About Omer

Omer

Omer, whose name was glossed in English as "Speaking," was a Hebrew daily newspaper published in Tel Aviv in simple, fully vocalised Hebrew for new immigrants. It appeared in 1951, published by the Davar publishing house, as the successor to Davar's earlier vocalised daily Hegeh, and it was part of the effort by the ruling Mapai party and the Histadrut labour federation to draw the mass immigration of Israel's first years into Hebrew reading. Where an ordinary Hebrew newspaper assumed a reader educated in unvocalised text, Omer printed its news with the vowel points that beginning readers of Hebrew needed, in deliberately simple language. It had a companion paper in the same project, Lamat'hil, "For the Beginner." Reference works disagree about when Omer ceased publication: the Encyclopaedia Judaica's table of Hebrew newspapers and lists of Israel's party press give its run as 1951 to 1979, while Hebrew press histories record that it appeared until 1986. On either dating it was, by a wide margin, the longest-lived vocalised daily in the Hebrew press, outlasting its predecessor Hegeh several times over, and its whole existence was spent performing a single task: giving newcomers who could not yet read ordinary Hebrew a real daily newspaper of their own.

Origins in a vocalised column for the immigrant

Omer's ancestry ran through a single column. In the years before the Second World War, immigrants who had escaped from Germany and the German-speaking countries reached Palestine in large numbers, and a German-language press flourished alongside the Hebrew press. The Hebrew newspapers competed for those readers by adding vocalised material, and from the middle of November 1935 Davar attached to its evening supplement a vocalised section called Davar le-Oleh, "Davar for the Immigrant." A scholarly study of that column, published in the Tel Aviv University journal Kesher, describes it as a pointed, vocalised section intended for new immigrants and for readers who found Hebrew hard going or were at the first stages of learning it. The column answered the practical needs of the individual reader, served as a news platform with a clear ideological and political character, and was meant to build a bridge between the world of the veteran settlers and the world of those who had just arrived. Its educational ambition and social role gave it a valued place in the life of the Yishuv, and through it the Hebrew language itself was presented as a recruiting cause: mastery of Hebrew was treated as part of the national task, and the column's outlook was that of socialist Zionism under the leadership of Mapai. Davar le-Oleh proved the format, but a column inside another newspaper was not what the campaigners for the Hebrew language wanted. They continued to demand a vocalised Hebrew daily newspaper of its own for the immigrants, and it was that demand that produced Omer's predecessor.

A licence that first served as a cover for Davar

The paper that became Hegeh entered the record in a week of emergency. In August 1939, before Hegeh had properly appeared at all, its licence was used as a cover for Davar itself: when the authorities ordered Davar closed for a week, Davar appeared between 17 and 24 August 1939 under the name Hegeh and was supplied to Davar's subscribers. News brought in by the Davar news service appeared under the label "Hegeh service," and the lost-and-found advertisements directed readers to the Hegeh office. In 1939 the Davar publishing house received its licence to publish a newspaper for immigrants under that name. Hegeh began to appear as an evening newspaper priced at three mils, but in February 1940 distribution of the evening paper was halted in preparation for its relaunch as a morning daily. The target date for the daily was set at 15 March 1940. The episode fixed the pattern that would govern the whole vocalised line, Omer included: it lived inside the Davar house, shared its news service and its institutional protection, and could be reshaped, suspended or renamed by decision of that house rather than by the market alone.

