Palestinian Yiddish

'Zionism was a revolution, and revolutions have victims - one of these victims was Yiddish'

New exhibition explores the animosity of the early Zionists toward the Jewish language and the fierce campaign they waged to stamp out its use to be replaced with Hebrew

Excerpt

In the exhibition Palestinian Yiddish: A Look at Yiddish in the Land of Israel Before 1948, which opened this week at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, he is actually exploring for the first time how the most popular language among world Jews in the past disappeared from the Israeli landscape.

Who, in fact, killed it? There was a time when every second Jew in the world spoke Yiddish. While it has commonly been thought that the Nazis were the ones who led to the destruction of the "Jewish language," the new exhibition shows that, in this regard at least, Hitler had accomplices. The Nazis started the work, but ironically, it was the early Israelis, the Zionists, who helped them finish off the language.

One of the central exhibits in this modest yet fascinating exhibition, which will be on display here over the coming fall months, is a black-and-white photo from 1928. The image shows a familiar sight of young people who are wounded and bandaged, seemingly as a result of another pogrom against Jews. However, in this case, the attackers were not antisemites or Palestinian Arabs, but Jews themselves. The young people in the photo were beaten in broad daylight on the streets of Tel Aviv by other Zionists because they dared to speak Yiddish publicly.

Source:

https://www.ynetnews.com/article/hk4w9snkp