Mordkhe Schaechter

Itsye Mordkhe Schaechter (Yiddish: איציע מרדכי שעכטער‎; December 1, 1927 – February 15, 2007) was a leading Yiddish linguist, as well as a writer and educator who spent a lifetime studying, standardizing and teaching the language. Schaechter, whose passion for Yiddish dated to his boyhood in Romania, dedicated his life to reclaiming Yiddish as a living language for the descendants of its first speakers, the Ashkenazic Jewry of central and eastern Europe. He was also the third editor of Afn Shvel (1957–2004), a prestigious Yiddish magazine. He died on February 15, 2007 after a long bout of illness following a stroke in the summer of 2001.

Schaechter was born in the then Romanian town of Czernowitz (in German and Yiddish; known in Romanian as Cernăuţi, and in Ukrainian Chernivtsi). He became fascinated with Yiddish as a pupil and later studied linguistics at the University of Bucharest. He completed his doctorate in Linguistics at the University of Vienna in 1951.

From 1947 to 1951 Schaechter resided in the Arzbergerstrasse Displaced persons (DP) camp in Vienna. During this period he worked for the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, as a zamler, or collector, for the YIVO Archives.

When Schaechter came to America in 1951, he served in military intelligence in the United States Army during the Korean War. Following this, he resumed his association with YIVO and began teaching and writing. He continued his work as a bibliographer and proofreader (1954–1956), and then, from the 1970s until 1986, he was a bibliographer, proofreader and finally editor of YIVO’s Yiddishe Shprakh, a journal devoted to the pronunciation, grammar and vocabulary of Standard Yiddish. He also founded the Committee for the Implementation of the Standardized Yiddish Orthography in 1958.

From 1981 until his retirement in 1993, he was Senior Lecturer in Yiddish Studies at Columbia University in New York. Besides this, he also taught Yiddish language in the intensive Uriel Weinreich Program in Yiddish Language, Literature & Culture, a joint project of YIVO and Columbia University, since its inception in 1968 until 2002. He has also taught Yiddish courses at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America (1960–1962), Jewish Teacher's Seminary-Herzliah (1962–1978) and Yeshiva University (1968–1973) and has instructed many distinguished scholars and professors of Yiddish language, literature and Jewish history throughout the world.

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