Crash Course
With Hebrew literacy declining among Jews, group embarks on language project.
JOANNE PALMER
Jewish Telegraphic Agency
r
New York
or more than 3,000 years, Hebrew has been
the language in which Jews spoke, prayed,
conversed with God and man and created
wonderfully creative writings in every possible field
— religious, literary, legal — you name it," said
Anita Shapira, a professor of Jewish history at Tel
Aviv University.
But Hebrew is in sharp decline among Jews in the
United States — something the Memorial
Foundation for Jewish Culture is working to change.
Shapira has spent the past year as a distinguished
fellow at the Center for Judaic Studies at the
University of Pennsylvania. She's also president of the
New York-based Memorial Foundation.
She's part of "Hebrew in America," an ambitious
new program that the foundation hopes will help
reverse Hebrew's decline.
The foundation is piloting the program in the
New York City suburbs in northeastern New Jersey
along with the UJA Federation of Northern New
Jersey.
Fifteen Jewish early-childhood programs have
agreed to host Hebrew-language immersion pro-
grams. The foundation hopes the program will grow
to include elementary schools, then high schools —
and students' parents — and reach out to the rest of
the community.
"The absence of a common
language weakens us as
a people.
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The federation plans to offer at least one ulpan pro-
gram to adults next year. The foundation hopes even-
tually to extend the program to other communities
around the country.
The foundation's president, Jerry Hochbaum, said,
"Jewish peoplehood is achieved by the transmission of
our collective memory and culture, and that's rooted
in our common language," he said. "The absence of a
common language weakens us as a people."
He's not talking about conversational Hebrew,
Hochbaum added — though certainly it would be
good for Jews to be fluent; he's talking about the abil-
ity to read Jewish texts.
When they can't read those texts, Jews "are tourists
in their identity," Shapira said. "Hebrew has never
been in as bad shape as it is now in America," she
said. "This is very worrying, because it means that the
American Jewish community is becoming disconnect-
ed from other Jewish tribes around the world."
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