Browse Items (11 total)

Sylvia Dworetsky Grunes holds the program for the Workmen’s Circle School’s first annual performance in 1933. Sylvia, who was a seven-year-old student at the time of the performance, turned 97 in 2023.

In 1938 the students performed the “Yiddish King Lear.” This production was not a translation of Shakespeare’s “King Lear,” but the title does acknowledge the play’s plot source. The play is set in Lithuania in 1890. Estelle Sweet (L) and Anita…

Every year the students staged a major theatrical performance, in Yiddish. Lawrence Weinstein and Betty (Blachman) Jacobs (photo right) performed in Shalom Aleichem’s “200,000/The Big Lottery” in 1939. Shalom Aleichem is perhaps best known for…

Every year the students staged a major theatrical performance, in Yiddish. Evelyn Dworetsky (Sylvia’s older sister, left photo) performed in Shalom Aleichem’s “200,000/The Big Lottery” in 1939. Shalom Aleichem is perhaps best know for writing the …

List of orchestral and choir music to be performed at the 1935 Workmen’s Circle annual concert. The classical orchestra musicians were drawn from the Madison Symphony and the UW-Madison School of Music.
At the bottom of the page is a list of songs…

Interior view of the Labor Lyceum. The doors at the rear of the hall (beneath the balcony) led to the library (center-left), front entrance (center-right) and school office (right). Translation of the Yiddish text on the library door reads: “A R…

Students from the 1933Workmen’s Circle school assembled on the stage of the Labor Lyceum. One students is holding a poster in Yiddish.
Yiddish translation of header text: “Send your children to the Arbeiter Ring Shule” (Workmen’s Circle School)…

Students from the Workmen’s Circle school assembled on the stage of the Labor Lyceum. At the center of the group is the school’s principal and only teacher, Philip Seigel. Students would be taught to: “read, write and speak the Yiddish language,…

The Workmen’s Circle Labor Lyceum provided a community center for the immigrant Eastern European Jewish community in Madison. The Arbeiter Ring, as it was called in Yiddish (a language which combines Hebrew and German words), is a national…

Cover of the 1935 program (4th ed.) for the Workmen’s Circle annual concert. At the lower edge of the cover is a Yiddish transliteration for the location of the concert: “In university theater, Bascom Hall, Madison Wis.” Prior to 1938, when the…

Sylvia Dworetzky Grunes grew up in the tight knit Jewish community in Madison's Greenbush neighborhood, with her Yiddish-speaking Russian immigrant parents. Sylvia lived with her family in several residences in the Greenbush neighborhood beginning…