The Yiddish of Jerusalem: The Old Yishuv in the Research of Mordecai Kosover

Yaad Biran | Delivered in Yiddish.

In the 1930s, Mordecai Kosover, the young researcher of Yiddish from Vilna, lived in Jerusalem and recorded his observations about the local Yiddish of the Old Yishuv’s residents. This was part of a larger project of his: to demonstrate that the history of Jews of the modern-day Land of Israel began not with Rishon LeTzion (the 1882 first settlement of the New Yishuv), but decades earlier, and that, furthermore, the Jewish community of the Land of Israel was not a world apart but was in fact very connected to a worldwide “Yiddishland.”

Part of the 2025 Yiddish Civilization Lecture Series.

You may also like the following events from YIVO Institute for Jewish Research:

• Next Tuesday, 22nd July, 06:00 pm, The People’s Torah: Crowd-Sourcing Jewish Customs from An-ski to the Internet in New York, New York
• This September, 18th September, 07:00 pm, The Great Dictionary of the Yiddish Language in New York