Farewell Banquet Program

Program for the farewell banquet in honor of Mr. Eliezer Ben-Yehuda

February 26, 1919, at Chaliff’s, New York City

New York: J. Blitt & Co., 1919

When World War I spread to Palestine in 1914, it was unsafe for the lexicographer Eliezer Ben-Yehuda (1858–1922) and his manuscripts of the new dictionary of the Hebrew language to remain in Jerusalem. He agreed to temporarily leave Palestine and come to New York, where he stayed until the end of the war in 1918. The prominent Jewish American bankers, businessmen, and political figures Jacob Wertheim, Jacob Schiff, Felix Warburg, Julius Rosenwald, and Herbert Lehman formed a small committee to bring Ben-Yehuda and his family to New York to ensure that he could safely continue his work on the Complete Dictionary of Ancient and Modern Hebrew. 

With the help of U.S. Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire Henry Morgenthau, banker Jacob Schiff, and Richard Gottheil, head of the Oriental Division of The New York Public Library, Ben-Yehuda was installed in room 222 of the Library, next to the Jewish Division’s reading room. His years at the Library were highly productive—he was able to complete most of his research on the remaining letters of the Hebrew alphabet there. 

But by the beginning of 1919, after the end of World War I, he was ready to return to Jerusalem. On February 26, 1919, Histadruth Ivrit of America, a society promoting the Hebrew language in the United States, and the Ben-Yehuda Jubilee Committee hosted a farewell dinner in his honor at Chaliff’s restaurant in New York, where they presented him with a check for $10,000 from the American Jewish community to build a new house for his family in Jerusalem. The Dorot Division has a unique copy of the event’s program, which also features a lavish menu in Hebrew and English.