Eliezer ben yehuda biography of michael
•
Eliezer Ben Yehuda, Father of the Modern Hebrew Language&#;Part 2: The Visionary
When Eliezer Ben Yehuda decided to leave Europe for Jerusalem in , there was not a single person in the Holy Land, or any place else in the world, who spoke Hebrew as their mother tongue. There was no such thing as everyday, spoken Hebrew—only words to be read from the Bible and rabbinical passages.
But Eliezer fell in love with the Hebrew language. Moreover, he saw it as the tool to recreate a united Jewish people who would return to their ancient homeland. Even stranger, he seems to have been the only human being in the world who grasped the connection between the language and the land.
He had plans to marry Devora Yonas, daughter of a well-to-do family, now in Russia, who had unofficially adopted him when he was a year-old orphan. But then to his great dismay, at age 23, his dreams shattered when he was diagnosed with tuberculosis. He wrote Devora’s father, Solomon, telling him that he could
•
Yehiel Michael Pines
Yehiel Michael Pines was a writer, early exponent of religious Zionism, and yishuv leader. Born in Ruzhany, Belorussia, into a family of prosperous merchants and Torah scholars, Pines was influenced in his youth by Mordecai Gimpel *Jaffe, an early leader of *Ḥovevei Zion, who headed a yeshivah maintained by Pines' family. He studied both traditional subjects and foreign languages and science, and the fusion of the two spheres of knowledge led to a romantic-religious outlook. Pines believed that Jewish life should be reformed, but he was opposed to deliberate, religious reforms that would undermine the foundations of tradition and increase assimilation. He thought that a reformed way of life would inevitably bring about certain changes of halakhah without affecting the sanctity of the Jewish religion. During the s Pines developed these ideas in his controversy with M.L. *Lilienblum, *J.L. Gordon, and others, mainly through his articles in *Ha-Karmel, *H
•
The Wordmaker Israel, , 90 minutes, color Buy Now Public Exhibition Formats: beta, DVD |
Selected Screenings
Shusterman Institute for Israel Studies - Brandeis University
The Vilna Shul - Boston
Hebrew College
Cinema Arts Center - Huntington, NY
Israel rulle Festival
Represented the Israel Broadcasting Authority in Prix-Italia
Synopsis
At the beginning of the twentieth century, a language war raged in Palestine. The contenders: Yiddish, Russian, French, German, English and Hebrew, a language barely spoken for years. At stake: the national language of the Jewish homeland-in-the-making.
The Wordmaker tells the dramatic life story of Eliezer Ben-Yehuda who championed the cause of modern Hebrew. He was zealous and stubborn and had one driving passion: breathing life into the ancient biblical tongue. Denounced a