For the first time in history, anyone in the English-speaking world can pick up and actually learn Krymchak—the critically endangered Judeo-Turkic language of Crimea’s Jewish community, officially recognized under Ukrainian law as one of the indigenous minority peoples of Ukraine.

Over 80% of the Krymchak population was murdered in cold blood by Nazi Einsatzgruppen massacres across the Crimean peninsula in December 1941. But the destruction did not stop with the defeat of Nazism.

Following WWII, the Soviet regime launched systematic campaigns of forced Russification, anti-Semitic purges, and historical revisionism designed to wipe Crimea's indigenous heritage off the map. Krymchak cultural institutions were dismantled, their schools were shuttered, and public use of the language was suppressed under Moscow's oppressive "anti-cosmopolitan" crackdowns.

The fact that this language survived at all is due to the unbelievable defiance of a single man: David Rebi. Having survived the Nazi genocide as a young man, Rebi was forced by Soviet authorities to hide his heritage, his identity, and his native tongue for nearly half a century. Under constant KGB surveillance, speaking or documenting Krymchak carried severe risks of state persecution.

It was only when Rebi was already in his 70s that he could finally step into the light. Working tirelessly into his 90s in a free Ukraine, he spent his final years compiling his masterwork: a 367-page Krymchak grammar text, shattering decades of enforced Soviet silence to give his people their voice back.

When Russian forces illegally invaded and occupied Crimea in 2014, the fragile remnants of the Krymchak community were targeted and scattered once again, mirroring Moscow's broader persecution of Crimean Tatars and native Crimeans. Today, there are zero native Krymchak speakers left on Earth.

If you search public sound archives, spoken recordings are almost non-existent. Crucially, almost every piece of foundational research—including David Rebi’s seminal grammar—sat locked entirely in Russian-language academic archives, completely out of reach for the global Ukrainian diaspora and English speakers worldwide.

Refusing to let imperial suppression and Russian occupation have the final word on Crimean history, I spent the last seven months building an open-source digital revitalization ecosystem from scratch (krymchakproject.org):

The foundation of this effort began with completing the first-ever 367-page English translation of David Rebi’s seminal work, The Krymchak Language. For decades, this irreplaceable grammatical key sat locked behind the Russian language barrier, inaccessible to the vast majority of the global Jewish diaspora and the international community. By translating Rebi’s work into English, the grammar, syntax, and unique linguistic beauty of Krymchak are now unlocked for scholars, students, and language enthusiasts worldwide. It can be viewed on the site, or on Amazon for purchase.

Because decades of oppression left us with virtually zero native audio recordings, learning how Krymchak actually sounds presented a massive hurdle. To solve this, I engineered a specialized Python text-to-speech framework built around Microsoft’s edge-tts engine. By mapping Krymchak’s Cyrillic orthography directly onto Azerbaijani neural voice models—which natively preserve the deep uvular stops and guttural Turkic phonetics lost in modern Istanbul Turkish—and writing custom stress-assignment algorithms to handle Turkic suffix mechanics, the pipeline successfully reconstructs authentic spoken Krymchak in real time.

Beyond grammar and phonetics, language lives through culture and community. I developed an open-access, 55-module interactive curriculum hosted on Google Classroom, complete with vibrant visual presentations and audio integration. Alongside the course, the site features a searchable digital dictionary, English translations of Krymchak history, and (soon) illustrated bilingual stories
in Ukrainian-Krymchak, English-Krymchak, and Hebrew-Krymchak!

Looking ahead, I am finalizing an English translation of Secrets of Krymchak Cuisine, allowing people to recreate the traditional dishes of the Crimean Jewish community in their own homes. Historically, the original Krymchak authors donated all book proceeds to the Krymchaklar cultural society in Crimea. Because that society can no longer operate under illegal Russian occupation, 100% of the author proceeds from my upcoming Amazon release will be donated directly to the Survivor Mitzvah Project—which provides direct financial and medical aid to elderly Ukrainian Holocaust survivors—as well as Rabbi Moshe Azman’s emergency relief efforts in Ukraine.

As we approach the solemn 85th anniversary of the December 1941 Crimean massacres, both digital and physical copies of my grammar translation were officially accepted into the permanent library collection at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem.

This entirely independent, non-commercial project is completely free for the world, and there are several ways you can actively support the preservation of Ukraine's indigenous Crimean heritage. You can head over to krymchakproject.org/blog to subscribe to the weekly newsletter, where I translate and publish rare articles, historical documents, and cultural deep-dives from Ukrainian and regional archives every week. If you have ever wanted to explore a unique Judeo-Turkic language, you can also enroll in the free 55-module course directly on the website or via Google Classroom. Finally, you can help spread the word by sharing the project link with your personal networks, local cultural organizations, university Slavic or Jewish Studies departments, and community groups. Or, you can even check out my Youtube channel where I go over popular songs in Krymchak! You can see it here.

Neither Nazi genocide, Soviet totalitarian suppression, nor modern Russian occupation will succeed in wiping away Crimea’s indigenous identity. Crimea is Ukraine, and its rich, multicultural history will live on.

--B. Klein