Jewish day schools would seem like a natural place to teach Yiddish, the mama loshen, or mother tongue, spoken by 75% of the world's Jews before the Holocaust. But schools that teach both Jewish studies and mainstream academic subjects have been more likely to offer French or Spanish in addition to Hebrew than Yiddish.
This fall, however, the famously evocative, 1,000-year-old language will be taught at three Jewish day schools in Los Angeles, a rare addition to the standard curriculum in use across the country.
"To go to Jewish day schools and discuss teaching Yiddish and see them excited -- it's a sea change," said Aaron Paley, founder and co-chairman of Yiddishkayt Los Angeles, which is administering the program.
The three-year pilot program is being developed with a $130,000 grant from Steven Spielberg's Righteous Persons Foundation. If administrators deem the effort a success, it will be offered to additional schools throughout the country, Paley said.
Yiddish, the language that added chutzpah and klutz to the vernacular, is based on medieval German, written in Hebrew characters and read from right to left like Hebrew. It was spoken by millions of Ashkenazi Jews in Europe until the Holocaust and by immigrant Jews wherever they settled. It was the language of Jewish social activists, writers, singers, actors, artists and entrepreneurs in towns and cities throughout the Western world.
"It was," said Bruce Powell, head of New Community Jewish High School in West Hills, "almost the Esperanto of the Jewish world, the language everybody spoke no matter where you went."
Powell's nondenominational Jewish school in the San Fernando Valley is one of the three that will add Yiddish in the fall. The others are Shalhevet School, an alternative Orthodox school on Fairfax Avenue near Olympic Boulevard, and Sinai Akiba Academy, a Conservative Jewish day school in West Los Angeles.
Paley said the beginning course will be offered to fifth- and ninth-graders, with a more advanced class added each of the next three years.
In the past, local children could study Yiddish and Yiddish culture in after-school and weekend programs run by Jewish organizations such as Workmen's Circle and cooperatives of parents, many of them nonobservant Jews and on the political left. Most of these programs have withered away, said Paley, 47, who as a child in the 1960s attended a vibrant, "profoundly cultural" Yiddish program on Saturdays in the San Fernando Valley.
