Word: vilna
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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When the rabbi at the Sunday service spoke in his sermon of the Jews in Vilna (a village in Eastern Europe) a century ago, he was speaking of my ancestors; my great-grandparents came from Vilna. His topic reflected the cultural heritage which had been passed down to me not only from them, but from their predecessors as well. Yet here I was, reciting prayers that had been written hundreds of years ago, and I was having trouble finding meaning in them...
...Eliezer Perelman to hear such a voice and think such thoughts? A nobody, a young scholar in Vilna, on the Baltic coast of what was then the Russian empire, the land of the pogrom. Perelman knew Russian, French and German, but what bewitched him was Hebrew, the scriptural language that he had first learned from a tutor at the age of three. Ever since the Jews were driven from Roman Palestine in A.D. 135, Hebrew had survived only as a literary language, primarily of prayer; nobody had actually spoken it in everyday affairs for centuries. It did not even have...
Image presents a candid mosaic of Jewish life in Poland. What emerges from the film's patchwork is a coherent portrait of a flourishing culture. Aspiring writers flock to Warsaw to study under Y.L. Peretz, the dean of Yiddish literature. In the town of Vilna, the Jewish community establishes schools for the mentally retarded and for orphans. In the shtetls, the townfold engage in lively commerce and conform to the letter of well-rooted traditions. The Jews are politically animated. The heirs of the Enlightenment try to balance universal values with continuing Jewish particularism (the "problem" of minority separatism...