Orthodox neighborhoods in some cities are demarcated by an eyruv, a wire strung high above the streets, outlining the boundaries of the community. Eyruv means blending: the border serves to "blend" the neighborhood into one ritual space, while erecting a ritual boundary between it and the world. Within the delineated space, special liberties--such as carrying objects, or pushing a stroller--that would otherwise violate the ritual laws of keeping the Sabbath are allowed.
Just as this border marks the boundaries of the sacred community, so distinctions in language, dress, hairstyle, and demeanor serve Hasidim as personal boundaries, protecting the separation of an individual Hasid from the secular world.
Hasidim also maintain a language barrier against the non-Hasidic world. Just as Hasidic dress serves as a visual marker of separation, so the sound of Yiddish serves as an aural one.
They reserve Hebrew for textual study and use Yiddish for much of their daily speech. The rebbe communicates with his Hasidim in Yiddish, Yiddish is taught in school, and used for explication and study of Hebrew sacred texts. But that ignored a rich literary tradition that goes back at least as far as , and a secular Yiddish literature that flowered from the middle of the 19th Century on.
Novels, plays, poetry and newspapers appeared in the language, along with prayer books and translations from the Bible. In waves of emigration in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, about 7 million European Jews spread the language to the United States, Canada, South America and what is now Israel.
But others stayed behind. Most of them were gassed or shot or died of cold and hunger in concentration camps after Nazi forces conquered the Jewish centers of Eastern Europe. By then, Hebrew had become the language of the Jewish settlers in Palestine. And in the United States, Yiddish was often discarded as worn-out baggage from the old country. Now, except for some ultra-religious enclaves in Israel and the East Coast, and a small circle of secularists in New York whose Yiddish-language nursery school is so popular that it has a waiting list, there is nowhere left where Yiddish is the common language.
We have a half-dozen young people too. About senior citizens gather there once a week for lectures, musical programs, tea, cake and a chat. Other groups of first- and second-generation Americans meet as far afield as Anaheim, Arcadia, Long Beach and Laguna Niguel for informal evenings of Yiddish literature and conversation. Labor Zionists, Socialists and disillusioned Communists speak the language at political meetings. Shoppers and shopkeepers use it in the bakeries and butcher shops of the old Jewish neighborhoods of Fairfax and Pico-Robertson.
Orthodox Jews often speak Yiddish in their synagogues, although services are generally conducted in Hebrew, the ancient language of the Bible and the prayer book. Since no one spoke Hebrew, the Americans and the Russians communicated in Yiddish.
Marion Herbst, a Los Angeles artist and folk singer, fell in love with the language when a friend played a record of folk songs for her, but she said it can be useful too.
In America after the war, immigrant parents were often hesitant to speak Yiddish with their children. Though there were a few networks of Yiddish schools in the post-war period, after-school programs and camps could not compete with the intense pressures of Americanization.
Yiddish began to take on a lowbrow image, and its use was associated with failure to climb up the American socioeconomic ladder of success. But the last half century brought many positive developments for Yiddish.
It has been seriously studied as an academic discipline, and Yiddish literature has been recognized as great world literature, exemplified by Isaac Bashevis Singer receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature in The s saw the beginning of a Yiddish and Eastern European cultural revival , particularly in music.
Thanks to the work of highly-talented artists, at the forefront of which are groups like The Klezmatics, klezmer music is now a ubiquitous presence in American Jewish culture. Pronounced: khah-SID-ik, Origin: Hebrew, a stream within ultra-Orthodox Judaism that grew out of an 18th-century mystical revival movement.
Produced in Poland and America, Yiddish film captured the diversity and richness of the Yiddish-speaking world. Jewish Theater and Dance. Hebrew is the language of the street, the lawless and value-depleted sphere.
The contrast is very clear. Meeting points. Every Saturday night, dozens gather at an event organized by Burstein, where they experience the Yiddish world through music, food and shows. They are mainly German, American, French and Swiss. Perhaps this is a sign that there are some meeting points between the Hasidic world and other parts of society.
Before that the audience would sing with the band, helping out, but new elements slowly crept in. Aaron Rabinowitz Sep. Get email notification for articles from Aaron Rabinowitz Follow. Open gallery view.
Credit: Gil Cohen-Magen.
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