Reading an Old Yiddish Family Letter

You have a letter from a great-grandparent, written in Hebrew letters, and you are not sure whether it is Yiddish or Hebrew. If it was written in Eastern Europe, or by an immigrant writing home, it is most likely Yiddish, with Hebrew phrases at the top, at the bottom and scattered through the middle. This page is a guide to reading one: the handwriting, the letters that are easy to mix up, the Hebrew words that are not spelled the way they sound, the abbreviations, the dates, and how letters usually open and close.

You do not need fluent Yiddish to get a lot out of a letter: names, dates, and who is well and who has died usually come in fixed phrases.

Handwriting and print

Most letters are in cursive (Hebrew handwriting), the same family of letter shapes Israelis still write by hand today. It looks very different from the square print in books. Hands vary a lot, and older writers who learned to write in a 19th-century kheyder sometimes used an older, more angular hand.

An alphabet chart of modern cursive is a good start (the alphabet page on my site shows every letter in cursive and lets you trace it; it needs a free account), but the writer's own hand is the real key. Find words you already know (a name, the city, the phrase ברוך השם) and use them to work out how this person forms each letter.

Letters that look alike

In cursive, these are the pairs that cause most mistakes:

• ס and ם. Both are small closed loops. Many hands give ם a little extra stroke, but the surest test is position: ם only comes at the end of a word.
• ו, י and ן. All three are single strokes. י is short and sits high, ו reaches the line, ן goes below the line. Hurried writers make these lengths unreliable.
• ב and כ. Both are curves open to the left. Cursive ב usually has a base stroke that runs along the line; כ does not.
• ה and ח. Both look like a small arch. ה has a gap at the top left; ח is closed.
• וו, ױ and ײ. This is a Yiddish problem. Two strokes side by side can be וו (v), ױ (oy) or ײ (ey, and in a letter often ay as well), and the only difference is whether each stroke is long or short. Sound out each reading and see which gives a word.

In faded or small print (newspapers, printed forms, books), watch for ב/כ, ד/ר, ה/ח/ת and ו/ז/ן.

Spelling: the marks you will not see

Modern textbooks use YIVO spelling, with marks under the alef and on some consonants: אַ (a), אָ (o), פּ (p), פֿ (f). Family letters almost never have them. In a letter, א can be a, o or silent, פ can be p or f, and יי can be ey or ay. Read the word both ways and keep the one that makes sense.

Letters from before about the 1920s often use older spellings modelled on German, called daytshmerish: extra ה and ע added the way German spells. A few that come up all the time:

Letters written in the Soviet Union from the 1920s on may use Soviet spelling, which writes Hebrew-origin words as they sound (עמעס instead of אמת for emes, "truth"). Soviet print also dropped the final letter forms for some decades; people writing by hand often kept them anyway.

Hebrew words in Yiddish spelling

Yiddish is spelled the way it sounds, except for words that come from Hebrew and Aramaic. Those keep their Hebrew spelling, so you cannot sound them out. They are frequent in letters because they cover family, religion and money:

If a word refuses to sound like anything, try reading it as Hebrew.

Family words and place names

The greetings at the end name the whole family, so these come up in almost every letter:

Towns usually carry their Yiddish names, not the ones on a modern map: ווילנע (Vilne, Vilnius), וואַרשע (Varshe, Warsaw), קאָוונע (Kovne, Kaunas), לעמבערג (Lemberg, Lviv), גראָדנע (Grodne, Hrodna). If a place name means nothing to you, JewishGen's Communities Database lists the Yiddish names of most towns. Once you know the town, Which Yiddish did your family speak? tells you how the people who wrote the letter most likely sounded.

Abbreviations

Hebrew abbreviations are marked with " before the last letter, or ' after a shortened word. These are the ones you will meet most:

For genealogy, the small marks after names matter most. נ"י or שי' tells you that person was alive when the letter was written; ז"ל or ע"ה tells you they had died. In a line like מײַן ברודער משה נ"י, the writer is telling you "my brother Moyshe", and also that Moyshe was alive.

