Yiddish Devotees Fight to Save Language

Itche Goldberg and Jason Rubin are separated in age by 82 years, but they're linked by a common passion for an ancient Jewish language that threatens to slip into obscurity.

The life of 102-year-old Goldberg spans the recent decline of Yiddish to its heyday early last century when about 13 million Jews - or some 70 percent of Jews worldwide - spoke the lilting language that gave English words such as "chutzpah."

Rubin, a 20-year-old student of Yiddish, embodies the hope that somehow, some way, the language can survive now that there are fewer than 2 million speakers. "You can't possibly see a future Jewish life with the disappearance of a 1,000-year-old language and with it a 1,000-year-old culture," Goldberg, a top Yiddish scholar since the 1930s, says by phone from his New York home. "Somehow it has to be there."

Ensuring the language and culture Jews brought from Eastern Europe is there for posterity is the goal of devotees across the nation, some of whom hold summer camps in a bid to turn people on to Yiddish.

New York's Yiddish-language Forward newspaper reflects the decline. Its circulation was around 275,000 before the war; today, it's around 3,000.

One last bastion of Yiddish is the ultra-orthodox Hasidic community, which employs the language to insulate members from outside influences and hedge against assimilation. So numerous are the ultra-orthodox in parts of Brooklyn that some ATMs offer the option of conducting transactions in Yiddish. "In our world, Yiddish is flourishing," says Rabbi Moshe Unger, the dean of a Yiddish-language Hasidic school in Chicago.

But there's a catch: Since Hasidics tend to shun the secular world, their affection doesn't extend to nonreligious Yiddish literature. "We don't have time for that," Unger says, adding flatly that "the loss of Yiddish outside the orthodox community is not a concern of ours."