Sara Klompus Stern and Phil Stern

Sara Klompus Stern always loved to sing Yiddish songs. In Washington, DC, where she grew up, she would perform for Holocaust survivors. After moving to south Florida in 2003, she performed for the even larger community of Yiddish speakers and Holocaust survivors there. But one thing was missing: as a non-Yiddish- speaking singer of Yiddish songs, she said, “I wanted to know what I was singing.” 

Sara already knew some Yiddish. In Washington she heard the language being spoken by older Jews, including her father. Growing up, she attended the Hebrew Academy of Greater Washington and later the University of Maryland, where she became a clinical social worker. But to better understand the songs she was singing, she decided to learn more. 

In 2005, Sara traveled to Vilnius, Lithuania, where she participated in the Yiddish Summer Program of the Vilnius Yiddish Institute. She returned the next summer and the summer after that. Those trips led to visits in Belarus—the country her parents were from—and the Baltic states. Over time she paid some eighteen visits to Lithuania, where she participated in the annual remembrance ceremony for the liquidation of the Vilna Ghetto and met with the country’s president. Then she heard about the Yiddish Book Center.   

“It was so stimulating to me,” Sara said in a recent phone conversation. “And then we also found out we really like the town of Amherst.” 

Sara and her husband, Phil Stern, became members of the Center in 2006 and attended many of the Center’s weekend programs throughout the 2010s, which Sara said she found “exhilarating.” In 2018 the couple donated a plaque for the Yiddish Writers Garden, and in 2021 they became members of the Yerushe Society, designating a bequest for the Center in their estate plans. In 2023 they dedicated a story case in the new permanent exhibition, Yiddish: A Global Culture, showcasing two books that had belonged to the Jewish community of Cairo. 

“I’ve always had a close feeling to Yiddishkayt. The Yiddish Book Center preserves that,” Sara said. “So that’s why we do anything we can to help.” 

Phil Stern didn’t grow up with Yiddish. His parents had emigrated to the United States from Germany in 1937, and he grew up in the German-Jewish enclave of Washington Heights, in upper Manhattan. During the Second World War his father served in an American counterintelligence unit in Europe, making use of his knowledge of German, French, and other European languages. 

Inspired by his father’s example, Phil spent many years in public service, serving in the U.S. Army in the late 1960s. After graduating from the New York University School of Law he spent a large part of his career working as a prosecutor specializing in Medicaid fraud. His family’s experience also inspired him to become a supporter of Holocaust commemoration and remembrance; while his immediate family survived the war, most of his parents’ relatives were murdered by the Nazis. 

It wasn’t until 2001, however, after he met Sara that he got involved with Yiddish. 

“I’ve developed a strong feeling for it,” Phil reflected. “It’s a language that has beauty and robustness and a sense of history. It’s a street language, a language that everyday people use to survive and get along.” 

“It’s the past, it’s history, and if you don’t preserve history you don’t learn from it,” Sara added. “I think that’s what the Yiddish Book Center does.”