14 Facts About Mordkhe Schaechter

Itsye Mordkhe Schaechter was a leading Yiddish linguist, writer, and educator who spent a lifetime studying, standardizing and teaching the language.

Mordkhe Schaechter was the third editor of Afn Shvel, a Yiddish magazine.

Mordkhe Schaechter was born Itsye Mordkhe Schaechter in the then-Romanian town of Tshernovits.

Mordkhe Schaechter became fascinated with Yiddish as a student, and he decided to study linguistics at the University of Bucharest.

Mordkhe Schaechter earned his doctorate in Linguistics at the University of Vienna in 1951.

From 1947 to 1951, Mordkhe Schaechter lived in the Arzbergerstrasse Displaced persons camp in Vienna.

When Mordkhe Schaechter came to the United States in 1951, he served in military intelligence in the United States Army during the Korean War.

Mordkhe Schaechter continued his work as a bibliographer and proofreader, and then, from the 1970s until 1986, he was a bibliographer, proofreader, and finally editor of YIVO's Yiddishe Shprakh, a journal devoted to the pronunciation, grammar and vocabulary of Standard Yiddish.

Mordkhe Schaechter founded the Committee for the Implementation of the Standardized Yiddish Orthography in 1958.

Mordkhe Schaechter has taught Yiddish courses at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, Jewish Teacher's Seminary-Herzliah and Yeshiva University and has instructed many distinguished scholars and professors of Yiddish language, literature and Jewish history throughout the world.

Mordkhe Schaechter received the Itzik Manger Prize, the most prestigious Yiddish literary award, in 1994; the Khayim Zhitlowsky Award in 1984; and the Osher Schuchinsky Award from the World Congress for Jewish Culture in 1986.

Mordkhe Schaechter was the founder of the League for Yiddish and served as its executive director from the inception of the organization in 1979 until his retirement in 2004.

Mordkhe Schaechter's nephew Itzik Gottesman is an contributor to The Forward and the online journal In Geveb, and a scholar of Yiddish folklore.

Mordkhe Schaechter died on February 15,2007, after a long illness following a stroke in the summer of 2001.