The founding of the Folksbiene in 1915 had its roots in the coming together of several immigrant amateur drama groups in N.Y. to form "Di Fraye Yiddishe Folksbiene." The same year, the fledgling players joined the Workmen's Circle as Branch #555, a move that determined the character of the company and its longevity.

Most who joined the group worked eight hours a day at jobs and came to do plays afterward. They performed without salary at first, but their members included several experienced artists interested in quality plays. As the Folksbiene developed and professional directors were hired to give guidance to play production, the Folksbiene became semi-professional, as is the case today.

The Folksbiene was widely noted and reviewed by both Jewish, yiddish and metropolitan journalists and was credited with raising the level of Yiddish theatre and the consciousness of its audience because they presented plays of great names like I.L. Peretz, Hirshbein, Leivick, Pinski, M.L. Halpern, Feuchtwanger, Goldfaden, Schneour, J. Gordin, J.J. Singer and I.J. Singer, as well as Europeans like Dostoyevsky, Ibsen, Schnitzler, Gorky, in translation. The list is impressive -- especially with the addition in recent years of American playwrights translated into Yiddish: Dreiser, Odets, Upton Sinclair.

The Folksbiene first performed in various Lower East Side locations, and its home was later in the Forward building on East Broadway. Since 1973-74 the Central Synagogue's community auditorium has been its seasonal base, where it has performed each October through March 9with a break in January) on weekends only. A landmark was reached in 1987 when some far-seeing patrons and Workmen's Circle members formed FRIENDS OF FOLKSBIENE to provide simultaneous English narration to enable those with a lack of Yiddish to attend Folksbiene. The change in the background of its actors now also requires that Yiddish coaching is part of its training. Now, in 1990-91, the search for more plays of "Yiddish connection" continues -- to insure that a new generation will enjoy the should of "mamaloshn," which is still alive in the literature of its dramatists, as well as in the memory of the lives of one's parents and grandparents.