There's a proverb in Yiddish: A heavy heart has much to say.
– Elka Elchis
Discover the sounds of Yiddish
The Corpus of Spoken Yiddish in Europe (CSYE) is an Open Access digital language archive sourced from hundreds of video-recorded interviews with survivors of the Holocaust. The materials contained in the corpus are a testament to the social and linguistic diversity of Yiddish-speaking Jewish society and an invaluable resource for research, language instruction and revitalization, and Holocaust education and commemoration.
The CSYE is a multi-year project, developed with the support of grants and research fellowships. Upon its completion, the corpus will be the most extensive source of conversational Yiddish ever compiled.
There's a proverb in Yiddish: A heavy heart has much to say.
– Elka Elchis
Yiddish matters to me as a language in its own right, because my family died with Yiddish on their lips.
– Fania Fainer
Explore our resources
The CSYE consists of testimony interviews from the USC Shoah Foundation and time-aligned transcripts, both in transliteration and in the Yiddish alphabet. These materials are available free of charge to researchers, students and teachers, and the broader public, subject to our Terms of Use. Visitors to the corpus website can explore these materials using interactive maps, search tools, and through a curated collection of original articles (CSYE Glosses) containing pedagogical guides and other short essays.
For more details, see our User Guide.
Yiddish matters to me as a language in its own right, because my family died with Yiddish on their lips.
– Fania Fainer