Mameloshen

Lets talk Yiddish, My mother tongue, which I do not speak. I am a typical second generation of East European Jews, who speaks the language which majority of people speaks around me. For me it is Russian and English. I grew up in USSR and now live in America. Not knowing your “mameloshen” is not only the problem of the Russian Jews, same thing happened to the Jews all around the world no matter were they are in America, Israel, Argentina or any other country. The language was 15 million speakers strong in a turn of 20th century. One of the main speaking languages in Eastern Europe, sort of Lingua franka between Jews of Poland, Russia, Romania, Hungary and America. Highly acclaimed literature, one of the first talking cinema were the Yiddish one. And everything changed after Holocaust, most of the Yiddish speakers were killed and the rest looked at the Hebrew as the language, which will unite all Jews around the world. Now barely 3 million people speaks the language, and number of them dwindling. The main speakers are elderly and Hasidim (Orthodox Jewish group). However Yiddish still have some government status in several countries in a world. It is an official Language of Jewish AO – Birobejan and official minority language in Sweden, Netherlands and Moldova. The most Yiddish speaker could be found in US and Israel (million for each country).

I found the only coat of arm in a world, which incorporates fraise in Yiddish in its design. That is coat of arms of Belorussian SSR from 1930’s to 1952. The fraise is Communist slogan – Proletariat of all countries united.