At that moment, they realized that he was Israeli. From that point on, the incident took a violent and severe turn.

By World Israel News Staff

A young Israeli man was brutally attacked over the weekend outside the hotel where he was staying in Limassol, Cyprus, after being heard speaking Hebrew, in an incident raising strong suspicion of an antisemitic motive.

The victim’s father told Kan News that the attack occurred Saturday night while his son was on a post-army trip.

According to his account, the young man was speaking on the phone in Hebrew when a stranger approached him asking for a cigarette. Shortly afterward, the man assaulted him violently.

The victim was flown to Israel on Sunday for medical treatment, underwent surgery on his eye, and ultimately lost vision in that eye due to the severity of the injuries.

In a Facebook post, the father described the attack, writing: “They attacked my son at the entrance to the hotel in Cyprus. Not on the street, not in a bar, but at the entrance to the hotel, a place that is supposed to be safe and secure. He was brutally beaten, suffered head and facial injuries, and was evacuated for medical treatment.”

The victim’s younger brother, Maor, also detailed the incident in a separate Facebook post.

According to him, two strangers approached his brother and began asking personal questions, including who he was, where he was from, and what he was doing there. “My brother felt uncomfortable and chose not to respond,” he wrote.

Minutes later, Maor said, his brother received a video call from a friend, conducted in Hebrew.

“At that moment, those people understood that he was Israeli. From that point on, the incident took a violent and severe turn. They attacked him together until he lost consciousness, stole his mobile phone, and fled the scene,” he wrote.

Maor added that an ambulance arrived only about 40 minutes later. He described the assault as “a serious and violent incident, with a clear suspicion of an antisemitic attack.”

The incident comes amid a sharp rise in antisemitic attacks worldwide, with Israelis and Jews increasingly targeted abroad because of their identity.

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Tehran greenlights launch of international television channel broadcasting in Hebrew, with aim of promoting Iranian state propaganda among Israelis.

By World Israel News Staff

Iran is preparing to launch an international television channel broadcasting in Hebrew, Iranian media have reported, in a bid by Tehran to foment change within Israel.

According to a report by the Iranian state media outlet IRNA, President Masoud Pezeshkian has ordered the national broadcasting company, the Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting, to establish a Hebrew television channel.

The new channel will target Israelis in the Jewish state and abroad and is intended to “respond to the media propaganda of the Zionist regime and its affiliates,” according to the directive signed by Pezeshkian.

The order defined its target audience as “everybody speaking Hebrew in the world.”

The move was first proposed last September by the Supreme Council of the Cultural Revolution. The president’s signature marked the final hurdle before the plan is implemented.

The new television channel is the latest in a long-running effort by Iran to appeal directly to Israelis with Hebrew-language media outlets in order to alter public opinion in Israel.

In 2022, the Tasnim News Agency, a semi-official outlet affiliated with Iran’s paramilitary Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, launched a Hebrew website.

While the new Hebrew television channel will promote Tehran’s narratives regarding the Israel-Arab conflict and the June war between Iran and Israel, it is also expected to exploit internal political and social divisions within Israel.

In recent months, Iranian media outlets have heavily covered the ongoing ultra-Orthodox draft crisis in Israel, giving significant attention to stories of anti-draft protests, the arrests of draft-refusing yeshiva students, and reports of several dozen yeshiva students leaving Israel to avoid the draft.

Past Iranian content in Hebrew on the Tasnim website has also promoted criticism of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

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Koller hopes that introducing students to these writings will open them up to new angles of studying cultural and intellectual history across the world.

By Shira Li Bartov, JTA

Since 1540, a prestigious chain of scholars has held the title of Regius Professor of Hebrew at the University of Cambridge.

But not one of these scholars of Hebrew and Semitic studies was Jewish — until this year.

In September 2025, Aaron Koller will become the first Jew to join the university’s department of Middle Eastern Studies as the Regius Professor of Hebrew, a role established by King Henry VIII.

