Today is International Mother Language Day. Jews have two: Yiddish and Hebrew.
What is Yiddish? It is a colorful language of everyday communication of European Jews, the so-called Ashkenazi. It is also called mame loshn, that is, native, mother's language. Yiddish was formed in the 10th-14th centuries on the basis of one of the German dialects of the Rhine River basin. It is a mix, a combination of German (68 percent), Hebrew (17 percent of words) and Slavic languages (15 percent).
Before the war, about 11 million people spoke Yiddish in the world. And Jews from Ukraine, Germany or, say, Romania could easily find a common language with other Jews in Europe. But the Holocaust of World War II took the lives of six million European Jews, a third of the nation. Yiddish is another great loss from the Holocaust, it did not die out on its own, it was shot, cut out, burned...
Currently, Yiddish is spoken by fewer than two million Jews. These are ultra-Orthodox communities in certain parts of the state of Israel and in Brooklyn, USA. However, it would be wrong to classify Yiddish as a dying language, because a huge amount of work is currently underway to revive it. Even the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy teaches Judaica, and students have the opportunity to study Yiddish as an additional specialization while studying at the Faculty of Humanities.
Yiddish has another name: it was somewhat skeptically called “jargon.” Because it is a simple home language. But the ancient Hebrew language, Hebrew, is called loshn koydesh, or the holy language. No one has ever spoken Hebrew; for 18 centuries it was the language of conversation with God, prayer, the language of sacred books, literature, and philosophical treatises. Perhaps that is why Israel made Hebrew, the holy language, not Yiddish, its state language. The revival of Hebrew was made possible thanks to a group of enthusiasts, the most famous of whom was Eliezer ben-Yehuda. Since then, he has been considered the “father” of Hebrew. The creation of a modern dictionary became his life’s work. Quite quickly, the ancient Hebrew language turned from a dead one into one that meets all the modern needs of everyday, business, and spiritual life, and is one of the decisive factors in the Jewish national revival.
Considering the fact that not so long ago Hebrew had no living speakers, the phenomenon of its revival to the stage of a full-fledged means of communication still remains unique and unrepeatable. It is a language of second birth.
Interestingly, the script for both Yiddish and Hebrew is the same. Words in both languages are written from right to left, and numbers from left to right. What else is interesting about Hebrew writing? The letters in writing are not connected to each other. There are only 22 letters in the Hebrew alphabet, all of them consonants. There are no vowels, vowel sounds are conveyed in writing by a system of signs - dots and dashes under the consonant letters.
Although Hebrew is a very ancient language, it has not changed significantly; 80 percent of ancient words have been preserved, and only 20 percent of words are new and modern.
By the way, our Hesed Besht Foundation has a conversational Hebrew club. Jews want to know their native language and are diligently studying it. Once a week we get together, communicate in Hebrew, read, and write. And about a dozen club members who repatriated to Israel after the war began write to us on social media that the knowledge of the language acquired in our club was very useful to them. So, our work was not in vain.! 
