Learning Hebrew at Case Western Reserve University may not only be enriching but entertaining.

CWRU's new Hebrew instructor Omri Yavin from Tel Aviv is an award-winning Israeli playwright and scriptwriter who has more than 18 years of experience in reaching Israeli audiences through television, film, videos, plays and books.

photo by Susan Griffith Omri Yavin teaches CWRU's new Hebrew classes.

Yavin came to CWRU this semester from the University of Michigan. Over the past year, he was a visiting instructor for Hebrew classes in Michigan's Near Eastern Studies Program

Prior to coming to the United States, he taught a variety of classes that ranged from Hebrew prose at Ben-Gurion University in Be'er Sheva to script and drama writing at The School of Art in Beit Berl College and Open University.

Since his graduation from the department of cinema and television at Tel-Aviv University and later his graduate degree in Hebrew drama from Ben-Gurion University, Yavin says his life has followed parallel paths-a creative one and an academic pedagogic one.

"These two complementary directions have helped me focus on my real interest-the dramatic text," Yavin said. "I was brought up in Israel and scenes of the land had become my own flesh and blood; however, it has been always difficult for me to see my homeland as a solid part of my identity."

He finds this "problematic connection" between identity and territory the essence of Israeli drama. This issue surfaces in various forms in his plays and scripts.

A new work of his is "The Calf that Saved the World, Almost." It recently received funding from the Israeli Film Fund to go into production in the near future.

"It concerns Israeli and Arab farmers trying to overcome their mutual hatred to create together a new species of cattle that is going to be the ultimate solution to the 'Hole in the Ozone" problem," Yavin said.

Yavin's writing has earned several awards. He won the Outstanding Play Award at the 2002 Haifa International Festival for Children's Plays for his work, "Operation Gazoz," which is a story of the early Tel Aviv and told through the view of a donkey, which is helping the city's inhabitant recover a favorite drink stolen by the occupying Turkish Army.

In 1998, his script for the full-length film, "Two Chinese Men," won the Golden Feather Award from the Israeli Association of Composers and Authors. The script tells about the voyage of two Chinese men running away from a construction site in Israel to return to China.

"I tried to show how the moral standards of Israeli society had deteriorated and how the society became a 'patron-exploiter' completely losing its innocence," Yavin said.

Also, the 1989 David Pinsky Haifa Award was given to him for his play, "The Rise and Demise of Paulus von Heitzen," based on the novel, Ahasver by Stephan Heim.

Among other creative endeavors were children's plays and programs aired on Israeli Public Television (Channel 1). Some of those shows were "Hoppa Hey," "The Friends of Shoosh," "Tailing the News" and "In Danny's Room."

Yavin recently talked about how he traveled to the United States to give his three children—especially the two daughters now in Roxboro School in Cleveland Heights—an experience in learning English. After seven months of immersion in school, they became comfortable with English and the American classroom just as it was time to return home.

In theater, as in academics, timing is important.

Yavin's desire to stay in the United States came just as CWRU's biblical Hebrew instructor Cindy Chapman from the religion department earned her Ph.D. from Harvard University and found a new position.

Meanwhile, Peter Haas, the Abba Hillel Silver Professor of Jewish Studies and director of the Rosenthal Center, began talks with the modern languages and literatures department's former chair Margaretmary Daley and then Marie Lathers, the Treuhaft Professor of Humanities and French and current department chair, about teaching modern Hebrew.

"Those who know modern Hebrew can easily recognize and read biblical Hebrew," said Haas, adding, that those students with only biblical Hebrew will have difficulty reading and speaking modern Hebrew.

Haas also explained that over the past 50 years, the Israelis have perfected the teaching of Hebrew in as short a time as six months in response to immigrants from Russia, Ethiopia and other places around the world.

With funding from the Samuel Rosenthal Center and the College of Arts and Science, the modern languages department began "Introduction to Hebrew" and "Intermediate Hebrew" with sequence courses to follow in the upcoming semester.

Lathers expressed her excitement that the department now could offer a new language that has importance in the world we live in today. Yavin's arrival at CWRU enables the department to expand its language offerings to eight languages. Students now have the option of studying French, Spanish, German, Italian, Japanese, Russian and Chinese.

If the University approves a new interdisciplinary minor in Judaic Studies, the Hebrew classes will become part of the course of study for the minor.