yiddish theatre, yiddish newspapers and other yiddish cultural stuff was illegal in israel for years and actively discouraged and attempted to make obsolete, yiddish lectures were disrupted and the israeli state translated the testimonies of holocaust survivors to hebrew rather than keep them in yiddish (the language spoken by most jewish holocaust survivors) but tell me more about how israel and zionism are saving jews and making jewish cultural identity stronger rather than destroying and devaluing jewish diasporic culture 🤔
reminder that Jews from North Africa and West Asia also often spoke dialects of Judeo-Arabic as their first language and this is still heavily repressed by the Israeli state in an effort to distance Arab Jews from Palestinians and other non-Jewish Arabs
Moreover, only after the Yom Kippur war Israel allowed Holocaust survivors to openly speak about their experiences. Between 48’ and the 70’s, there was no support nor sympathy for Holocaust survivors. They were seen as weak, a “perfect example” for what a Jew or zionist shouldn’t be. The Holocaust survivors were just used as a reason to spread and justify the zionist ideology
also around 1/3 of holocaust survivors in israel live in poverty and israelis very vocally talk about how much they look down on holocaust survivors and diaspora jews
It’s 1945, three years before the establishment of the state of Israel and at the very end of the Holocaust.
Vilna Ghetto fighter Rozka Korczak-Marla comes to Tel Aviv, addressing the assembled in Yiddish about the extermination of Eastern European Jews.
David Ben-Gurion, who would soon become Israel’s first Prime Minister, then spoke to the crowd in Hebrew. “A comrade has just now spoken here in a grating, foreign language,” he declared.
Ben-Gurion’s shocking remark was part of a pattern of denigration expressed by advocates of Modern Hebrew within the Zionist movement during the pre-state years. It aimed to delegitimize the Yiddish language using violence, intimidation and propaganda.
i first read about this in academic papers that i dont have access to right now, but here are some more articles about it
In his superb study of Yiddish, Words on Fire, Professor Dovid Katz tells of an incident that troubles me. The Israeli government hosted a reception in the early years of the Jewish state for Rozka Korczak, a survivor of the Vilna Ghetto who organized partisan units in the forests to fight the Germans. Korczak, according to Katz’s account, was one of the first partisans in the nascent Jewish state to speak about her experiences and her heroism in the Shoah.At the reception, she told her story in Yiddish.David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s founding father, became visibly upset as the survivor told her tale. Eventually and abruptly, he stormed out of the reception, claiming – in Hebrew – “the language grates on my ears.”Yiddish was Ben-Gurion’s first language, as it was for every Israeli leader at that reception. Zionists had even published exhortations in Yiddish to convince young Jews in Eastern Europe to join the movement and make aliya. […] Yiddish was not a “jargon” or a “dialect” – it was a powerhouse that could have undermined the Zionist project.
destroying the strength of jewish diaspora culture was necessary to creating the “jewish state”
NEW YORK – The nearly 100-year-old photo features half a dozen young Jewish men all bandaged up. They appear to be victims of a pogrom.
Except, as the caption reveals, this photo was not taken in Eastern Europe. Nor were the attackers non-Jews.
In fact, these young men were beaten up in Tel Aviv by fellow Jews. Their crime? Speaking Yiddish in public.
Published in a Jewish weekly in Warsaw, this black-and-white photo, taken in 1928, is part of an exhibit that opened this week at New York’s YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, dedicated to “Palestinian Yiddish.” That is, Yiddish spoken before 1948 in the territory that encompasses the modern State of Israel.
A major focus of the exhibit is the outright hostility and disdain shown by many of the early Jewish settlers toward the Yiddish language. In creating a “new Jew” in what they called the Land of Israel (Eretz Israel), these fervent, Hebrew-speaking Zionists were determined to break away from anything that smacked of the Diaspora – first and foremost the language widely spoken by European Jews.
“Negating the Diaspora was a core part of the ideology of early 20th-century Zionism, and for this reason Yiddish had to be suppressed,” says YIVO academic adviser Eddy Portnoy, who curated the exhibit. “It was almost like a Jewish self-hatred.”
