Tag Archives: Hebrew

Jew of the Week: Zelda Mishkovsky

Israel’s Hasidic National Poet

Shaina Zelda Schneersohn (1914-1984) was born in what is now Ukraine, then part of the Russian Empire, to a religious family of Chabad Hasidim. She was a first cousin of the Lubavitcher Rebbe. An only child, she made aliyah with her parents when she was 12. The family settled in Jerusalem, where Zelda went on to study at the city’s Bezalel Academy of Arts in the hopes of being a professional painter. She ultimately became a teacher and taught at school in Tel-Aviv, Haifa, and Jerusalem. (One of her students was renowned writer Amos Oz). Meanwhile, she wrote poems and essays for local newspapers, and slowly gained a large following of fans. After marrying Hayim Mishkovsky, Zelda became a full-time writer and poet. She published her first collections of poems in 1967, blending themes from both Israel and Russia, infused with religious symbols and mystical concepts from Kabbalah and Hasidism, often mixing Modern Hebrew with Biblical Hebrew and Yiddish. The poems were hugely popular across Israel’s social, political, and religious spectrum. She went on to publish five more collections of poetry over the next two decades, each reaching bestseller status. She became affectionately known in Israel simply as “Zelda”, going on to win the Brenner Prize in 1971, and the Bialik Prize in 1978. Her poem “Each Person Has a Name” is publicly recited in Israel on Holocaust Remembrance Day (which also happens to be her yahrzeit). Like her cousin the Lubavitcher Rebbe (with whom she kept a regular correspondence), Zelda never had children, but had many devoted students and foster daughters that she took into her home. She is recognized today as one of Israel’s greatest poets.

Purim Begins This Saturday Night – Chag Sameach!

Secrets of Purim

3 Quran Verses Every Jew Must Know

Words of the Week

We are immersed in an evolving, ongoing conflict: an Information World War in which state actors, terrorists, and ideological extremists leverage the social infrastructure underpinning everyday life to sow discord and erode shared reality.
– Renée DiResta

Jew of the Week: Sholem Aleichem

The Jewish Mark Twain

Sholem Solomon Alexei Rabinovich (1859-1916) was born to a wealthy family near Kyiv in what was then the Russian Empire. He grew up in the Jewish shtetl of Voronkiv, receiving both a secular education and a traditional Jewish one. His father lost most of the family’s fortunes, and his mother died of cholera when he was just 13. Rabinovich started writing around this time, and already at age 15 wrote a Jewish version of Robinson Crusoe. He wrote stories in Hebrew, Yiddish, and Russian. At 24, he took up the pen name “Sholem Aleichem”, the Yiddish pronunciation of the Hebrew greeting meaning “peace be upon you”.  After completing his studies, he worked as a teacher and then as a “crown rabbi”, a representative of the Jewish community to the Russian government. He lost his own wealth in the stock market in 1890 and at one point struggled to make a living and feed his five children. By the end of the 1890s, Sholem Aleichem was the most popular Yiddish writer in the world, and inspired countless other young Jewish writers. He published Tevye the Milkman in 1894, which was later adapted to Fiddler on the Roof, becoming a major international hit (as well as a Broadway play—the first to run for more than 3000 performances—and a film). Rabinovich lived in Kyiv until 1905, when terrible pogroms raged across the Russian Empire and he witnessed the brutality firsthand. The family fled, splitting their time between New York City and Geneva, Switzerland. All in all, Sholem Aleichem wrote some 40 works in Yiddish, and many more in Hebrew and Russian. He was commonly referred to as “the Jewish Mark Twain”. (When Mark Twain himself heard about this, he said that he was actually “the American Sholem Aleichem”!) Rabinovich was a passionate Zionist, too, joining Hovevei Zion in 1888, and representing the American Jewish community at the Eighth Zionist Congress in 1907. There are streets, schools, and other public places named after him around the world, including in Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Israel, Lithuania, Russia, Ukraine, and the United States. There is even a Sholem Aleichem Crater on the planet Mercury! Rabinovich’s funeral drew some 100,000 mourners, making it among the largest in New York’s history. He wrote in his will: “Let my name be recalled with laughter, or not at all.”

Who are the Indigenous People of Israel?

Words of the Week

Life is a dream for the wise, a game for the fool, a comedy for the rich, a tragedy for the poor.
– Sholem Aleichem

Jews of the Week: Belkinds and Hankins

Israel’s Great Pioneers

Israel Belkind (1861-1929) was born near Minsk, Belarus. After a Hebrew elementary school education, he enrolled at a Russian gymnasium and planned to study in university. However, the terrible 1881 pogroms turned him into a passionate Zionist, and the rest of his life was dedicated to saving the plight of diaspora Jews. He founded an organization called BILU (an acronym of Beit Yaakov Lechu v’Nelcha, from an End of Days prophecy in Isaiah 2:5, where the Biblical prophet encourages Jews to get up and take possession of their land). In the summer of 1882, Belkind led the first group of Biluim to the Holy Land. After several years of working on Jewish agricultural settlements, he decided to focus on education instead. He taught at a school in Jaffa, and then in Jerusalem. In 1904, Belkind started his own school for children orphaned by the devastating Kishinev Pogrom. Meanwhile, Belkind wrote several important Zionist texts, and was also a noted anthropologist. Intriguingly, he did a great deal of research among the local Arab population and came to the conclusion that they must be the descendants of Jews who had been forcibly converted to Islam! He noted how the locals did not even refer to themselves as “Arabs”, but only “Muslims” (they called the Bedouins “Arabs”), and many of them knew about their Hebrew ancestors. They had various customs that resembled Jewish ones, used an Arabic dialect peppered with old Jewish terms, and venerated the same Biblical figures as the Jews. His dream was thus to open Hebrew schools for the Palestinians, and slowly return them to the Jewish fold. (Later, thanks to the opportunities created by the Zionist movement, a massive influx of non-indigenous Arab immigrants came from neighbouring areas, particularly Egypt, Syria, and Lebanon.)

Yehoshua and Olga Hankin in 1910

Belkind’s older sister was Olga Hankin (1852-1943). She studied in St. Petersburg to become a midwife. Olga joined her brother in the Holy Land during the First Aliyah of 1886, making her the first professional midwife in the region. She soon became the most famous midwife in the land, and was sought out by Jews, Christians, and Muslims alike. She made a name for herself as being the only woman to ride alone on horseback—even at night—and became something of a feminist icon. Olga married Yehoshua Hankin (1864-1945), originally from Russia. Hankin was well-respected by local Arabs, and was able to negotiate a purchase of a massive plot of land on behalf of the Zionist movement in 1890. This land became what is today the city of Rehovot, a name proposed by Israel Belkind based on a verse in Genesis. In 1891, using donations from diaspora Jews, the Hankins purchased what is today Hadera (the neighbourhood of Givat Olga in Hadera is named after Olga Hankin). In 1908, Yehoshua Hankin joined the Palestine Land Development Company and became its number-one real estate agent in the Holy Land. His most famous deal was the Sursock Purchase, acquiring Haifa Bay and the Jezreel Valley from the Sursocks (an Orthodox Christian family who had purchased the land from the Ottomans decades earlier). Hankin’s work secured hundreds of thousands of dunams of land for the Jewish cause, and he is credited with being the top negotiator of land purchases in Israel’s history.

Understanding the Arab-Israeli Conflict in 5 Easy Points

The Incredible Story of the “Mensch of Malden Mills”

Words of the Week

We are worth what we are willing to share with others.
– Sir Moses Montefiore