BS”D
Yiddish is hardly buried, nisht in Americhke in nisht in Eretz Yisroel. Never a formal language, it is just being redefined in a new US/EY version that differs from its European predecessors just as Ingarish Yiddish in either its US or EY or older version differs from the Yiddish spoken in Lita/White Russia/Ukraine as transplanted abroad after the churban.
English means London is the center of the world.
ROTFL. When someone here in Ukraine wants to speak English with me it is because he wants to understand American music, American news programs, American internet sites. He isn’t interested in British English.
And the preservation of Yiddish, though it should not be done in a way that leaves anyone out, is the preservation and replanting of the very vibrant life of the Torah communities that Hitler and Stalin, zol zayn bren’n in der erd, almost succeeded to destroy.
Our focus on EY is not speaking a bastardized tongue invented by a koifer and mumar lehachis. It is also not trying to speak laha”k which may or may not have been an everyday language.
Instead, our focus on EY is “Vesechezeyno eyneynu beshuvcho leTzioin berachamim”. We know that the return to Tzion of the tzioinim was not berachamim, not bechasdei Hashem as it must be to be legitimate, it was by force, in the way of the baryoinim and the Sicarii.
I speak Ivrit because I need it to speak to Jews who are most comfortable speaking it, not because it is part of my identity. I see it as an imposition, and ideally I would respond to anyone who spoke to me in Hebrew with: “Ich halt nisht by danne tryfe medine, ich red nisht danne tryfer loshon!” And when I am in EY, older North African Jews feel very respected when I speak to them in French because it reminds them of how things were before the tzioinim uprooted their peaceful existence, that only would have been more peaceful had the medine never come to be to tear them out by their roots to become despised “frenkim’ in EY.
I speak Yiddish because it is the language in which my Rebbe ZYA gave over his Toras haChassidus, and it is the language of those of the older generation who preserved the spark of that Toras haChassidus even when serving sentences of 10, 17, 20 years in the Gulag.
And thanks to Lipa, I can understand and even attempt to communicate in the Yiddish spoken by those hyliger Yidden who managed to survive Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen, Matthausen, Majdanek, Sobibor and the ghettos, yet come out with their emunah intact or even strengthened, to be able to rebuild their lives and their communities afresh.