Yiddish Seminar in Bet Vilna 2020 — Association of Jews of Vilna and vicinity in Israel

Dr. Mordechai Yushkovsky, Director of the International Yiddish Culture Center in Vilna, said today at Beit Vilna in Tel Aviv:

Yiddish started in the Middle Ages as a ‘mittelhochdeutsch’ (middle high German). Lexica and phonetics moved away from the source language and Eastern European countries gradually turned into ‘Yiddishland’.

The language, tradition and territory define the identity of a people.

A group of youth councils in Israel who went to the Yiddish seminar in Vilna, met with Dr. Yushkovsky, the previous Ambassador to Lithuania Amir Maimon, and second-generation members of the board of the Association of Jews from Vilna, through whom they absorbed a little Yiddishkeit.

‘As we see it, wherever Jews stopped speaking Yiddish in Europe, that’s where assimilation began’ said Yushkovsky.