Page 137 - The Legacy of Abraham Rothstein - text

Immigration and sweatshops

Before I moved in she had gone to a Hebrew school, but they did
not really teach Hebrew; only a few prayers and the rest was Yiddish.
She could read and write Yiddish, which helps when learning
Hebrew. Teaching her was really a spiritual kind of work for me, as
well. Hebrew was my ideal. When I left the old country I carried with
me the dream of a reborn Palestine. It was only a few years earlier
that Dr. Herzl appeared on the Jewish horizon, and the Dreyfus case
and Kishinev pogrom had made that Zionist dream more powerful
than ever. I remained true to my people and joined two societies,
Ahavath Zion, the oldest Zionist organization in New York, and
Maphitsi Sfath Ivri, a Hebrew-speaking society.
A short time after coming here I found the Ahavath Zion Society,
a center for Palestine activity. I joined it and served Zionism
faithfully by helping in every way I could to make appeals and
propagandize the cause, and with it awaken the desire to establish the
Hebrew language as the medium of a united Jewish people whose
state would be established in Palestine. Not long before my arrival, a
few Zionists had founded a society promoting the Hebrew language.
It met every Sunday night at the Hebrew Educational Alliance,
providing lectures and entertainment in Hebrew. This organization
gathered up many fine young men of our culture, mostly university
students, who became our greatest leaders in the struggle for the
Jewish state: Magnes, Weiss, Silver, and dozens of others whose
names are on tongues everywhere. I also served that group, Maphitsi
Sfath Ivri, faithfully—I was not the high priest, only a foot soldier.
But I was recompensed more than I gave, for I met the learned and
the educated, the real nobility who came over to this country with a
pack of learning on their backs and continued to study in this
country’s best universities, men who became well-known rabbis,
doctors, poets, and other professionals. Being near them I learned to
know myself, and knowing oneself is worth learning. To read the
Hebrew language and spread propaganda for that cause brought me
in contact with the present.
Amongst the immigrants, recent arrivals and older ones, most of
them read Yiddish papers and followed the socialistic trend of that
period. They hated the Zionist movement and despised the Hebrew
language, and considered Yiddish as a weapon against everything in
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