Freilikh-makher – Yiddish

A Yiddish term for entertainer, or more charmingly, ‘merry-maker’, echoing the German fröhlich-macher.

In his 1929 book on the history of Polish Jewry Emanuel Ringelblum devoted several paragraphs to a description of groups of late eighteenth century Jewish jesters, musicians, and other “merry-makers” (freilikh-makhers) who wandered from town to town.

See also the bibliographic entry for Goldberg’s paper, quoted above.

Source: Goldberg, Amos, ‘A Fool or a Prophet: Rubinstein the Warsaw Ghetto Jester’, The 2019 J. B. and Maurice C. Shapiro Annual Lecture at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 13 March 2019, p. 2-3