Program Cover courtesy: National Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene
The communal reading of NIGHT by Elie Wiesel was an event we conceived of and produced for the NYTF and the Museum, only six months after Wiesel’s passing on July 2, 2016. The participants all read a page or a page and a half from Elie Wiesel’s celebrated book NIGHT, and the participants reads like a “who’s who” in the worlds of show business, literature and the performing arts, politicians, religious representatives, as well as survivors. Some of the people who participated were Sheldon Harnick, Daryl Roth, David Hyde Pierce, Joel Grey, Ron Rivkin, Itzhak Perlman, Rabbi Yitz and Blu Greenberg, Ambassador Francois Delattre (Permanent Representative of France to the United Nations), Ambassador Katalin Bogyay (Permanent Representative of Hungary to the United Nations), Ambassador Dani Dayan (Consul General of Israel in New York), Scott Singer, Sheila Nevins, Geraldo Rivera, Dr Ruth Westheimer, Bruce Ratner, Bill T Jones, Daniel and Nina Liebeskind and others.
Zalmen Mlotek (Yiddish: זלמן נתן מלאטעק), born June 15, 1951 in the Bronx, NY), is an American conductor, pianist, musical arranger, accompanist, composer, and the Artistic Director of the National Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene (NYTF), the longest continuous running Yiddish theatre in the world. He is an internationally recognized authority on Yiddish folk and theater music and a leading figure in the Jewish theatre and concert worlds. As the Artistic Director of the NYTF for the past twenty years, Mlotek helped revive Yiddish classics, instituted bi-lingual simultaneous English and Russian supertitles at all performances and brought leading creative artists of television, theatre and film, such as Itzhak Perlman, Mandy Patinkin, Sheldon Harnick, Theo Bikel, Ron Rifkin, Mandy Patinkin and Joel Grey, to the Yiddish stage. His vision has propelled classics including NYTF productions of the world premiere of Isaac Bashevis Singer’s Yentl in Yiddish (1998), Di Yam Gazlonim (The Yiddish Pirates of Penzance, 2006) and the 1923 Rumshinky operetta, The Golden Bride (2016), which was nominated for a Drama Desk Award and listed as a New York Times Critics Pick. During his tenure at the NYTF, the theatre company has been nominated for over ten Drama Desk Awards, four Lucille Lortel Awards, and has been nominated for three Tony Awards. In 2015, he was listed as one of the Forward 50 by The Forward, which features American Jews who have had a profound impact on the American Jewish community. (Wikipedia)
