BEN GURION 's public speech in Yiddish-YUNG YiDiSH archive

YUNG YiDiSH (www.yiddish.co.il) is pleased to present an original recording of Ben Gurion giving a public speech in Yiddish in Sweden 1963. Special thanks goes to Alex Dafner from the SBS Radio Yiddish Program's Web, Podcasts and App for airing this rare recording.
Ben-Gurion had a famously contradictory relationship to the Yiddish language, his mother-tongue. On the one hand as David Grun he was one of if not the most important Yiddish language journalist and editor from the 1910s-1930s in Ottoman and later British-Mandate Palestine and he published his first two Zionist tracts in Yiddish. On the other hand he personally yelled at a Jewish Holocaust survivor and Partisan giving a speech in Yiddish (as she knew no Hebrew) to stop speaking saying the language grated on his ears and is believed to have personally oversaw the semi-banning of Yiddish in Israel in the media and theater in the earliest years of the state. And yet 15 years later here he is speaking in Yiddish in Sweden. (Thanks to Jordan Kutzik for this additional information)