Protest: For the Hebraicization of the Technion

Honorable Editor,
Please publish the following remarks in your newspaper:

We, the students in the upper classes of the Palestinian high schools, sent a protest as follows to Messrs Shmaryahu Levi[n], Ahad Ha-Am, and Dr. Chlenov—members of the board of governors of the Technikum [Technion] that is due to open in Haifa:

To the honorable member of the board of governors of the Technikum in Haifa, Mr. . . . 

We were astonished and agitated to hear the news that at the Technikum that is due to open in Haifa, Hebrew will not be the language of studies. 

As students at the Hebrew schools in Palestine, we cannot accept this idea. 

We received our Jewish education and our secular development in Hebrew. We have proved to the entire nation that only Hebrew can and should serve as the language of study and speech in our Land; we have been educated since our childhood on the knees of our people’s language in the ancestral Land; we speak, study, and think in it—only in it. 

We, the students, placed so many hopes in the only institution of higher learning that is being created in our Land; we were delighted with the hope to continue our development by obtaining a complete Hebrew education. 

We—the students who are about to graduate from high schools in Palestine and stand on the threshold of the postsecondary school—herewith express our fierce protest, bursting forth from our hearts, against those who tear asunder the Hebrew language in our Land, which would undermine our nascent [Hebrew] culture, the fruit of an enormous national project. 

No language can replace Hebrew in our thoughts and knowledge! Accordingly, we demand that all those responsible for the development of the Technikum and concerned for its establishment as a Hebrew school, and those creating an academic sanctuary at the Technikum for the youth of our nation in general, and particularly for us, the children of this Land—to grant our language its proper place at the Technikum. 

The language of the Technikum can, and must be, only Hebrew.  

Signed:

Senior students at the Seminary for Teachers in Jerusalem  
Seniors at the Herzliya Gymnasium in Jaffa 
Seniors of the School of Commerce in Jerusalem