Against the odds, devotees are fighting to save Yiddish

? Itche Goldberg and Jason Rubin are separated in age by 82 years, but they’re linked by a common passion for an ancient Jewish language that threatens to slip into obscurity.

The life of 102-year-old Goldberg spans the recent decline of Yiddish to its heyday early last century when about 13 million Jews – or some 70 percent of Jews worldwide – spoke the lilting language that gave English words such as “chutzpah” and “schmo.”

Rubin, a 20-year-old student of Yiddish, embodies the hope that somehow, some way, the language can survive now that there are fewer than 2 million speakers.

“You can’t possibly see a future Jewish life with the disappearance of a 1,000-year-old language and with it a 1,000-year-old culture,” Goldberg, a top Yiddish scholar since the 1930s, says by phone from his New York home. “Somehow it has to be there.”

From Jake Morowitz’s downtown office atop the Board of Trade building, he can see what’s been lost in Chicago, which once boasted 200,000 Yiddish speakers.

In clear view is Maxwell Street, where shoppers still haggled in Yiddish over unfixed prices in the street’s open-air market until 40 years ago.

Gavriel Yehuda Twerski, left, and Meir Simcha Singer study the Torah in their eighth-grade class last month at Yeshiva Shearis Yisroel, a Yiddish-language Hasidic school in Chicago. Yiddish is flourishing at the school, but devotees of Yiddish are concerned about the disappearance of the 1,000-year-old language.

Today, there’s virtually nothing left: Most original Jewish families have long since moved to the suburbs, and large swaths of the district were bulldozed in the 1960s to make room for a new University of Illinois campus.

No more than 5,000 Jews still speak Yiddish in and around Chicago today, says Morowitz, head of the YIVO Society, which promotes Yiddish in the area. Yiddish has lost ground in New York, too. After World War II, several hundred thousand people spoke Yiddish in the city. Now, around 100,000 do.

One last bastion of Yiddish is the ultra-orthodox Hasidic community, which employs the language to insulate members from outside influences and hedge against assimilation.

So numerous are the ultra-orthodox in parts of Brooklyn that some ATMs offer the option of conducting transactions in Yiddish.

“In our world, Yiddish is flourishing,” says Rabbi Moshe Unger, the dean of a Yiddish-language Hasidic school in Chicago.

But there’s a catch: Since Hasidics tend to shun the secular world, their affection doesn’t extend to nonreligious Yiddish literature, theater and music.

“We don’t have time for that,” Unger says, adding flatly that “the loss of Yiddish outside the orthodox community is not a concern of ours.”