Sara Ziv, chairwoman of the National Authority for Yiddish Culture, is optimistic about the future of the mama-loshn in Israel.

When Eliezer Ben Yehuda was reviving the modern Hebrew Language a century ago, Yiddish was the lingua franca for the majority of Europe’s Jews and even further afield as the great waves of migration spread Yiddish culture and language to the America’s and even to Palestine.

In 1939, around 11 million of the world’s Jewish population of 16 million spoke Yiddish, but then the Holocaust decimated the great Yiddish speaking masses and in the nascent state of Israel, Yiddish ran up against the emergence of Hebrew culture and was sidelined and even frowned upon.

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