Reply To: Yiddish at Siyum hashas

BP27-“As I said two Yiddish speeches, out of 11” You actually forgot about the speech given by the Klausenberger Rebbe which was over 15 minutes. That would make 3.5 speeches out of 12 in Yiddish. That is close to 30% which is a significant number. Especially if you consider the number of people who need to sit like golems during those speeches. Even if the total amount of Yiddish speeches is not more than 45-50 minutes if you multiply that by 50,000 we are talking about ten of thousands of hours shot. Think about how the halachos that relate to tircha ditzibura are much much shorter than that. If chazal take tircha detzibura so seriously shouldn’t we?

Let’s stay focused. This is not a question of “Yiddish: good for the Jews or bad for the Jews?”. The question is this the place to push the Yiddish issue?

Everyone has a tendency to look at their own personal surroundings and assume that the rest of the Jewish world is like that too. Ex: Joseph thinks the majority of Jews in America are Yiddish speaking chasidim. The obvious reality is very different. Orthodox Jews make up maybe 10-15% of Jews in America with Chasidim only a portion of that. Even amongst the attendees of the siyum hashas (granted it is mostly Orthodox) I think the chasisidim are under-represented compared to their total percentage of the Orthodox population. To imagine more than 50% of the attendees are fluent Yiddish speakers is ignoring reality.

However many the actual numbers are, when someone gets up and speaks in Yiddish he is essentially saying to those who can’t understand “please pardon me while I ignore you for the next 15 minutes”