- published: 30 Nov 2007
- views: 6007768
"Hatikvah" (Hebrew: הַתִּקְוָה, HaTiq'vah, lit. The Hope) is the national anthem of Israel. Its lyrics are adapted from a poem written by Naphtali Herz Imber, a secular Jew from the city of Złoczów, province of Galicia, Austro-Hungarian Empire, (today, Zolochiv, Ukraine), who moved to the Land of Israel in the early 1880s. The anthem's theme reflects the nearly 2000-year-old hope of the Jewish people to return to the Land of Israel - their ancient homeland - and to restore it and reclaim it as a sovereign nation.
The text of Hatikvah was written in 1878 by Naphtali Herz Imber, a Jewish poet from Złoczów (today, Zolochiv), a city often referred to by its nickname, "The City of Poets." in the province of Galicia, Austro-Hungary. The foundation of Hatikvah is Imber's nine-stanza poem named Tikvateynu (lit. "Our Hope"). In this poem Imber puts into words his thoughts and feelings in the wake of the establishment of Petah Tikva, one of the first Jewish settlements in Ottoman Palestine. Published in Imber's first book, Barkai (lit. "Morning Star"), the poem was subsequently adopted as the anthem of Hovevei Zion and later of the Zionist Movement at the First Zionist Congress in 1897. The text was later revised by the settlers of Rishon LeZion, subsequently undergoing a number of other changes.
Barbra Joan Streisand (/ˈstraɪsænd/; born April 24, 1942) is an American singer, actress, writer, film producer and director. She has won two Academy Awards, eight Grammy Awards, five Emmy Awards including one Daytime Emmy, a Special Tony Award, an American Film Institute award, a Peabody Award, and is one of the few entertainers who have won an Oscar, Emmy, Grammy, and Tony Award.
She is one of the most commercially and critically successful entertainers in modern entertainment history, with more than 71.5 million albums shipped in the United States and 140 million albums sold worldwide. She is the best-selling female artist on the Recording Industry Association of America's (RIAA) Top Selling Artists list, the only female recording artist in the top ten, and the only artist outside of the rock and roll genre. Along with Frank Sinatra, Cher, and Shirley Jones, she shares the distinction of being awarded an acting Oscar and also recording a number-one single on the U.S. Billboard Hot 100 chart.
So long as still within our breasts
The Jewish heart beats true,
So long as still towards the East,
To Zion, looks the Jew,
So long our hopes are not yet lost
Two thousand years we cherished them
To live in freedom in the land