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Pressures from within, without
If concern about security has been one constant in Israel's 50 years, change has been another. Growth has been steady and, in the 1990s, explosive. As happened after World War II, Israel again has become the destination for hundreds of thousands of Jews from other countries and societies. The economy is stratifying into richer and poorer. The dream of a common language is harder to hold. Even the singular religious and cultural identity that has been Israel's strength for 50 years seems shaken. Almost from the beginning, Israel has opened its arms for any Jew who wanted to come. The Jewish population doubled right after World War II, when the Holocaust survivors streamed in. In more recent years, the country has assimilated millions of immigrants from the former Soviet Union, Morocco and Ethiopia. About 800,000 immigrants from the former Soviet Union alone have arrived since 1989; the Israelis call them "the Russians," and they now make up one-seventh of the population. Some 36 percent of the 13.8 million Jews worldwide now live within Israel's borders. Many immigrants are poverty-stricken and face little hope of true assimilation. Many don't speak Hebrew, the Israelis' chosen language, or English, the country's second language. Many have inadequate housing. Ethiopian immigrants complain of being isolated in muddy trailer communities in the north. Many immigrants from the former Soviet Union are trained, skilled professionals who say there is little work for them in their true professions. The problem of too many immigrants and too few jobs has exacerbated an economic recession that many blame on the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Miri Winternitz knows about unemployment firsthand. She was educated at the Technion, Israel's premier technological institute, and worked for many years as a drafter. But she was laid off in 1995, when new construction slumped. Now she works in a temporary consulting job. With a growing, diverse population, language, like jobs, is becoming a dividing line between Israel's haves and have-nots. A century ago, almost no one spoke Hebrew, a dead language like Latin, used only in prayer and ritual. Nineteenth-century Zionists assumed that Yiddish -- a form of medieval German spoken by two-thirds of all the Jews before the Holocaust -- would become Israel's national language. But in 1881, an immigrant from Lithuania, Eliezer Ben Yehuda, made it his life work to reinstate Hebrew. The odd result is that, since Hebrew originally was written without vowels, no one really knows how the language they speak every day was pronounced by the ancients. Spelling is haphazard, with street signs using one spelling on one corner and another on the next. The town next to Tel Aviv may be spelled Jaffa on one map, Yaffo on another and Yafo on a third. Street signs may speak in three alphabets: always in Hebrew, often in English, sometimes in Arabic. But Hebrew, confusing as it is to outsiders, has taken on life in Israeli society. Hebrew and religion united the pioneers, who arrived speaking a hodgepodge of European languages and perhaps Yiddish. Now, Hebrew is what identifies Israelis as Jews with a homeland and language of their own. Many Israeli writers and philosophers say they can't capture the nuances of Israeli culture in any other language. Like most educated Israelis, the Weiss' relatives -- the Winternitzes, Blanks and Ors -- speak Hebrew most of the time, English when necessary. The problem is that Hebrew and English are becoming the mark of education and affluence in Israel. Hebrew is mandatory, and English is necessary for better jobs in tourism and trade. The native languages of the less-educated, less-assimilated classes are useless except for talking with friends and family. And Arabs need three languages -- Hebrew, English and Arabic -- to be successful.
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