Jerusalem, December 2, 2009 - If you thought Yiddish was something of the past or confined to ultra-Orthodox neighborhoods, think again. An international conference next week at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem shows that Yiddish is in fact blossoming and becoming more widespread.

 

The four-day conference, “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 overseas who will speak in 16 sessions.

 

"Until recently, Yiddish was thought of as a channel for jokes," says Prof. Yechiel Szeintuch, the Joseph and Ida Berman Professor of Yiddish at the Hebrew University and one of the organizers of the conference. "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."

 

"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," Prof. Szeintuch points out. "The Holocaust dealt a severe blow to Yiddish after millions of Yiddish speakers were murdered. But Yiddish didn't die with them." It is estimated that in the world today there are about two to three million Yiddish speakers.

 

"The fate of the language is like the fate of the people," says Prof. Eli Lederhendler, chair of the Avraham Harman Institute of Contemporary Jewry at the Hebrew University and one of the organizers of the conference. "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."

 

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. The conference will conclude with a theatrical performance in Yiddish.