The Yiddish Book Center's

Wexler Oral History Project

A growing collection of in-depth interviews with people of all ages and backgrounds, whose stories about the legacy and changing nature of Yiddish language and culture offer a rich and complex chronicle of Jewish identity.

Rejecting then returning to Yiddish

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Haim describes how his involvement in the zionist youth movement Hashomer Hatsair caused him to reject Yiddish, and how the foundation of the Yiddish Book Center changed his mind later in life.

This is an excerpt from an oral history with Haim Gunner.

This excerpt is in English.

Haim Gunner was born in 1924.

Other video highlights from this oral history

From Europe to Israel in the mid-1950s: DP camps and refugees

2 min 44 sec

Missing sister's wedding due to discipline of the youth movement

39 sec

A Request Unfulfilled: Imrich Rosenberg's wife

3 min 27 sec

Absorbing Jewish Refugees into kibbutz in Israel

3 min 55 sec

Haim ruins the family seder

1 min 43 sec

Hashomer Hatsair in the 1930s

3 min 53 sec

Why I Left the Kibbutz

3 min

Hashomer Hatsair in the McCarthy Era

2 min 30 sec

Meeting His Wife- "We took an immediate disliking to each other."

1 min 50 sec

Life Beyond the Kibbutz: a Tel Aviv Purim Party

3 min 19 sec

Experiences with Arab Resistance on Kibbutz During Early Years of Israeli State

5 min 30 sec

More information about this oral history excerpt

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