Event

YIVO Presents 'The Wheel Keeps Turning': Yiddish Song, Humor, and Lore with Stewart Figa

Tuesday, July 11, 2023
3:00 pm - 5:00 pm
Petty Auditorium

Stewart Figa, accompanied on keyboard by Ilya Levinson, weaves Yiddish songs and stories for a distinctive tribute to the ongoing legacy of Yiddishkayt.

Figa has served as cantor at West Suburban Temple Har Zion in River Forest, Illinois, since 1998 and has been a cantor in the Chicago area since 1990. 

In the 1980s Stewart Figa performed several seasons in Yiddish theater productions in New York City, where he worked with and befriended some of the legendary greats of the prewar Yiddish Theatre and Yiddish Film scenes. In 2015, Figa received a Grammy nomination for his work as a vocalist with the New Budapest Orpheum Society (NBOS) on their album As Dreams Fall Apart. With the NBOS he has also delighted audiences on tour in several cities in England and throughout Germany, in Vienna, and in New York City. He has also sung at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC, and at the Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center, where an historic picture of his father, Leon Figa, a Partisan resistance fighter in the forests of Belarus, is on permanent display.

Tickets will be distributed 30 minutes before the performance begins. Limited to 196 people.

This event is in collaboration with Chicago YIVO Society, a local affiliate of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research.