“AF PURIM DARF MEN LAKHN!” – “ON PURIM YOU GOTTA LAUGH!” with Stewart Figa

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Cantor, actor, and Yiddish performer Stewart Figa returns to Chicago YIVO to present a program of humorous Yiddish songs, jokes and stories keeping with the fun of the holiday of Purim. Figa pays tribute to such Jewish comedy legends Menashe Skulnik, Aaron Lebedeff, Mickey Katz, Bruce Adler, Allen Sherman and others. Accompanied on piano by Ilya Levinson, much of his material will be in mamaloshen with translation provided.

STEWART 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. An established and in-demand performer of Yiddish and Jewish music, his programs for the annual Chicago YIVO Society Summer Festival have been cheered by capacity audiences.

In the 1980s Stewart Figa performed several seasons in Yiddish theater productions in New York City where he had the rare privilege of working with and befriending some of the legendary greats of the pre-war Yiddish Theatre and Yiddish Film scenes.

In 2015, Mr. Figa received a Grammy nomination for his work as a vocalist with the New Budapest Orpheum Society on their CD “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 New York City. Most meaningful for him, Stewart has sung at United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., 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.