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صفحة: 22
Moder n Hebrew For hundreds of years , Jews throughout the world spoke and read Hebrew only when praying or studying holy texts . In their daily lives—when they worked , shopped , studied math , played , or ate—they spoke the languages of the countries in which they lived , or they spoke Jewish forms of those languages , such as Yiddish , a Jewish form of German , or Ladino , a Jewish form of Spanish . In 1881 , Eliezer Ben-Yehuda and his family left Russia and settled in Eretz Yisrael . Ben-Yehuda and his wife Deborah believed that Hebrew should be used in everyday life . They published the first Hebrew newspaper in the land . But many people didn’t take the idea of speaking conversational Hebrew seriously . How could they be expected to speak an ancient language that didn’t have words for such modern inventions as the elevator and the steamship ? Israelis do not use dollars to pay for what they buy . They use the New Israeli Shekel ( NIS ) . There are 100 agorot ( plural of agorah ) to a shekel—just like pennies to a dollar ! The book of Genesis teaches that Abraham bought a plot of land for 400 shekels . Had they been New Israeli Shekels , how many agorot would Abraham have paid ?
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