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The Betar Movement is a world Zionist youth movement founded 85 years ago by Ze'ev Jabotinsky. Betar members played important roles in the creation of Israel. Today the Betar Movement is active in many world branches and is involved in Jewish and Zionist activism.
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| The Idea of Betar |
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| Ideology | ||||||||||||||||
Page 4 of 14 4. THE HEBREW LANGUAGE Betar recognizes Hebrew as the only and eternal language of the Jewish people. In Palestine it must become the only language in-all phases of life; in the diaspora it must, at least, be the language of the Jewish educational system, starting with the kindergarten and ending with high school (later on perhaps college too, if we shall ever have Jewish universities in the diaspora). In the education of every Jewish child it must be the beginning and base of everything. A Jewish child who is ignorant of Hebrew is not entirely Jewish, even though he or she is a Betari. We have the utmost respect for the other languages which are being utilized by our people. Especially do we appreciate the tremendous role of Yiddish in preserving our national integrity, the wealth of its literature and press. We also esteem the Ladino of the Sephardim which also served as an excellent remedy against assimilation. A national language, however, is something different and by far greater. It cannot be a language which the nation has, in the course of its history, derived from a strange people and then suited it for its own purposes. Very significant indeed is the fact that the greatest immortal works of our national genius (the Bible, the Books of HaLevi and Ibn Gavirol, of Bialik and Shneour), were not created in Aramaic during antiquity nor in Yiddish in our own times despite the really great role of both languages in our development. A national language is one which is born simultaneously with a nation and then accompanies the latter in one form or another throughout its entire life. Such is Hebrew to us. I hope - being a hopeful man and having unbounded faith in Betar - that there will eventually arrive a day when Betar will also play an important part in the renaissance movement of our language: one role which was forgotten by all the groups participating in this revival movement. I refer to that role which is to safeguard the beautiful tone and pronunciation of Hebrew. Our language is being revived, but without that marvelously harmonious enunciation which it apparently possessed was as musical a language as Latin or French. Today, on the other hand, Hebrew is spoken vulgarly, and the accents are ill-sounding and foreign, even in Eretz Yisrael. This too is a problem which can be termed "lack of Hadar" - to talk the language in any manner whatsoever and be careless of its beauty. It is sufficient to look over attentively a page of the Bible with its various notes of pronunciation, in order to understand the love for each letter and the wealth of nuances that could be found in its spoken Hebrew. I sincerely hope that it will be fated to the Betar again to renew this forgotten tradition of our national language. And our national language must again be what it once upon a time was: a poem, a musical masterpiece. |
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