Mother Tongue

Along with this intimidation, there emerged a movement to preserve the old language. The Association of Yiddish Writers and Journalists was founded in 1928; it has been housed in Tel Aviv’s Beit Leivik since 1970 and has printed more than 100 books. The current chairman, Daniel Galay, said he notices a recent change in the status of Yiddish, which he also grew up speaking in Argentina. More and more students are signing up for language courses, including about 20 this year. Twenty years ago, Galay said, “the opposition to Yiddish was still very strong. There were pro-Yiddish waves, in the 1980s, and but it went up and down. Today the situation is different.”

Tel Aviv remains at the center of the Yiddish revival in Israel, as most of the city’s residents trace their roots to Eastern Europe. While Orthodox Jews in Jerusalem also speak Yiddish, they are not connected to the secular literature and courses offered in the coastal city.

Eliezer Ceizler, assistant director of productions and administration at Tel Aviv’s Yiddishpiel Yiddish theater, which was founded in 1987, said the company now runs more than 300 plays a year in theaters and retirement homes around Israel. This month, the theater is performing God, Man, and the Devil, a play about a simple, religious man who wins the lottery. Most of his audience is older, Ceizler said, but he also sees younger Yiddish speakers.

A spokeswoman for the Ministry of Education said that about 500 high-school students will likely take the Yiddish matriculation exam in 2012, up from 400 the year before.

Cahan said he has also developed a lecture for Israeli high-school students preparing to visit the concentration camps of Eastern Europe. “About the destruction they will hear plenty,” he said. “I bring newspapers and books and magazines to their classrooms so they can touch and feel and get a sense of the life that was”—and the language that was spoken there.

No area of culture is off limits. In his Yung YiDish centers in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, Cahan runs Yiddish cabaret nights. He has also hosted events to eat herring and kugel, and he welcomes young actors and artists to rehearse and throw parties in his library. “Yiddish culture connects so many different segments of society,” he said. “Russian immigrants, secular Israelis, tourists from all over the world, the religious, and the very religious—the kaleidoscope of multiplicity in Jewish society today.”

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For all the recent enthusiasm in Israel for Yiddish, however, its biggest champions acknowledge that reviving the language is an ongoing struggle. The generation of people who speak it as a mother tongue is aging. Cahan said the Yiddish classes in Israeli high schools have mostly been disappointing. “You teach a few songs and that’s it,” Cahan said. “There’s still some real interest missing, like why should we teach the kids Yiddish at all.”

Novershtern said that Yiddish’s revival speaks to Tel Aviv’s growing role as Israel’s cosmopolitan heart. “Israel is a more open society, more open to cultural discoveries, and the Yiddish culture blends into this trend,” he said. “Before, the approach was more of a monopoly, or exclusive role of the Hebrew, Zionist culture. And in the last few years there is more openness.”

Galay cautioned against complacency. “There is nothing to promise that today’s revival will continue,” he said. “The interest, the learning, the lectures are all stronger today, but there is nothing that promises it won’t disappear in a year.”

And so, though it is the language of Israel’s founders, today Yiddish competes with the panoply of cultures mixing in Tel Aviv. The Yung YiDish center embodies that tension. It is one of 1,600 enterprises in the bus station, sharing a corridor with a Filipina-Israeli matchmaking agency, a kindergarten for children of migrant workers, and an Israeli artists’ collective. Outside, the nearby Neve Shaanan pedestrian walkway is crowded with Ethiopian and Sudanese restaurants, Asian dry good stores, and Western Union money-transfer storefronts. Cahan said he enjoys the variety. Over the summer, he offered his library to migrant workers’ children who needed a place to read.

“I feel very much at home in Neve Shaanan,” Cahan said. “When I go there I see the Lower East Side of New York in the 1920s. There’s not necessarily Yiddish on the streets, but I feel there’s a natural parallel.”

Daniella Cheslow is a Jerusalem-based journalist.