Welcome to Caravan Orchestra & Choir 2026!
With the first edition in 2017 and only one gap year due to Corona in 2020, Caravan is now in its 9th year in bringing together young musicians from different traditions and backgrounds with the common goal of exploring East European Jewish and East Mediterranean and Middle Eastern music traditions. Every year, we build a learning community that relies on curiosity, transcultural experience and a general understanding of friendship and partnership. We invite you to become a member of this unique community. All instrumentalists and singers who live in Germany or Israel (independently of your nationality) are invited to apply!
What to expect from your participation in Caravan? In the summer of 2026, we will continue to explore the connection between Yiddish (East-European Jewish) music and musics that derive from the Ottoman heritage of Greece and Turkey. We have found a wonderful shared repertoire (instrumental melodies, songs, dances) of these traditions and will study their common heritage and their own musical live in different cultures in Europe and Asia minor. If you’re curious to see what that looks like on stage, take a look at our concert clips here.
We will learn a lot of music by ear and improvisation will play a major role in our music making. The faculty (see below) consists of renowned practitioners of Yiddish, Turkish, Greek and Ottoman traditions with decades of teaching expertise in projects like Caravan.
The 2026 Caravan Orchestra and Choir will take place from July 25 in the morning to August 17 in the afternoon (beginning date is approximate, end date is definite; stay tuned for updates). We will spend the first week of our time together at a beautiful Music Academy in Germany (exact place to be confirmed soon) and the second part in Weimar during Yiddish Summer Weimar.
Apply by clicking HERE.
The application process is open until April 15.
While we will sing in many languages, English will be the main language of communication.
We will ask a 100 EUR fee for participation in Caravan Orchestra & Choir. In return, we will cover your travels, tuition with great teachers, most of your meals, and the accommodation for all Israeli participants. For the German participants who do not live in Weimar, we can help find accommodation, ideally as a guest with other participants in Weimar. Due to the funding, there is an age limit of 30 years, so you should be born after August 16th, 1996. However, if you are older than that, please apply anyway and we’ll try to make your participation possible somehow.
For participants living in Weimar: please get in touch if you can offer accomodation for fellow band members from Haifa or Germany. In these cases, we can waive the participation fee for you.
If you have any questions, please get in touch with project manager or Anna Grünhardt (anna.gruenhardt@othermusicacademy.eu). For urgent matters (only!) please contact project director Andreas on WhatsApp/Telegram: +49 177 6017686
We’ve found three amazing musical directors to share their knowledge with Caravan. Here is the faculty for Caravan Orchestra & Choir 2026 (Full details will be published soon):
Photo: Shendl Copitman
Polina Shepherd was born in a Russian Jewish family in Novosibirsk. Whilst living in Tatarstan, Central Russia in the 1980-1990s, she was one of the visible young Jewish activists during her student years, just as the Jews of Soviet Union began to turn their focus back to their roots. Helping her father to bring a Jewish community together in an industrial town Naberezhnye Chelny, recording the remaining memories of Yiddish songs from locals, performing, forming her own band, she learnt about being Jewish in Russia. At the age of 17, she joined Russia′s first professional klezmer band after Perestroika, Simcha, with whom she toured the Former Soviet Union, at the same time studying her musical heritage further.
By her early 20s she was a Yiddish choir leader, composer, bandleader, singer, an international touring musician, educator and festival organiser. Having witnessed the phoenix of Jewish culture rising from the ashes of communism and helping it is flourish and develop throughout the FSU, she is now part of the international world of Ashkenazi culture.
Now living in the UK, she continues to be an international culture makher, to open this culture and to connect it to the rest of the global village. She taught the Caravan Choir in 2021 and has been the artistic director for Caravan Orchestra & Choir since 2022.