Ida Kaminska in 1899 Born in Odessa, the daughter of actor couple Esther Rachel Kaminska (1870-1925) and Abraham Isaac Kaminski (1867-1918). Both parents were important figures in the Yiddish theater in Poland and Russia. Ida Kaminskas father had founded at the age of twenty years, a theater, her mother is co-founder of the Yiddish theater. Ida Kaminska grew along with her sister Regina Kaminska and her younger brother Joseph Kaminski (1903-1972) on which should take after a successful career as a composer. From a young age she performed in the footsteps of her mother and held five years ago for the first time a role in a play. Upon entry into adulthood, she had been involved already with several leading roles at the family's Kaminski Theater in Warsaw and in a guest appearance on the Yiddish theater in Vienna, participated in 1917. Having had traveled Ida Kaminska three years long with the theater Soviet Union, she founded after 1933 in Warsaw, its own venue, the Ida Kaminska Theater. In her own theater Kaminska starred in many stage plays, but did indicate also the first female theater director in Poland between the wars, and wrote, translated and adapted plays in the Yiddish language. In 1938 she took over for five years managing the Nowosci Theater in Warsaw.

Ida Kaminskas film work has always had to subordinate their commitment to the theater and it came in the course of her career in only seven films in appearance. Her big screen debut in 1912, they Mirele Efros by Andrzej Marek, in which she appeared alongside her mother and sister. The Russian silent film based on the same well-known play from 1898 by Jacob Gordin (1853-1909), which is also known under the title Jewish Queen Lear. It tells the story of the old Jewish matriarch Mirele who have become alienated from her family. Kaminska was 1921 with her mother, her first husband, Sigmund Turkow and Diana Blumenfeld of the founding members of the Yiddish Art Theater in Warsaw. Three years later, Kaminska acted again at the side of Esther Rachel Kaminska in the romantic drama Tkies khaf (1924), participated in the Sigmund Turkow as an actor and director. The original 81-minute US-US-Polish silent film was later fitted with a sound track in Yiddish. Kaminskas last film before the outbreak of World War II was also the last Yiddish films that emerged in Poland before the war. The drama On A Heym (Polish Title: Bezdomni, American Rental Title: Without a home) by Alexander Marten (1898-1942) is about an Eastern European family, which tried unsuccessfully after the death of his son in America to build a new life.

Success in Film

The systematic Nazi genocide of some two thirds of the Jewish population and jüdischstämmigen Europe escaped Ida Kaminska. After the outbreak of war she had worked for the Jewish State Theater in Lviv, but was under pressure from the Soviet authorities withdrew from the line. In June 1941, she fled to the east and survived the Holocaust in the Soviet Union, where they) in Frunze (now Bishkek in Kyrgyzstan, a Jewish theater built. After the war ended, the actress 1945 (returned according to other sources 1947) returned to Poland to revive the Yiddish theater culture. Kaminska worked for the Jewish Theater in Wroclaw and in other cities and headed for five years starting in 1948, the Jewish Theater in Lodz, where she organized 35 world premieres. She founded the National Jewish Theater in Warsaw, was named after her mother, Esther Rachel Kaminska, and this was in 1955 as artistic director before. The success on the stage set in and Ida Kaminska was on the Yiddish Theater in Warsaw and in France, Britain, Belgium, the Netherlands, East Germany and North and South America. After small roles in the Polish film The Jewish People Live (1947) and Aleksander Ford's Holocaust drama The Border Street (1949) the mid-1960s was followed by the recognition of the international film critics. 1965 Kaminska was required for the female lead in the tragicomedy The shop on Main Street (East Germany Title: The shop on the Corso). Director, the two Czechs Kadár Ján and Elmar Klos, who also co-authored the screenplay and produced the film. The shop on Main Street tells the story of the carpenter, Tono (played by Jozef Kroner), in 1942 in a Slovak town in the wake the Nazi "cleansing policy" as trustee for the business of the Jewish widow Lautman Rosalie is used. Tonos hopes of winning do not come true - the dry goods store is bankrupt, has no inventory and the former owner appears to be the danger in which she floats do not understand, too. Tono pushing the old woman he has grown fond of, to flee from the threat of deportation, thereby indirectly to blame their deaths. The film was praised by international critics and rated as "exciting time penetrating drama of artistic unity,". Similarly, in the favor of critics were the acting performances of the two main characters, which were given in 1965 to the Cannes Film Festival, a special praise of the jury. Beginning in January 1966 celebrating the film's theatrical release in the U.S., where he was accepted as positive, and won the Oscar in the category Best Foreign Language Film. For the part of Rosa Lautmann Ida Kaminska was nominated a year later for the Golden Globe as Best Actress in a Drama and was nominated for the Oscar as Best Actress. Kaminska was the Golden Globe Awards yet (compared to Anouk Aimée, a man and a woman) had a disadvantage, it had to be at the Academy Awards of the U.S. hit American Elizabeth Taylor type, which has for Mike Nichols' debut film Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? received her second Actor Award.

Immigration to Israel

After the great success in the cinema of the American impresario Harold Leventhal (1919-2005), who had been involved in the dissemination of the business on Main Street, Ida Kaminska pulled from Warsaw to New York's Broadway. From October to December 1967 where she appeared with Jacob Gordin play Mirele Efros. From November to December 1967 she was seen in a Broadway revival of Bertolt Brecht's Mother Courage and Her Children. In both plays, she played the lead role and took over the direction in Mirele Efros Kaminska was also responsible for the screenplay adaptation. In 1968 she gave up the post of artistic director at the State Jewish Theater in Warsaw and decided because of the anti-Semitic sentiment in Poland left their home country. On the day of the invasion of troops of the Warsaw Pact in Czechoslovakia Kaminska emigrated with her family and many members of the ensemble of Vienna to Israel, and gave up Polish citizenship. Her last film appearance was followed two years later, again under director Jan Kadar in an angel named Levin (1970), which also signified their debut in the English cinema. In the drama, a variation on Frank Capra's life is not it? (1946), were Zero Mostel and Harry Belafonte her fellow actors. Kaminska but could not with this film or with the following theater productions build on previous successes and lived alternately in the U.S. and Israel. In 1973 she published her memoirs in the U.S. under the title My Life, My Theater, which was only 22 years later be translated into Polish.

Ida Kaminska who was married in a second marriage with the Polish actor Marian Melman (1900-1978) and was from their son Victor Melman, who died in 1980 in New York of heart disease. The actress, who was aufgetraten in 124 rolls, written two plays, 58 more had been translated into Yiddish and in 65 performances directed the film, was buried at Mount Hebron Cemetery in Flushing, New York. 2001 and dedicated her to the New York Yivo Institute for Jewish Research, an exhibition titled "Ida Kaminska (1899-1980): Grande Dame of the Yiddish theater." 2005, their daughter Ruth Kaminska (died b. 1920), emerged from his first marriage with Sigmund Turkow and was also acting as her mother moved into the tray.

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