One of the most important enterprises of Zionism was the renewal of the Hebrew language. For 2000 years, Hebrew existed mainly as a written language. Jews prayed, read, studied, buried, and married in Hebrew, but did not speak it. Then, towards the end of the 19th century, in Europe and Palestine, the Hebrew language began to be revived as a spoken language. How do we know when a language has been revived? When there are children who use it as their mother tongue.
In 1895 a publishing house called "Tushiya" was established in Warsaw, with a pioneering initiative seeking to solve the problem of the severe shortage of children's books in Hebrew. The publishing house printed original literature along with translations of famous stories for children. The first stories translated were Grimm’s Fairy Tales, omitting the Christian motifs. Snow White was one of the first stories the publishing house chose to translate. The story was translated into ancient Hebrew, endowing Snow White and her stepmother with the charm of a biblical narrative.
The first Hebrew translation of Pinocchio was published in the city of Lodz, Poland, on July 1, 1920. The translator of this Italian classic was a Jewish educator and writer named Israel-Eliyahu Handelsaltz. He believed that Jewish youth would learn to love the Hebrew language through literature and theater. Handelsalz devoted his time to his two loves - teaching and translation - between the two world wars. He taught Hebrew in high school and at the Rabbinical Seminary, and translated stories, books, and plays into Hebrew. (He appears in this photograph, sitting on a chair surrounded by his family).
In 1950, a new version of Pinocchio's translation was published in Israel by the Hebrew writer and poet Avigdor HaMeiri. The new translation was much "wilder" and full of action than the old one: Pinocchio visits the Western Wall, and gets involved in a fight in Tel Aviv. Throughout the story, Grandfather Geppetto is busy teaching his little Pinocchio Torah so that Pinocchio will quit smoking (see illustration).
The first translation of children's literature to appear in Jerusalem was published in 1887, by Eliezer Ben Yehuda (shown in the photograph sitting at the desk with his many books). He translated Jules Verne's Around the World in Eighty Days. In his translation, the protagonists occasionally use phrases in Aramaic and Arabic, and utter well-known Jewish prayers such as the Shema. Ben Yehuda, known as the "reviver of the Hebrew Language," coined thousands of terms in modern Hebrew, wrote the first Hebrew dictionary, and devoted every moment of his life to reviving the Hebrew language. We might also view him as the “father of Modern Hebrew" because his son, Itamar Ben Avi, was the first child in thousands of years to speak Hebrew as a mother tongue.
photo by: Assaf Shevadron
Teaching Hebrew always required creativity, and many Jewish educators of the last 200 years devoted great efforts to planting a love for Hebrew in the hearts of the younger generation. In fact, the Melton Centre offers a whole course about the revival of the Hebrew language! The International M.A program at The Melton Centre offers Jewish educators around the world an opportunity to rethink and innovate Jewish education, together with fellow educators, via distance learning. Check out the full M.A program on the website>>> https://masterjewishprogram.huji.ac.il/
Information and photos are taken from the National Library of Israel's blog and archive.