Raysh Weiss

On another occasion, while praying in a Berlin synagogue on Yom Kippur, Weiss says that many people there had little knowledge of the prayer service. “I’m realizing more and more how vital to Jewish life Jewish education is…Rituals become script without a legacy, tradition and history.”

Living in Germany has been full of surprises, says Weiss. “Who would have guessed that the first shul I would join as an adult would be in Kiel, Germany?” she wrote in an email to Rabbi Matanky.

Weiss, who is researching ethnomusicology--the study of minority music—says that her experience and education at Ida Crown has been instrumental to her current work. She is researching what she calls a “renaissance of klezmer,” the center of which is in Germany. Though she played saxophone and klezmer since she was young, Weiss says that music is a means for expressing her spirituality. “Ida Crown offers students a strong Jewish identity, and graduates find their own expression for that in some way. For me, that expression is in music, among other things.”

Weiss also says, “To this day, the way I analyze text is immediately influenced by how I learned to approach Jewish texts.”

As an undergraduate student at Northwestern University, Weiss directed and co-produced a film, The King’s Daughter, some scenes of which were shot at the Academy. Now, says Weiss, the film has been honored at festivals in New York and Montreal. “Although our filming schedule was far from ideal, I was proud to have directed/co-produced the NU film program’s first film to have been shot only on weekdays and Sundays. And half of it is in Yiddish!”

In 2007, Weiss headed to the University of Minnesota to work on a doctorate in comparative literature. She says, “The teachings of Mrs. Charlotte Rosenwald, (former chair of the Academy’s English department) stay with me on a day-to-day basis. I only wish I could tell her I chose to pursue a doctorate in comparative literature.”

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