Remembering the Yiddish literature great, Sholem Aleichem

It’s doubtful that anyone outside the world of Yiddish literature has ever heard of Solomon Naumovich Rabinovich, but even non-Jews have heard of Sholem Aleichem, which was Rabinovich’s pen name. The commissioning of the statue and its placement was the brainchild of Dr. Mark Zilberquit: a Moscow-based author publisher and founder of the Yiddish Heritage Preservation Foundation, whose goal is to preserve Yiddish language and culture which was the common denominator of the majority of European Jews before the Holocaust. This foundation was among the donors to the project, as was the Blavatnik family whose foundation engages in international philanthropy – mostly in education and culture – and is well known for its sterling support of London’s Tate Gallery. In New York, it also founded the Blavatnik Archives which are dedicated to the study of 20th-century Jewish and world history with special emphasis on the World Wars I and II and Soviet Russia.