From Moscow to Montevideo and from across North America, lovers of Yiddish and Jewish culture have begun to arrive in Quebec for the week-long KlezKanada festival.

The event started 10 years ago as the brainchild of Montreal physician Hy Goldman and late Yiddish expert and advocate Sara Rosenfeld, but its reputation has grown beyond the grounds of Camp B'nai Brith in Lantier, where the annual festival is held.

KlezKanada has become so popular that it is now feasible as a self-contained event; the keystone concert by leading musicians that used to be open to the general public is no longer needed to attract attention, and has been replaced with performances by students.

The 55 people who will lecture and lead seminars in Yiddish culture include top performers in the klezmer revival. Few events in the world can boast such distinguished faculty. Musician/teachers include members of klezmer group Brave Old World; singer/musicologist Adrienne Cooper; pianist/arranger Pete Sokolov; saxophonist Hankus Netsky, founder of the Klezmer Conservatory Band; trumpeter Frank London of the Klezmatics; and Zalman Mlotek, a New York-based Yiddish folk and theatre music authority. Canadian scholars include Lethbridge-born Yiddish expert Michael Wex and Eugene Orenstein, a McGill professor of modern Jewish history.

The 450 participants are all expected to arrive at the site, about 90 kilometres north of Montreal, by Wednesday, when the core program begins. (KlezKanada scholarship students - musicians who received grants to attend and study in master classes to improve their techniques and expand their repertoire - began arriving yesterday and start their workshops today.) They include a contingent of young musicians from Russia and Ukraine, part of the small but growing revival in those territories.

Co-founder and director Goldman is proud of this "East meets West" initiative and the fact that over 100 campers are scholarship students.

"This (the scholarship program) is the most important element of KlezKanada," he said in an interview at his home, where a dozen musicians and students were billeted Saturday before the start of the festival. "It should be a fascinating mixture."

Organizers are convinced the ripple effect of this week-long immersion in a cultural hothouse will help ensure continuity and growth for the Yiddish language and culture, which were almost wiped out by Hitler and Stalin.

Some of the teachers, including Montreal musicians Josh (Socalled) Dolgin and pianist/harmonica player Jason Rosenblatt, are former scholarship students. The Russian and Ukrainian scholarship students were selected by violinist/vocalist Michael Alpert of Brave Old World- a key figure in the klezmer renaissance. Alpert will also perform at the festival with Brave Old World.

Moscow singer Tanya Gutyontov, 22, was among the students staying at Goldman's home Saturday. She said Yiddish remains marginal among Russian Jews, who are drawn to Hebrew, and added she is looking forward to the KlezKanada experience.

"The faculty is the best you can get today, and it's extremely exciting to have a chance to meet all those people and be their students."

Guitarist/singer Ivan Zhuk, 27, a full-time blues player, said he regrets his "zeide" - Yiddish for grandfather - died before he began to study the language and play klezmer.

"He was an officer in the (Russian) army and the Jewish theme was just forbidden. When he was alive, we never talked about this - my biggest tragedy.

"It's the strangest thing for me - this rebirth is on a blank page. I am getting my roots back from the other side of the Atlantic!"

St. Petersburg singer Motl Gordon, 18, who teaches Yiddish, said he learned the language "a bit from the books, a bit from the songs, a bit from the bubbe and zeide." He later studied at a secular Jewish school.

Moscow singer/guitarist Anna Smirnitskaya, 27, is looking forward to a session on cantorial music, which would not be possible at home, where synagogue worship and Jewish practices in general were repressed during much of the communist regime, especially the Stalinist period. "Nusach - the system of Jewish prayer modes - is the root of Jewish singing," she said.

That course will be given for the first time at KlezKanada this year, by ethnomusicologist Mark Kligman and musician Jeff Warschauer. It will deal with Hebrew text and include such relatively esoteric subjects as the gestures made during cantorial concerts.

Pianist/composer Evgeny Khazdan, artistic director of the Jewish Community Centre in St. Petersburg, said he is committed to Yiddish and klezmer music because "it's the language of our fathers."

"We come to KlezKanada with our students, they know Yiddish, they sing klezmer at a high level, and they are trying to deepen their understanding of the culture."

Alexander Frankel, executive director of the St. Petersburg centre, said the young musicians will show in their performances that the revival is succeeding. He added the goal is to eventually return Yiddish culture and klezmer music to the eastern European countries where they originated.

The KlezKanada program includes concerts Wednesday and Thursday in which the teachers will perform for the participants in the B'nai Brith Camp auditorium, followed by dancing and late-night cabaret-style shows.

The Sabbath will be brought in by a procession of musicians, singers and campers chanting a Romanian Yiddish melody from the lake to the dining hall for the Sabbath meal and celebration.

Saturday night at 9, the students will take over and showcase what they learned in the week-long workshops.

Later on Saturday night, Goldman said, "the younger people head to the lake and greet the sun as it comes up."

KlezKanada continues until Sunday at Camp B'nai Brith in Lantier. Visit www.klezkanada.com