Battalion for the Defence of the Language
Encyclopedia
Tel Aviv
Tel Aviv , officially Tel Aviv-Yafo , is the second most populous city in Israel, with a population of 404,400 on a land area of . The city is located on the Israeli Mediterranean coastline in west-central Israel. It is the largest and most populous city in the metropolitan area of Gush Dan, with...
, Palestine
Palestine
Palestine is a conventional name, among others, used to describe the geographic region between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River, and various adjoining lands....
in the 1920s to urge Jews to use only the Hebrew language
Hebrew language
Hebrew is a Semitic language of the Afroasiatic language family. Culturally, is it considered by Jews and other religious groups as the language of the Jewish people, though other Jewish languages had originated among diaspora Jews, and the Hebrew language is also used by non-Jewish groups, such...
.
The group campaigned against the use of other languages under the slogan "Jew, speak Hebrew." Its most prominent supporters were Mordechai Ben-Hillel Hacohen, a Hebrew writer, Zionist and one of the founders of Tel Aviv, and Zvi Yehuda Kook
Zvi Yehuda Kook
Zvi Yehuda Kook was a rabbi, leader of Religious Zionism and Rosh Yeshiva of the Mercaz HaRav yeshiva...
, the son of the chief rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook
Abraham Isaac Kook
Abraham Isaac Kook was the first Ashkenazi chief rabbi of the British Mandate for Palestine, the founder of the Religious Zionist Yeshiva Merkaz HaRav, Jewish thinker, Halachist, Kabbalist and a renowned Torah scholar...
.
The Jewish (mostly Yiddish) press tended to portray the group as "a gang of fanatic, insolent hoodlums" and although the battalion was sometimes involved in violence it acted largely "as patriotic watchdog, barking loudly and baring its teeth but seldom actually biting."
On 15 August, 1929, the Jewish fast of Tisha B'Av
Tisha B'Av
|Av]],") is an annual fast day in Judaism, named for the ninth day of the month of Av in the Hebrew calendar. The fast commemorates the destruction of both the First Temple and Second Temple in Jerusalem, which occurred about 655 years apart, but on the same Hebrew calendar date...
, 300 youths led by Jeremiah Halpern
Jeremiah Halpern
Captain Jeremiah Halpern was a Revisionist Zionist leader in Palestine who first came to prominence when he served as aide de camp to Ze'ev Jabotinsky in the 1920s when the latter was head of the Haganah in Jerusalem.Halpern, a certified ship's captain, was known as Rav...
, who were mostly from the Battalion with some from Betar
Betar
The Betar Movement is a Revisionist Zionist youth movement founded in 1923 in Riga, Latvia, by Vladimir Jabotinsky. It has been traditionally linked to the original Herut and then Likud political parties of Israel, and was closely affiliated with the pre-Israel Revisionist Zionist splinter group...
and other youth movements, made political speeches, raised the Zionist flag and sang the Zionist anthem
Hatikvah
"Hatikvah" is the national anthem of Israel. The anthem was written by Naphtali Herz Imber, a secular Galician Jew from Zolochiv , who moved to the Land of Israel in the early 1880s....
at the Wall. A counter-demonstration by Muslims on the following day was followed by violent incidents and subsequently led to widespread rioting in Palestine.
See also
- Pro-Wailing Wall CommitteePro-Wailing Wall CommitteeThe Pro–Wailing Wall Committee was established in Palestine on 24 July 1929, by Joseph Klausner, Professor of Modern Hebrew Literature at the Hebrew University, to promote Jewish rights at the Western Wall....
- Western WallWestern WallThe Western Wall, Wailing Wall or Kotel is located in the Old City of Jerusalem at the foot of the western side of the Temple Mount...
- 1929 Palestine riots1929 Palestine riotsThe 1929 Palestine riots, also known as the Western Wall Uprising, the 1929 Massacres, , or the Buraq Uprising , refers to a series of demonstrations and riots in late August 1929 when a long-running dispute between Muslims and Jews over access to the Western Wall in Jerusalem escalated into violence...
- Association for Palestinian ProductsAssociation for Palestinian ProductsThe Association for Palestinian Products, later known as the Product Loyalist Alliance, was established in Tel Aviv, Palestine in the mid 1930s to promote products of the Jewish settlement....