- Daughter of Yiddish stage actress Ester Rachel Kaminska (born Halpern)and stage actor, director and producer Abraham Izaak Kaminski, younger sister of Regina Kaminska. Her mother was known as the Jewish Eleanora Duse, and her father founded the Yiddish Theater in Moscow.
- Began her stage career at age five an later played leading roles on stage. Appeared in a handful of films and is better now for her support of the Jewish people. She later moved to Israel.
- In 1941 Kaminska was evacuated to Central Asia, then brought to Moscow.
- After her divorce from Zygmunt Turkow, Kaminska alone organized a succession of dramatic companies that toured Poland.
- Even as her audiences in Poland shrank and the remaining audiences increasingly availed themselves of translations through headphones attached to their seats, Ida Kaminska toured the world. Her company performed in Western Europe, Israel, Australia, and later in North and South America. I.
- In 1968, Kaminska and her company were swept up in the Polish government-organized "anti-Zionist" campaign. Most of the company emigrated;Kaminska and her family left Poland forever in July 1968, first to Israel and eventually later settled in New York.
- In 1973, she released her autobiography, titled My Life, My Theater.
- In 1957, she toured Israel for the first time, where she performed for Prime Minister.
- In 1938 she installed a company for one season in the large Teatr Nowosci in Warsaw. There she directed and played the title role in Max Bauman's Glikl fun Hameln (Glückel of Hameln), which, set in seventeenth-century Germany, climaxes with the heroine's plea for justice before the mayor of Hamburg. Staged on the eve of the German invasion of Poland, the play was a popular success.
- At 16 she began to direct as well.
- She performed first in operettas and then in dramatic theater.
- She starred in the 1965 film The Shop on Main Street, which won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film. For her performance, she received special mention at the Cannes Film Festival, as well as nominations for the Golden Globe Award and the Academy Award for Best Actress.
- In 2014, the Jewish Theatre in Warsaw held a special exhibition in her honor. The exhibit featured costumes worn by Kaminska, as well as photographs and memorabilia from her esteemed career.
- In 1967, she directed herself in the lead role of Mother Courage and Her Children on Broadway.
- One of her earliest roles was that of Mirele Efros's grandson, at whose bar mitzvah the family is finally reconciled.
- In her own roles, Kaminska portrayed a succession of wise and heroic women. One of the most acclaimed was her Mother Courage, who wheels and deals and pulls her cart ever onward as the war she profits from claims all her children. Brecht intended his "epic theater" to create a didactic distance between audience and stage, but in this respect Kaminska subverted Brecht. Her Mother Courage was less a symbol than a solitary sorrowing woman.
- In 1965, with the release of the Czech film Obchod na Korze (The Shop on Main Street), in which she played a stubborn Jewish shopkeeper caught up in the Holocaust, Ida Kaminska became an international celebrity. The film won an Academy Award in 1965 and Kaminska was nominated for Best Actress the following year.
- Ida Kaminska was born in the Theatrical Hotel in Odessa during one of her parents' numerous tours.
- At the end of 1946 she returned from Russia to Poland and immediately began to work in reestablished Yiddish theaters in Lódz and Wroclaw. In 1950 these theaters were nationalized and named the Ester-Rokhl State Yiddish Theater, with Ida Kaminska as the director.
- She was interred in the Yiddish theater section of the Mount Hebron Cemetery in Flushing, New York.
- One of a handful of female stage directors in interwar Poland, she translated, staged, and performed in scores of plays by authors including Eliza Orzeszkowa, Romain Rolland, Gogol, and O'Neill as well as in Yiddish classics.
- In her long career Kaminska produced more than 70 plays, and performed in more than 150 productions. She also wrote two plays of her own and translated many works in Yiddish.
- In 1918, she married the actor and director Zygmunt Turkow, and they founded in 1922 their own company committed to dramatic theater. From 1924 this was known as the VYKT (Varshever Yidisher Kunst-theater).
- When Ida Kaminska arrived in New York she hoped to create a Yiddish company that would serve both America and Israel. Unfortunally nothing came of these plans and after a flurry of performances, she slipped into unwilling inactivity punctuated by occasional work.
- She her husband , daughter Ruth and family members escaped from Warsaw to Russian-occupied Lwów. There Soviet authorities funded a Yiddish theater that Kaminska directed.
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