My research explores the immigration experience and the construction of Israeli Identity of Hungarian speakers, women and men, in the years 1948 – 1960 as reflected in "Uj Kelet", a daily paper in Hungarian.
In This lecture I will focus on the encounter of the immigrants with the Hebrew language in everyday life, while Hebrew was considered top national value that should be enforced on the new immigrants. I will examine the reactions of readers of the paper, among them soldiers, camps inhabitants and journalists, including Efraim Kison (then Ferench Kishont) in the years 1949 – 1954.
I will show that beside objective obstacles such as not knowing Hebrew and Yiddish - which made it almost impossible to communicate with state officials and native Israelis - Hungarian speakers suffered linguistic oppression, silencing and discrimination, and they were mocked for their pronunciation in Hungarian and accent in Hebrew. They protested against the aggressive way of enforcing the Hebrew and the violation of their individual liberties, and they demanded the right to use their mother tongue in public.
One of the scientific claims is that the Hebraization project in the 1950s was not conducted fanatically (Helman, 2014). Exploring new sources from the point of view of the immigrants who were subjected to the Hebrew Project, enables us to tell a new and more complex story.
Historians of everyday life in the first decade still concentrate on veterans and the hegemonic groups. Their assumption is that the new immigrants didn’t write. The potential of immigrant`s newspaper make it possible not only to tell their story but to undermine the exclusivity of the hegemonic narrative.