c. 2007 Religion News Service

TEL AVIV, Israel _ When Sibylle Hamann enrolled in the Yiddish summer program at Tel Aviv University, the 32-year-old graduate student from Germany looked forward to chatting up Israelis on the beach and in coffeehouses.

But since her arrival in this unabashedly secular seaside city, Hamann has had trouble finding anyone under the age of 70 who isn’t ultra-Orthodox who speaks the language.

“I’ve spoken with older people, but when I meet young Israelis, many ask me, `Why are you studying Yiddish? It’s so over.’ I’ve come to realize that a lot of people here reject the language, and that’s been a bit hard for me,” said Hamann, a Christian, during her recent graduation ceremony.

While greater interest in the Holocaust has boosted enrollments in Yiddish-language programs from New York to Warsaw in recent years, Israelis have been slower to embrace the “mama loshen,” or mother tongue, of their country’s Eastern European founders, thinking it old-fashioned and irrelevant.

But that’s begun to change as the first generation of native Israelis _ many now graying baby boomers of Eastern European descent _ grow nostalgic for the language of their parents. The younger generation, meanwhile _ largely secular and disconnected from the vanished world of their grandparents _ feel secure enough in their “Israeli-ness” to recover some of their forgotten heritage.

Sensing the time was right, Tel Aviv University launched a Yiddish summer program two years ago that combines intensive language instruction with cultural studies. This year, the monthlong program attracted more than 100 Israelis, two-thirds of them under the age of 40, and almost two dozen foreigners, making it the largest Yiddish summer program in the world.

“There is a real and growing interest in Yiddish in the world, and we thought it was important to have a program in Tel Aviv, where historically the language was not encouraged,” said Hana Wirth-Nesher, director of the Goldreich Family Institute for Yiddish Language, the program’s co-organizer.

To say that Yiddish _ a spicy mix of Medieval German, Hebrew and Slavic words written in the Hebrew alphabet _ was not encouraged in Tel Aviv, or anywhere else in Israel, is a bit of an understatement.

When Israel was established in 1948, Wirth-Nesher said, “Yiddish was marginalized in order to revive Hebrew as the unifying language of the state. Yiddish was considered the language of the Diaspora, of being a minority in a foreign land. Ideologically, it was a liability.”

While the country’s founders were by and large Yiddish speakers from Holocaust-ravaged communities, the demise of the Yiddish language “started much earlier than the Shoah (Holocaust),” said Avraham Novershtern, director of Beth Shalom-Alechem, an institute devoted to the promotion of Yiddish culture and language, and co-organizer of the Tel Aviv program.

The Jewish intelligentsia in Europe “wanted to leave behind and disconnect from Yiddish because they wanted to be culturally and linguistically assimilated into European society,” Novershtern said. “They frankly despised the language, and at best saw it as the language for jokes.”

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That’s both sad and ironic, Wirth-Nesher said, given the rich literature associated with the 800-year-old language, and that Yiddish-centered society and culture were actually much more sophisticated than “Fiddler on the Roof”-type shtetls, or villages.

“Much of Yiddish literature recorded the movement from the traditional to the modern,” Wirth-Nesher said. “The major cities _ Warsaw, Odessa, Kiev, Vilna _ had centers of Yiddish cultural life with theater, poetry, novels, literary and avant-garde journals. Yiddish literature was being influenced by Russian and German literature. These people were no longer ultra-Orthodox. These were modern people, urbanites, who spoke the Yiddish language.”

Juliette Brungs, a German Jew who is pursuing a degree in German Jewish Identity in Contemporary Germany at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, calls Yiddish literature “brilliant.”

“Yiddish speakers related so much to the artistic and political movements of that period and produced a huge national literature. Knowing Yiddish opens a door to a whole new world,” she said.

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Like a growing number of young Germans, Hamann decided to pursue Yiddish in order to learn more about the Holocaust that first took root in Nazi Germany.

“I began reading about the Shoah as a child,” Hamann said. “When I was about 14, I went to the university library and started to learn about Yiddish. It’s a special language because it’s not a national language. It’s the language of a people, not a place.”

While many of the program’s students said they were drawn to Yiddish, either to conduct research or out of a sense of nostalgia, Smadar Ben-David, a 29-year-old Israeli, never dreamed she would be conversing in the tongue of her maternal grandparents.

A young actress from a “secular Jerusalem family,” Ben-David remembers asking a friend at Hebrew University why anyone would study Yiddish. “The language seemed so distant from me, so useless,” she said.

But when she landed a job with the Tel Aviv-based Yiddishspiel Theater, she and the other young actors were ordered to learn basic Yiddish _ not just for performances, but so they could interact with elderly audience members who never mastered Hebrew.

During her monthlong summer course, she discovered her mother understood Yiddish and her father, whose roots are Middle Eastern, not European, knew a little from his days at an ultra-Orthodox yeshiva. That prompted her to re-examine her identity and her relationship to the past.

“I grew up with a very Israeli, very anti-Diaspora mentality,” Ben-David said. “I was a little repulsed by the old (pre-World War II) Judaism because I thought the Jews who lived then were powerless against anti-Semitism. We’re taught to believe that Israeli Judaism is a rebirth, a righting of past mistakes.”

But like a person who has just found a long-lost piece of a complex puzzle, Ben-David flashed a smile that conveyed both surprise and satisfaction.

“I guess you can say I’ve discovered my connection,” she said.

KRE/PH END CHABIN

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