.

Shiri Shapira, also a Jerusalem resident, is a literary translator who translates works from English, German and Yiddish into Hebrew; her translations include works by the Yiddish writers Deborah Fogel and Yisroel Rabon. She earned M.A. degrees in literary translation and Yiddish studies from the Hebrew University.

Raphael Halff, studying for M.A. in Yiddish at Tel Aviv University, is originally from Teaneck, New Jersey. He graduated with a joint degree from Columbia University and the Jewish Theological Seminary. A former fellow at the Yiddish Book Center in Amherst, he made his literary debut in the last print issue of the Yiddish Forward in April 2019.

See the full article in the Forward newspaper.

The second contest took place in 2020. The prize winners were:

1. Leybl Botvinik for his short story “Fly, Little Coloured Butterfly, Fly."

2, Alexander Fish for "The Three Letters which Felix Wrote to Binyomin."

3. Ruth Levin for "A trip from Czernowitz to Kiev." 

 The third contest took place in 2021. The prize winners were:

1. Eli Scharfstein for “The Big Win".

2, Shlomo Lerman for "Two Miracles."

3. Puah Peri for "Little Knives." 

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