We need to talk about Ivrit
IS HEBREW in our schools as good as can be expected? When it comes to schools, the UK Jewish community is the envy of communities throughout the world. We are blessed to be able to provide our children with an excellent (mainly free) secular and Jewish education from an abundant choice of wonderful Jewish primary and secondary schools, many of which frequently feature at the top of national league tables. Elsewhere, Jewish day schools are usually a prohibitively expensive fee-paying option available to only a few.
Professional educators across the world agree on the importance and centrality of teaching Hebrew language, whether biblical or modern, as the unifying thread in the faith, heritage, history, culture and homeland of the Jewish people. As a bonus, there are cognitive benefits to learning a foreign language, so it’s a win-win. It is highly unlikely you will ever come across anyone who regrets knowing more than one language.
However, if we reduce Hebrew to just another foreign language our children learn at school, we disregard the place of Hebrew as both a vibrant, living language and an ancient language, the voice of the Jewish people. We fail to give Hebrew its rightful place and deny our children the opportunity to participate in international programmes where young Jewish people throughout the world communicate in Hebrew as their common language. We consign our Jewish school graduates to being the Brits who cannot cope in the same yeshivot and seminaries as their American, Australian and Canadian peers, or who later in life sign up for an evening ulpan, to learn Hebrew “properly”.
As a community, in spite of some loud murmurs to the contrary, we have excellent, fully qualified Hebrew teachers but we do not have enough of them. In fact, this shortage is a global one. With Brexit looming and immigration rules tightening, the need to recruit and train a sustainable pool of UK based Hebrew language teachers is becoming even more urgent.
The truth is that other languages are facing the same crises. At national education conferences focusing on modern foreign languages in UK schools, the