On June 2 - 5, 2016 WJC held a seminar "Pearls of Yiddish Culture" for 30 teachers who arrived in Odessa from all parts of Ukraine. Tetyana Batanova, the Yiddish lecturer at Kiev-Mohilyanska Academy, presented two lectures.

The first one, "The remote and close world of Sholem-Aleychem on the example of Kasrilovka: the shtetl, Its people, places, traditions and events", focused on the stories of the great Yiddish writer Sholem-Aleychem, his depiction and attitude to the life of Jews in the pale of settlement of the former Russian Empire and especially the image of joyful people in Kasrilovka. This is an invented name of a Jewish shtetl whose prototype may be Berdichev or any other town in the region where Jewish population constituted a majority and lived its own traditional life.

The second lecture, ""Lebn vi Got in Odes / To Live as the God in Odessa, or History of Yiddish and Jews in Odessa in the 19th – beginning of the 20th centuries" covered not only the history of Jews in that city and its prominent dwellers such as Mendele Moykher Sforim, Sholem-Aleichem, Haim Nachman Bialik, Iza Kremer, Ze'ev Zhabotinsky, but also Yiddish folk idioms connected with Odessa and its life style.

Both lectures were received very warmly. The listeners were encouraged to ask questions or propose some interpretations to the key points of the lectures, so the lectures were interactive with communicative contact with the audience. Participants approached Tetyana during the breaks and after the lectures, asked questions about Yiddish culture in general and opportunities to learn the language in particular. During both lectures and breaks, the lexturer encouraged students to keep in touch with the WJC Yiddish Center.