Confessions About My Learning Hebrew

 Nadene Goldfoot                                             

I just got up at 11:30pm to write this, but I have to get it off my chest.  It's about my attempts at learning to read and write Hebrew.

I'm not a stupid woman.  I skipped twice in grammar school, graduating high school and starting college at 16, being the youngest in my freshman class and making a speech with the oldest professor at Lewis & Clark College, but my struggles with Hebrew was something else again.

I attended Neveh Zedek, a conservative Synagogue's kindergarten class in 1939, and it's 1st grade in 1940 when I started learning Hebrew.  It was easy and fun.  The only problem I was having was that it happened in Sunday school once a week, and school lasted from 10am to 12:00.  Two hours was stuffed with songs, stories and probably if lucky, 20 minutes of Hebrew.  Then I remember not getting up in the morning and missing a class.  The next week, the class was ahead of me, and I couldn't catch up.  That happened enough times for me to be completely in the dark and never did catch up.  My parents couldn't help me as they couldn't read.  Dad had been kicked out of Hebrew school being too wild, I imagine.  His father had died when he was 4 years old and his mother spoke Yiddish but could not read or write in any language.

That was my Hebrew as a child.  As a girl, I went through Confirmation at age 13 which was all in English.  I had memorized my part about Ruth and Naomi.  

Along comes 1980 when Danny and I made aliyah at age 46 and moved to Israel.  We were on a program to retrain and teach English.  We were both teachers as I had been teaching for the past 22 years in the 2nd, 3rd and 4th grades and Danny for about 3 years in high school.  

Danny, from Brooklyn, New York, had been bar mitzvahed and had the experience of helping boys study for their bar mitzvah.  I had studied Latin for a year, then had learned a little Spanish, so attempted to teach myself Hebrew as we were living in Eastern Oregon at the time and I had no way of taking a class in Hebrew to prepare myself.

I made flash cards and wrote out the words in English to learn Hebrew words, so I was learning a few words of Hebrew. My first Hebrew class at the Ulpan in Haifa went through the words I had taught myself in the first hour of class and it had taken me months to learn those words at home.  I knew I was in trouble. I had given up my teaching position with 10 year and couldn't return home.  I had to keep on trying to learn Hebrew.  There are only a few words I can sight read, like Shabbat.  We English readers do a lot of sight reading and it's easy because our letters are of such different shapes; a b g...I am sounding out every letter in Hebrew. Sheket (quiet): שקט shin, quf tet, .  

Incidently, in Israel, there are newspapers that leave out the vowels.  

Both Dan and I were placed in kitta gimel!!!  It was a smaller group of slower students.  Even Danny!  Here he was, a bar-mitzvah boy and he was having trouble with speaking Hebrew.  The trouble was, he had been such a great speaker of English for a man, an actor in Florida, a debater in high school, that he couldn't make the transition to speak in a new language.  We saw several American men drop out and return to the states, leaving their wives and children in Israel.  They couldn't manage the language.  I continued taking Hebrew in classes 3 times a week to continue learning new words.  I got so I could speak a little to carry on a conversation but it was minimal.  Reading did not get improved upon.  

We lasted over 5 years of living in Israel.  Dan taught in high school but couldn't discipline the students and they were wild.  We had graduated, passed the Hebrew written test, had our teaching certificates and all, and I just kept teaching in the junior high across the street from our apartment in Safed. 

                  Rabbi Mark S. Golub of Jewish Broadcasting Service

This week I was writing and had the TV on in the living room.  I forgot to turn it off and noticed Rabbi Golub  beginning to teach Hebrew.  I sat down to watch his program.  It was about an hour long and he taught Hebrew very slowly, covering the letters in Shabbat;  shin, bet and tuf  שבת. 

 It was a terrific program.  I even learned a few things about the diacritical marks of ah and aw, and a silent letter : that had been left out in my previous life.   Now I want to see the whole program covering the whole alphabet even though I've covered it all in Israel and then some.   

I thought, this may be the way I can tell the rabbi what a wonderful teacher he had been with this program.  I note that he was quite a bit younger when he made it, and it's still a great program.  He's a rabbi on JBS, one of its leaders that I watch when I can on youtube.  I never knew he had also taught Hebrew.  I am proud to say that at age 88, I can still learn Hebrew and this is sticking !!

Mark S. Golub is an American rabbi, media entrepreneur, television personality and educator. He created the first Russian language television channel produced in America, RTN and the Jewish television channel Shalom TV.  Golub is the rabbi of Chavurah Aytz Chayim (Stamford, CT), and is the host of L'Chayim, a talk show he created in 1979 in which he interviews prominent Jewish figures.  Golub attended Hebrew Union College for Reformed Jews – Jewish Institute of Religion for rabbinical school after he graduated from Columbia.

Rabbi Golub is also a historian.  He shares all my knowledge about the history of Israel and feels the same way that I do about it. He's much like our former Rabbi Emanuel Rose of Beth Israel in Portland, Oregon who held a class in debating about Israel.  It was Rabbi Rose that got me reading so many books about Israel and her history, and I wasn't even a member of his congregation, but I did teach for him after returning to Portland from Israel.