Hatikvah - History - Lyrics

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The text of Hatikvah was written in 1878 by Naphtali Herz Imber, a Jewish poet from Złoczów, a city often referred to by its nickname, "The City of Poets" in the province of Galicia, Austro-Hungary, (today Zolochiv, Ukraine). N.H.Imber emigrated to Eretz Israel in the early 1880s and lived in two or more of the first Jewish colonies . The foundation of Hatikvah is Imber's nine-stanza poem named Tikvatenu (lit: "Our Hope"). In this poem Imber puts into words his thoughts and feelings in the wake of the establishment of Petah Tikva, one of the first Jewish settlements in Ottoman Palestine. Published in Imber's first book (Jerusalem, 1886) called Barkai (lit: "The Shining Morning Star"), the poem was subsequently adopted as an anthem by the "Hovevei Zion" and later by the Zionist Movement at the First Zionist Congress in 1897. The text was later revised by the settlers of Rishon LeZion, subsequently undergoing a number of other changes.