By COLlive reporter
The website yiddish.co.il presented an original recording of David Ben Gurion, founder and first prime minister of Israel, giving a public speech in Yiddish in Sweden 1963.
Alex Dafner from the SBS Radio Yiddish Program’s Web, Podcasts and App aired this rare recording last year.
Ben-Gurion had a famously contradictory relationship to the Yiddish language, his mother-tongue. On the one hand, as David Grun, he was one of, if not the most important, Yiddish language journalist and editor from the 1910s-1930s in Ottoman and later British-Mandate Palestine and he published his first two Zionist tracts in Yiddish.
On the other hand, he personally yelled at a Jewish Holocaust survivor and Partisan giving a speech in Yiddish (as she knew no Hebrew) to stop speaking, saying the language grated on his ears and is believed to have personally oversaw the semi-banning of Yiddish in Israel in the media and theater in the earliest years of the state.
And yet, 15 years later here he is speaking in Yiddish in Sweden. And most importantly, he makes the statement that he is first a Jew, then an Israeli.
In it interesting to note, that just a few years earlier, on February 17, 1959, the Rebbe wrote a letter to Ben-Gurion emphasizing that “Israelis Must Remain Jewish.”
Here is a part of the letter:
“It was once fashionable in certain circles to suggest that the Jewish religion and religious observances were necessary for those living in the Diaspora—as a shield against assimilation. But for those who can find another “antidote”—in the place of religion, particularly for those living in Eretz Yisrael, within their own society, where the atmosphere, language, etc., (apparently) serve as ample assurances of national preservation, the Jewish religion was superfluous—what need had they to burden themselves with all its minutiae in their daily life?
“But the trend of developments in Eretz Yisrael in the last seven or eight years has increasingly emphasized the opposite view: That however vital the need for religion amongst Diaspora Jewry, it is needed even more for the Jews in Eretz Yisrael.
“One of the basic reasons for this is that it is precisely in Eretz Yisrael that there exists the danger that a new generation will grow up, a new type bearing the name of Israel but completely divorced from the past of our people and its eternal and essential values, and moreover, hostile to it in its world outlook, its culture, and the content of its daily life; hostile—in spite of the fact that it will speak Hebrew, dwell in the land of the Patriarchs, and wax enthusiastic over the Bible.”
Israel realized and lived up to this ideal. Israel was created to serve the Jewish people, not the alternative lifestyle, the ones who eat traif, are mechalel Shabbos etc. those are the ways of the world and not the ways of the Jewish people.
Notice his ‘mistake’ saying “Eretz Yisroel” then correcting himself saying “Yisroel”