Koller is packing up from New York City, where he has taught at Yeshiva University, specializing in Hebrew from biblical to medieval texts, since earning his doctorate there in 2009.

Aaron Koller. (Yeshiva University)

According to Koller, it’s no surprise that Jews never made the cut before. Henry VIII, who founded the Church of England along with the professorship, intended it for Anglican churchmen to teach Hebrew in the Anglican tradition. That idea lasted until recently.

“Fifty years ago, it wouldn’t have struck anyone as odd that no Jewish person had held the position,” Koller said in an interview. “It was pretty clearly — not officially, but very clearly — meant for an Anglican professor of the Old Testament.”

Koller — who spent the 2022-23 academic year in Cambridge — credits his predecessor, Geoffrey Khan, with breaking the mold. Khan is not a member of the Anglican Church nor a specialist in the Old Testament, but a scholar of Semitic languages with mixed British, Indian and Iranian ancestry.

In his new role, Koller wants to promote the study of Hebrew texts over the thousands of years between the Hebrew Bible and the modern state of Israel, drawing on Cambridge’s rich trove of manuscripts that includes the Cairo Genizah, the vast collection of medieval manuscripts discovered in Egypt in the late 19th century.

Koller hopes that introducing students to these writings will open them up to new angles of studying cultural and intellectual history across the world.

Despite being the first Jewish Regius professor, Koller said he is wary of narrowing the department around “Jewish studies for the Jews.”

In the United States, Jewish studies departments tend to attract Jewish students looking to connect with their identity and heritage.

That fills a valuable need, said Koller, but he wants to build out Hebrew studies as a home for any student with a humanistic interest in Hebrew — addressing the same historical and philosophical questions that draw people to studying ancient Greek or Latin.

“No one thinks that Greek studies would only be for Greeks,” he said. “Greek studies spend a lot of time trying to explain to the world that this is of universal significance. It’s not for every single person, but it’s for any given person; [they] will find something interesting here. And I very much want to do the same for Hebrew studies in Cambridge.”

As far as faculty representation, there is still progress to be made in the Regius Professorship.

“There still hasn’t been a woman in the position,” said Koller. “That’s yet to be solved.”

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With thousands of Ukrainian refugees arriving in Israel, the key to their success heavily rests on their ability to speak the language.

The post WATCH: Free intro Hebrew lessons for all Ukrainian refugees appeared first on World Israel News.

As Israel celebrates 73 years of existence, it’s important to highlight something that has a history deeply intertwined with the nation, and has evolved alongside it since the country’s founding: modern Hebrew, ILTV reports.

The post WATCH: What it took to revive the Hebrew language appeared first on World Israel News.

One wouldn’t expect Hebrew in an Iranian military song honoring the death of one of Israel’s greatest enemies.

The post WATCH: Iran mixes Hebrew into song marking death of Soleimani appeared first on World Israel News.

“Hebrew is a much older language as well, so it makes sense the roots of words go back before Latin or Greek,” a linguistics buff theorized.

By Ariel Ben Solomon, JNS

English and European words such as alphabet, earth, loco and habitat could come from Hebrew, according to an independent Israeli linguistics researcher who has written a number of unpublished dictionaries, articles and books.

According to the English Oxford Dictionary, the word etymology refers to “the study of the origin of words and the way in which their meanings have changed throughout history.”

Researchers can make inferences based on studying the roots of the words and their meanings and try to piece together the history of words, though it’s far from an exact science.

Modern works on the subject are lacking, and one Israeli—Tony Daccre Barat, 73, born in Romania and now living in Akko, Israel—has studied linguistics on his own as a hobby for the past four decades.

He and his wife, who has a Ph.D. in architecture, live on a paltry stipend from the government of $1,200 a month. Barat is familiar with several languages, including Hebrew, Yiddish, Romanian, French and English.

