Yiddish eyes a comeback

By Patrick Lannin and Nerijus Adomaitis

VILNIUS (Reuters) - If you are having a shmooze over some nosh, but maybe you do not like schmaltz then, whether you know it or not, you are talking Yiddish.

Though the language -- known to Jews as the mame-loshn or mother tongue -- has made inroads into English, it has all but died out in daily use in its homelands of eastern Europe.

This includes Lithuania, which was once home to more than 200,000 Jews. But now schools and universities are trying to spread Yiddish again.

"Yiddish is a key to the rich culture of eastern European Jews, the heritage of European culture," said Roza Bieliauskiene, a former engineer who teaches at Lithuania's only Jewish school -- named Sholom Alecheim after the famed Yiddish writer whose stories inspired the "Fiddler on the Roof" musical.

"I feel a very rich person by knowing this language."

The school has 260 pupils, between the ages of seven and eight. Children take only one hour of Yiddish a week, starting at age 15, in a small step towards reviving the language.

Yiddish was originally seen as the language of women and children as opposed to the holy tongue of Hebrew that was studied by men, earning it the name mame-loshn, literally a mother tongue for Jews.

Yiddish writers also include Isaac Bashevis Singer, the only Yiddish writer to win the Nobel Literature Prize, in 1978. It was once spoken by about 13 million Jews in eastern Europe from all walks of life, but the combined effects of the Holocaust and Soviet repression caused a drastic fall.