If you are to visit Google homepage of Israel, you will surely enjoy the cute look of today’s doodle and remember the good deeds of Eliezer Ben Yehuda.
Because today, Google Doodle celebrates the 155th birthday of Eliezer Ben Yehuda, a Litvak lexicographer, newspaper editor, and the driving spirit of Hebrew language revival of the modern time, a reason he was hailed as the father of Modern Hebrew.
As a journalist, Ben-Yehuda was an editor of different newspapers HaZvi, Hashkafa, and HaOr in Hebrew language. On the other hand, Ben-Yehuda authored the first Modern Hebrew dictionary as part of him being a Lexicographer.
In his early life, Ben-Yehuda belonged to a religious family and he was sent to Yeshiva to study. Here is where he learned the Hebrew language. At the age of 24, he then wrote the text saying, “There is no nation without a language.”
Ben-Yehuda saying those words marks the beginning of his mission in reinstating Hebrew as a working language to create a solid union of Jewish people as a nation. Upon moving to Israel, Ben-Yehuda married Debora, his teacher under a condition of using only Hebrew language when speaking with their children and their child was the first child that speaks Hebrew.