In 1951, he immigrated to Israel with his family and served in the army, studied political science at Haifa University, and later studied linguistics for one year in Paris.

Barat noticed during his studies in Paris that nobody was making the links from European languages to Hebrew and that there was no desire to do so. “Hebrew is a much older language as well, so it makes sense the roots of words go back before Latin or Greek,” he theorized.

In 1990, Barat returned to Romania and started a consulting company with his wife, assisting Israeli investors.

“Modern scholarship does not deal at all with the etymology of European or world languages from Hebrew,” said Barat. “It seems crazy at first, as Hebrew is written from right to left. But if you look more closely, similarities can be discovered.”

Examples of Hebrew as basis of European words

Scholarship exists on the connection between Hebrew and European languages, noted Barat, adding that he has around 1,500 books in his personal library that touch on the subject, often indirectly.

Barat has many theories regarding the Hebrew roots of certain European language words.

Take the word “earth” in English, which in Hebrew is eretz, or the word more associated with land, adama. In Arabic, it is ard, German erde, and in Romanian tara. The ending of these words can have differing pronunciations weather ending with a “se,” “te” or “de” sound. If you experiment with the different ending accent on these words, they sound quite similar.

Or, for example, the word “phrase” (which is the same in French), which Barat concludes comes from the Hebrew three-letter root “paras” or “faras,” from the word “lifrosh,” meaning to interpret. In Spanish, the word is frase, in Romanian fraza as well, and the same sound in Russian. The Online Etymology Dictionary says the word comes from the Greek frasi, but Barat infers it originates in Hebrew.

The word loco in Spanish means “crazy,” “distraught” or “deranged,” and according to dictionaries it comes from the Andalusian Arabic lawqa, signifying a foolish person. Barat theorizes that it comes from the Hebrew word laka, meaning to be defective, to become ill or to receive lashes.

In Aramaic (a Semitic language that replaced Hebrew for local Jews and was displaced by Arabic in the seventh-century C.E.), laka means to be stricken with a disease. The Hebrew word likui means suffering from a deficiency.

Another is the word habitat, which Barat thinks comes from the Hebrew word for house, bayit (בית) or ha-bayit. The Online Etymology Dictionary puts it as originating in 1762 as a Latin term on English flora and fauna, literally “it inhabits.”

Also, “the word alphabet comes from Hebrew,” claims Barat, noting that it is credited to having a Greek origin. Aleph is the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet, and bet is the second and the equivalent to the English “b.” The letter “d” in English is usually attributed to the Greek delta, “but I think it refers to the fourth Hebrew letter, daled.”

Academics remain skeptical, but…

Asked if there is any way to prove the origins of words beyond theorizing one way or the other, Barat responded: “It is not about proving it, just connecting words that are close. Nobody really knows definitively where many words originate.”

Professor Gerald Leonard Cohen, an expert in etymology at the department of arts, languages and philosophy at the Missouri University of Science and Technology, told JNS that Barat’s arguments would receive sharp criticism from academics, who would point out the weaknesses in his suggestions.

For example, Barat claims that the word “alphabet” comes from Hebrew, but actually, “it derives from Phoenician. The Greeks had considerable contact with the Phoenicians, and the Phoenician language was very similar to Hebrew.”

According to the Encyclopedia Britannica, Phoenicians were merchant traders that by the second-millennium BCE “had colonies in the Levant, North Africa, Anatolia and Cyprus.”

“Their alphabet became the basis of the Greek alphabet,” it stated.

Cohen noted that “the Greeks borrowed the alphabet from the Phoenicians, making several changes along the way.” For instance, the Phoenician language did not have letters for vowels, and so Greek needed to develop them. And aleph bet (alphabet) wound up as alphabēt-os in Greek.

But on a positive note, continued Cohen, “amid all the fanciful suggestions, Barat may have wound up spotting a few items that really are worth pursuing, and perhaps other scholars will develop them into polished, scholarly articles.”

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