Hegeh, the first vocalised daily

The daily Hegeh was published for the first time on 22 April 1940, the eve of Passover. It was vocalised throughout, and it carried translations of difficult words into German for its refugee readers. The Encyclopaedia Judaica describes Hegeh, which ran from 1940 to 1947, as a vocalised Hebrew daily, the first of its kind in the country; its language was generally simple, and translations were supplied for any difficult words. David Zakai, writing in Davar as the paper appeared, stressed both the novelty and the difficulty of the undertaking: a vocalised daily newspaper was, in his judgement, something new in the history of the Hebrew press, and anyone who knew anything of Hebrew printing knew how hard it was to produce and how far it was from being profitable. The paper nevertheless established itself as a fixture of immigrant life. Davar marked its hundredth issue in August 1940 with an article by Dov Shtok, its thousandth issue in August 1943, and its fifth anniversary in April 1945. The Encyclopaedia Judaica's newspaper table preserves the paper's shifting forms: a weekly Hegeh in Tel Aviv in 1939 to 1940 that served as an afternoon paper of Davar, the vocalised daily of 1940 to 1947, and a weekly Hegeh again in 1947 to 1949 as a Saturday-evening paper. It was this inheritance — the name recognition, the trained routine of vocalised production, and the defined immigrant readership — that Omer took over in 1951.

The economics that closed Hegeh

Hegeh reached a circulation of six thousand copies, but it never reached profitability. Its staff pressed the national institutions to support the paper in its fight on behalf of the Hebrew language, and pressed the immigrants' federations to distribute Hegeh instead of putting out newspapers in foreign languages. The core of the problem was mechanical as much as commercial: vocalised type had to be set by hand, letter by letter with its vowel points, and that made every issue unusually expensive to compose. By June 1947 the financial burden of publication, which ran to tens of thousands of Palestine pounds, forced the paper to close; the Palestine Post announced the closure of Hegeh on 17 June 1947. The closure was not quite the end. In 1948 and 1949 Hegeh's appearance was renewed as a weekly, and the paper's formal period of activity is recorded as running to 14 May 1949. But the daily experiment had been interrupted, and when a vocalised daily returned to the Davar house two years later it returned under a new name, in a new state, and for a far larger wave of newcomers than the refugees of the 1930s.

1951: Omer replaces Hegeh

The State of Israel's first years brought mass immigration on a scale the Yishuv had never faced, and with it a readership problem of a new order: hundreds of thousands of newcomers who needed Hebrew not as a cultural ideal but as the working language of absorption. A Hebrew history of the press describes how the Davar house of Mapai, which maintained a paper for every sector of its public, promoted the absorption of the mass immigration by replacing the weekly Hegeh with a vocalised daily in easy Hebrew named Omer. The Encyclopaedia Judaica's account of Davar states the succession in a sentence: Hegeh was revived under the name Omer in 1951. Omer was thus not a new idea but the resumption, under statehood conditions, of the project that Davar le-Oleh had begun in 1935 and Hegeh had carried from 1940. It was published in Tel Aviv by the Davar publishing house, in the same city and from the same institution as its predecessor, and it inherited Hegeh's defining features: complete vocalisation, simple language, and an intended reader who was learning Hebrew by reading the news.

Part of Mapai's chain of immigrant papers

Omer did not stand alone. The Jewish Virtual Library's history of the Israeli press explains that the party press of the period set out to educate the newcomers and to inculcate in them its own brand of political culture, and that to further this effort Mapai, the ruling party, founded a chain of papers in the immigrants' native languages together with two papers in simple Hebrew: Omer and Lamat'hil, "For the Beginner." The assumption behind the chain was that a party was expected to speak to every public in a form that public could read, and the notion that every party deserved a paper of its own became close to axiomatic in those years; even very small parties made the financial and organisational effort to maintain a daily. Within that system Omer occupied a particular niche. The foreign-language papers of the chain addressed immigrants in the languages they had brought with them, while Omer and Lamat'hil addressed them in the language the state wanted them to acquire, graded to their ability: vocalisation carried the reader over unfamiliar words, and simple Hebrew kept the sentences within reach. Hebrew reference lists of Davar's accompanying publications describe the pair in the same terms, as the weekly Hegeh and afterwards the daily Omer, vocalised newspapers for new immigrants published alongside Davar's other sectoral papers for children, for women workers and for the cooperative economy.

