THE BATTLE OF
THE YIDDISH SOLDIERS

 
Two Jews, three opinions . . .

Warfare. The cops were called. [This was at the 2022 Yiddish concert at Cain Park, Cleveland Heights.] The concert chairman, who had a quite a temper, asked the Cleveland Heights police to eject a Workmen’s Circle (WC) person for passing out WC literature at a card table at the show.

The tightly wound chairman was the head of a group called the Yiddish Concert in the Park (YCIP) committee, an offshoot delegation of the Workmen’s Circle. Farshtey?

The YCIP chairman was annoyed with the WC. It appeared he wanted total control of the show. It was a pishing contest. The police escorted the Workmen’s Circle pamphleteer out.

Can’t we Jews get along?

(Don’t answer that.)

Back in pre-history (the 1980-1990s), the annual free Cain Park Yiddish concert attracted up to 2,000 people. Acts included The Klezmatics, Pharaoh’s Daughter, the Klezmer Conservatory Band, Bruce Adler and Chava Alberstein.

Then the Yiddish-speaking audience dwindled. The target audience pretty much died out. Concert attendance was down to about 400 attendees typically, in the 2010s.

Today: The YCIP and the WC (Cleveland branch) don’t exist. The WC’s website shows nothing much has happened there in the past several years. The YCIP hasn’t met in four years. Gornisht.

I’m a former member of both the YCIP and the WC. People sometimes ask me, “What’s going on with the Yiddish concert at Cain Park? I miss it.” I explain there’s a rump group of five people who use the name Workmen’s Circle, and these folks have self-funded the shows for the past two years. Funded it small-time. A couple grand, most. Not enough dinero to bring in high-quality talent.

Cain Park, which is a city-owned venue, has no time, or the resources, to deal with these nuances. Cain Park doesn’t know Yiddish from spinach. And lately Cain Park has run through two general managers and an interim manager. Aisde: snother established entity seemingly in the dark about all this is the Cleveland Jewish News, which aggressively promotes the WC’s low-rent shows, maybe because the CJN makes money by selling ads for printed concert programs.

In 2023 I met with the then-chief financial officer of the Jewish Federation of Cleveland, and he told me he was fed up with the squabbling committees and “we’re not giving another dime [to underwrite the concert] until we see accounting reconciliations and a financial statement.”

I remember when Yiddishist Henry Green donated approximately $50,000 to the concert fund. He had escaped Europe and started a business in Bolivia, made some dough, and then moved to Cleveland. He died in 1998.

The concert endowment now has more than $150,000, manged by the Jewish Federation of Cleveland. For the record, Henry’s son, Andy, wrote to the Federation in 2023 and said he wanted the dough to go to the YCIP, not the WC. Andy died last year.

Shortly after the cops visited Cain Park, I contacted a rump WC person. He said he wanted to revive the concert in a big way. He had a very talented, very well-known performer in mind. Top secret.

“Come on, tell me who you’re thinking of. I’m a musician,” I said. “Come on.”

“Bette Midler.”

What? “How do you get to Bette Midler?” I said.

“Somebody knows her. She was in Workmen’s Circle.”

Does Midler she still perform? Does she still breathe? Does she know any Yiddish? Would she work for less than rock-star gelt?

[Midler grew up in Hawaii, where which never had a Workmen’s Circle branch.]

I called the Cain Park general manager and said, “We’re not able to attract a national act because the Yiddish Concert in the Park committee [YCIP] doesn’t exist and neither does the Workmen’s Circle.”

This was news to the park manager. He said people occasionally asked him, too, what’s up with the Yiddish concert. (This manager got fired from Cain Park after a year.)

Last year:  The rump WC group produced a show which attracted approximately 75 people. The craziest part of the concert, for me, was when the WC raffled off a Glock gun at intermission.

This year: The Cleveland Jewish News just published a recap of the Aug. 23, 2026, show. Headline:

‘Phenomenal’ annual Yiddish Concert draws over 400 fans.”