Dates

A letter may carry a civil date, a Hebrew date, or both.

Civil dates are often written with digits: דעם 5טן מערץ 1912 (dem finftn merts, the 5th of March 1912). Letters from the Russian Empire before 1918 may use the old Julian calendar, which ran 12 days behind the Western calendar in the 19th century and 13 days behind from 1900. If a date seems off by about two weeks, that is likely why.

Hebrew dates use letters as numbers (gematria):

Add the letters up. Two exceptions: 15 is written ט"ו (9+6) and 16 ט"ז (9+7), because the obvious spellings would spell part of God's name.

The year usually drops the thousands (that is what לפ"ק means). For a year in the 5000s, add 5000 and then convert:

• תרע"ב = ת 400 + ר 200 + ע 70 + ב 2 = 672, so 5672.
• The Jewish year starts in September or October. Add 1240 for a date between January and the Jewish New Year, and 1239 for a date between the New Year and December.
• So י"ב אייר תרע"ב (12 Iyar 5672) is in spring 1912 (it was 29 April 1912), and a date in Tishrei of the same year is in autumn 1911.

For the exact day, type the date as it is written in the letter into the Hebrew date converter on my site.

The Hebrew months, in order from the autumn: תשרי, חשון (also מרחשון), כסלו, טבת, שבט, אדר, ניסן, אייר, סיון, תמוז, אב (also מנחם־אב), אלול. In a leap year there are two Adars, written אדר א' and אדר ב'.

Some writers date by the week's Torah reading instead of the day of the month: יום ב' לסדר נח means "Monday of the week of the reading Noach". You need the year to turn that into a date, and a calendar converter that lists the weekly readings. Days of the week appear as יום א' (Sunday) through יום ו' (Friday), or in Yiddish: זונטיק, מאָנטיק, דינסטיק, מיטוואָך, דאָנערשטיק, פֿרײַטיק, שבת.

How letters open

At the very top: ב"ה, then the place and the date. Then the greeting, often with a Hebrew honorific from a writer who had a religious education:

• לכבוד אבי מורי, "to my honoured father, my teacher", or לכבוד אמי מורתי for a mother.
• In Yiddish: טײַערע און געליבטע מאַמע! (tayere un gelibte mame, dear and beloved mother), טײַערער ברודער! (tayerer bruder, dear brother).

Many letters then open with a fixed formula about health. A typical version, in modern spelling:

ערשטנס קען איך אײַך מעלדן, אַז איך בין, ברוך השם, געזונט. דאָס זעלבע זאָל איך הערן פֿון אײַך.

Ershtns ken ikh aykh meldn, az ikh bin, borekh-hashem, gezunt. Dos zelbe zol ikh hern fun aykh. "First of all I can let you know that I am, thank God, well. May I hear the same from you."

Once you recognise this sentence (it comes in many spellings and small variations), you can skip past it to the news.

How letters close

The end usually has greetings to a list of relatives, a request to write back, and a signature that says how the writer is related to the reader:

Read the greetings slowly: they are often the only place a letter names every member of a household, with נ"י or ז"ל after each name.

A way to work

1. Find the date and place at the top, and the signature at the bottom.
2. Pick out every name, with whatever comes after it (נ"י, ז"ל, ע"ה).
3. Find the health formula and the greetings at the end, and set them aside.
4. What is left is the news. Work through it a line at a time, reading each word aloud.
5. Mark what you cannot read with a question mark and move on. It is often clear a week later, once you know the hand better.

Students and members of my site also have a tool that reads a photo of a page, printed or handwritten, and gives you text to work from. Treat it as a first pass to check against the page, not a final reading.

If you are stuck on a few words, JewishGen's ViewMate lets you post an image and ask volunteers to read it, and members of my site can post it in our community as well. Send a clear photo of the whole page, not just the hard word: the rest of the page is what tells a reader how this person formed their letters.