How the paper worked

Omer's method was the method worked out by its predecessors and applied daily. The whole paper was vocalised, so that a reader who had learned the Hebrew alphabet and the vowel signs in an immigrant language class could sound out any word in the news columns; the language was kept generally simple; and the tradition of the line, established by Hegeh, was to remove the obstacles that unvocalised Hebrew put in a beginner's way rather than to simplify the news itself into a schoolbook. The point of the enterprise, from Davar le-Oleh onward, was that the immigrant should read an actual newspaper — the same day's events, presented as journalism — and learn the language by using it, instead of being confined to primers. That ambition is also what made the paper expensive to produce for its entire lineage: vocalised composition was slow, skilled work, and Davar's own writers had acknowledged at Hegeh's birth that a vocalised daily was far from profitable. Later Davar retrospectives returned to the subject; an item headed "Vocalised News" in Davar of 30 June 1961, cited by the Hebrew histories for the history of the vocalised papers, looked back over the undertaking a decade into Omer's life, by which time the vocalised daily had become a settled, if specialised, part of the house's output.

Reception among the newcomers

The immigrant papers did not win the audience they were built for. The Jewish Virtual Library's history judges that Mapai's venture into immigrant-language and easy-Hebrew papers was not a great success: the new immigrants felt deprived in comparison with the veteran population, and the party press, whether in their own languages or in Hebrew, proved unattractive to them. That verdict describes the climate in which Omer spent its life rather than a failure of its craft. A vocalised daily asked its reader to make an effort — to read in a language still being learned, in a paper aligned with the governing party and the labour federation — at a time when commercial papers and foreign-language publications competed for the same reader without demanding as much. Omer's survival for decades under those conditions was possible because it was not required to survive commercially: like Hegeh before it, it was an institutional paper, carried by the Davar house as part of a political and cultural programme, and its continuation was a decision of the Histadrut's publishing system rather than of the newsstand.

The disputed end of the paper

Omer's ending is the least settled fact in its record. The Encyclopaedia Judaica's table of Hebrew newspapers lists Omer as a Tel Aviv daily, vocalised, published with Davar, running from 1951 to 1979, and a Hebrew list of Israel's defunct party newspapers likewise gives Omer, the Histadrut's paper, as 1951 to 1979. Against that, the Hebrew article on Hegeh states that the vocalised daily Omer, which appeared in Hegeh's place under the Davar imprint in 1951, persisted in appearing until 1986, and a Hebrew history of the Hebrew press repeats that Omer was published until 1986. No source consulted for this profile explains the seven-year difference, and it cannot be resolved from the published record alone; it is possible that the paper's frequency or status changed in its last years in a way that different reference works dated differently, but that too is not documented in the sources. What is not in dispute is the shape of the run: founded in 1951 as the direct replacement of Hegeh, Omer continued the vocalised daily through the decades of mass immigration and well beyond them, long after the emergency that had created its format had passed, and it closed, whether in 1979 or in 1986, as a defunct paper of the party-press era whose other titles were disappearing in the same period.

Namesakes and legacy

The name Omer had been used in the Hebrew press before, and the Encyclopaedia Judaica's table separates the vocalised daily from its namesakes: a single-issue literary Omer in Tel Aviv in 1927, an Omer that appeared weekly from 1936 to 1939 and then monthly to 1942, sometimes in place of the suspended Davar, and an annual Omer on rabbinics published from 1955 to 1960. Only the daily of 1951 was the immigrants' vocalised newspaper. Later surveys of the Israeli press remembered the line to which it belonged as one of the distinctive creations of the Davar house: a short history of Israel's printed press, surveying Davar's empire of publications, lists among them the punctuated daily Hegeh that was later called Omer, alongside Davar's papers for children, for women workers and for the new immigrant. Omer's historical significance lies in that continuity. For roughly three decades it kept a daily news service in pointed Hebrew before the public, completing the arc that had begun with a single vocalised column in 1935: the belief that a newspaper could be an instrument of language revival, teaching a country of immigrants to read by giving them, every morning, something worth reading.