Toronto Jews celebrate 150th birthday of Canada with Yiddish version of national anthem

After the idea was germinating in Toronto since mid-April, a Yiddish version of “O Canada” has finally been turned into reality, with two separate YouTube versions of the song online now. Canadian actress Deb Filler does her solo version here, with background scenes shot on location in Toronto. Toronto writer Hindy Nosek-Abelson did the masterful translation for Filler’s rendition, and the same translation was used for a second version of the anthem here, this time sung by a chorus of old and young, Jewish and non-Jewish, an elderly Holocaust survivor who rehearsed her lines well, and four Chinese-Canadian Jewish kids in the front row.

The videos have both been well-received and the media response has been terrific, with news articles appearing online in the Canadian Jewish News, The Globe and Mail, The Tablet, Adweek, the San Diego Jewish News, and the Times of Israel news section. More international news articles are expected in the next few weeks as Canada Day approaches on July 1st, and the official 150th birthday celebrations get underway nationwide there.

Page views of the video have been super, too. The Deb Filler video has some 1000 page views, and the ZoomerTV studio version, with a group choir sing-a-long, has over 25,000 hits. Canada will never be the same, and congratuations are certainly in order to all those who set up and organized and filmed and edited — and sang! — in the two videos.