Hugueta Sendacz, caretaker of the Casa do Povo in São Paulo

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The almost 100-year-old director of the Yiddish choir has been keeping this endangered Jewish language alive through song since the creation of the São Paulo art center.

Hugueta Sendacz, 98, saw the founding of the Casa do Povo and has directed the choir for over thirty years. (Yaël Bartana)

Hugueta Sendacz, an elegant and frail figure approaching a hundred years old, enters with small steps, supported by a giant. As she does every week, she is preparing to lead the Yiddish choir, now attended by the neighborhood's largely Korean population, thus keeping alive this endangered language of the ancient shtetls, villages immortalized in Chagall's paintings and Singer's novels. Pearl necklace, impeccable blow-dry, a world emerges at her appearance. Hugueta is one of the pillars of the Casa do Povo, whose foundation stone ceremony she attended. For her, the building materializes above all a "promise," while a document was buried beneath its foundations. And what does this document contain? The hope, she believes, that the Casa do Povo will allow "continuity to this culture carried by all the people murdered by the Shoah" , and bring together, as recommended in 1937 by the Jewish congress held in different cities including Paris, all the Yiddish associations, reading and theater clubs, schools, newspapers, choirs attended by Ashkenazi exiles who had left their meager luggage in Bom Retiro .

Born in 1926 in Lodz, Poland, she arrived in Brazil well before the war in