beersheva, israel | A growing number of young Israelis are joining the revival of a language once nearly extinguished: Yiddish.
For Israel’s founders, Yiddish bore emotional baggage, a reminder of the ghettos they had left behind in Europe.
But for young Israelis in increasing numbers, Yiddish is a point of connection to their Jewish roots.
Meira Goodman, 24, became interested in Yiddish only after her grandmother died three years ago.
Like many of her generation, Good-man’s mother, the child of a Holo-caust survivor, wanted nothing to do with the language of Europe’s destroyed Jewish civilization.
“She swept it under the rug,” Goodman said. “Now our generation is digging it up. We are unburying these hidden treasures.”
In recognition of this steadily growing interest, Ben-Gurion University this spring launched the Center for Yiddish Studies, joining the ranks of Hebrew University, Bar-Ilan University and Tel Aviv University.
At Ben-Gurion, the idea is to create a fellowship of Yiddish scholars already working in the field and reach out to larger audiences through conferences, publications and Yiddish theater performances.
Yiddish language and culture have not always enjoyed popular respect in Israel. Even before the founding of the state, Hebrew was touted as the language of the new, strong Israeli Jew, while Yiddish represented a defeated world.
The dichotomy grew stronger after independence.
Professor Yechiel Szeintuch, who has taught Yiddish at Hebrew University for 40 years, remembers the postwar years when “people would throw bricks at gatherings of Yiddish speakers” and the country’s 300,000 Holocaust survivors refrained from speaking Yiddish in public.
Last December, Szeintuch and three colleagues organized a conference called “A Century of Yiddish,” bringing experts from around the world to discuss the trajectory of the language and its culture over the past 100 years. More than 350 people attended.
Professor David Roskies, a Yiddish scholar from the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, was tapped to head Ben-Gurion’s Yiddish center.
Roskies is upbeat about his mandate to create a safe haven for Yiddish studies in the middle of the Negev Desert. As a 40-year veteran of teaching Yiddish at the university level, Roskies said he was stunned his first week at Ben-Gurion to learn that 90 students had signed up for his elective course on the Yiddish writer Sholem Aleichem.
“There’s something amazing going on in this country, and this is just the tip of the iceberg,” he said. “There is a spiritual awakening in Israel, a return to one’s severed past. Yiddish was pushed aside to make room for Hebrew. This is a third generation not locked into its Oedipal complex.”
Roskies has no illusions about reviving Yiddish as a living language. Despite the 2 million to 3 million Yiddish speakers in the world today, very few outside the Chassidic world or the very elderly speak it as their first language.
The importance of the new Ben-Gurion center, he said, is to provide a boost to the study of Yiddish culture as a whole within the Jewish state and to help Israelis recover a discarded part of their identity.
“I see it as a peoplehood project,” he said. “I can now bring that severed piece of Jewish culture to Israel, where it can flourish.”
Sue Fishkoff was a participant in the American Associates, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev’s Murray Fromson Media Mission to Israel in March.