[lg policy] Israel: Conference to present Yiddish as a 'blossoming' language

[Harold Schiffman]

Conference to present Yiddish as a 'blossoming' language
By JAMIE ROMM



  [image: OY, MAMALOSHEN... After...]




A four-day seminar this week at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem hopes to
prove that there is more to Yiddish than the "oy veys" and "kvelling," of
your grandparents' generation.


OY, MAMALOSHEN... After nearly a quarter century, the country's largest high
school Yiddish program is 'kaput.'

SLIDESHOW: Israel & Region  |  World The conference, which will take place
Monday through Thursday at the Wise Auditorium at the Edmond J. Safra
Campus, plans to show that Yiddish is blossoming and its use is becoming
more widespread. According to Yechiel Szeintuch, professor of Yiddish at the
university and one of the conference organizers, the seminar hopes to debunk
widespread beliefs about the language. "Until recently, Yiddish was thought
of as a channel for jokes," Szeintuch said. "But in the last decade, we have
witnessed a renewed interest in Yiddish language and culture among young
people and adults who are not ultra-Orthodox, and the demand for courses
teaching the language has increased."

The four-day conference, entitled "A Century of Yiddish: 1908-2008," which
is being coordinated by the Institute of Advanced Studies of the Hebrew
University and the Israel Science Foundation, will bring together 40 experts
from Israel and around the world for 16 sessions. Sessions at the conference
include: Yiddish on the Electronic Jewish Street; The Fate of Yiddish in the
Soviet Union; Zionist Language Policy and Yiddish; Yiddish in Travel
Literature: Between Poland and South America; Teaching Yiddish to Israeli
Defense Force Veterans; and Elie Wiesel's Yiddish.


Szeintuch said that Yiddish came into wide use over a century ago but didn't
fade away after World War II, as some believe. "Yiddish was at its height
about a hundred years ago. Between the two world wars, 1,700 national and
local Yiddish newspapers were published in Poland alone," Szeintuch
said.  "The Holocaust dealt a severe blow to Yiddish after millions of
Yiddish speakers were murdered. But Yiddish didn't die with them." He
estimated that in the world today there are some two to three million
Yiddish speakers.

Eli Lederhendler, chair of the Avraham Harman Institute of Contemporary
Jewry at the Hebrew University and one of the organizers of the conference,
said that there is a future for the Yiddish language and hopes the
conference conveys that message. "The fate of the language is like the fate
of the people," Lederhendler said. "One of the ways to follow the course of
the language is to follow demographic, linguistic and cultural changes of
the Jewish people, and this is the aim of this conference." The conference
is open to the public and will be conducted in Hebrew, English and Yiddish.


http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1259831465580&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull
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