You don’t have to be Jewish to love Yiddish. It’s the only language in the world that has as many words for “stupid” as Alaskans have for snow — a mitzvah in a city that doesn’t suffer schmos gladly.

Even a Midwesterner can manage a “mazel tov,” but Yiddish doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue. That’s why Broadway’s “Indecent,” about an Eastern European acting troupe, needed an expert. Paula Vogel’s Tony-nominated play-within-a-play touches on many things: art, passion, persecution, lesbianism — and the struggle to speak a language that isn’t your own.

“In my head, I can hear those English words so good,” one character says. “But then when I open my mouth, it’s like the dust of Poland is in my throat.”

Enter Moishe Rosenfeld, whose job it was to make the Yiddish in the show — three songs and some dialogue — sound like the real deal. (Stephen Gabis, Broadway’s veteran dialect coach, handled the play’s other accents.)

“Saying ‘bagel’ isn’t a problem,” says Rosenfeld, 67, the son of Yiddish-speaking parents who fled Poland before the Holocaust. Other words, particularly those with the throaty “ch” of chutzpah, are harder to pronounce correctly, he adds, especially when you’re working from a transliteration.

Happily for Rosenfeld, who’s also an actor — he played a mohel in the 1988 film “Crossing Delancey” — the cast members, gentile and Jewish alike, were eager to learn: “Sometimes actors are more interested in getting the role right, but these people wanted every nuance to be correct!”

For Katrina Lenk, who grew up in the Midwest with a father who came from Germany, the biggest challenge was “just figuring out how this language fits in [my] mouth.”

Granted, she’s no stranger to dialects: She played a Czech in Broadway’s “Once,” a Croatian (TV’s “Elementary”) and an Israeli (“The Band’s Visit”). Still, she was daunted when she realized one-tenth of her dialogue would be in Yiddish. “But Moishe helped with everything,” she says. “The way some words are stressed in sentences, the meter of the language, the rolling of the tongue . . . it helps to see a native speaker in person.”

The language flowed more naturally to Richard Topol, whose grandparents all spoke Yiddish. “There were probably a good two dozen words that were a regular part of our household,” he says. “Like shiksa [non-Jewish woman], my first college girlfriend. And meshuggeneh [crazy]. I was always being called that . . .

“Moishe mostly reminded me that Yiddish was in my bones,” adds Topol, whose résumé includes “Vilna’s Got a Golem” and “A Dybbuk.”

“I always thought Yiddish was kind of a redheaded stepchild language, a pidgin German, But hearing it in this play, it’s filled with a passion and musicality I didn’t know existed.”

Here are Rosenfeld’s tips for sounding like a landsman (native Yiddish speaker):

chutzpah (the nerve!): Make the “ch” sound in the throat, “as though you are about to expectorate.” The accent’s on the first syllable.

chazzerei (garbage): Same “ch” sound as in chutzpah. This time, accentuate the last syllable (“rye”).

mishigas (crazy stuff): “Think of it like Michigan, only with a ‘gas’ at the end.” But don’t pronounce it like “gas”: For the right vowel sound, think of the word “box.”’

tchotchke (trinket): The accent’s on the first syllable; end the word with a “keh” sound, not a “key.”

kvetch (complain): “Don’t say ka-vetch!” It’s one syllable.”