JEWISH GENEALOGICAL SOCIETY OF TORONTO

The Shtetl: The Real, The Fictitious and the Nostalgic

Speaker: Dr. Joseph Gilbert

Wednesday, 15 March at 7:30 p.m. EST

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The word “shtetl” means several things, among them: a small town in Eastern Europe populated mainly by Jews or metaphorically an old Yiddish way of life. In this talk we will explore how shtetls came about, what was “shtetl life,” and how it changed over the course of the nineteenth century.

Language, commerce, and religion were fundamental to the people who lived in the shtetl, but these changed, pushed by forces from inside and from outside. Shtetl life has disappeared.

Dr. Joseph Gilbert is a retired physician, researcher, research administrator, and hospital executive. A lifelong fan of classical music, Dr. Gilbert has in recent years concentrated on studying the interface of Judaism and Jewish subjects within opera, music, and history. He has lectured on these subjects in Toronto, Montreal, Ottawa, Florida, and London, Ontario. Some of his lecture topics include The Music and Legacy of Felix Mendelssohn, French Opera and Anti-Semitism, The Dybbuk and The Golem, The Portrayal of Jews in Opera, Jewish Folk Tales that Have Become Operas, Entartete Musik - Degenerate Music, Salamone Rossi and Jewish Music in the Italian Renaissance, The Shtetl: The Real, the Fictitious, and the Nostalgic, and The Shtetland Hasidism, (in several series).

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