"Hatikvah" (The Hope)

"Hatikvah" (The Hope)
Is the national anthem of Israel. The anthem was written by Naphtali Herz Imber, a secular Galician Jew from Zolochiv (today in Lviv Oblast),who moved to the Land of Israel in the early 1880s. The anthem's theme revolves around the nearly 2000-year-old hope of the Jewish people to be a free and sovereign people in the Land of Israel. The text of Hatikvah was written by the Galician Jewish poet Naphtali Herz Imber in Zolochiv in 1878 as a nine-stanza poem named Tikvateynu (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, Barkai (lit. "Morning Star"), the poem was subsequently adopted as the anthem of Hovevei Zion and later of 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.
A former member of the Sonderkommando reports that the song was spontaneously sung by Czech Jews in the entryway to the Auschwitz-Birkenau gas chamber in 1944. While singing they were beaten by Waffen-SS guards.
When the State of Israel was established in 1948, Hatikvah was unofficially proclaimed the national anthem. However, it did not officially become the national anthem until November 2004, when it was sanctioned by the Knesset in an amendment to the Flag and Coat-of-Arms Law.

TRANSLITERATION ENGLISH
Kol ‘od balleivav penimah.........As long as in the heart, within,
Nefesh yehudi homiyah,............A Jewish soul still yearns,
Ul(e)fa’atei mizrach kadimah,.....And onward, towards the ends of the east,
Ayin letziyon tzofiyah;...........An eye still gazes toward Zion;
Od lo avdah tikvateinu,...........Our hope is not yet lost,
Hatikvah bat shnot alpayim,.......The hope of two thousand years,
Lihyot ‘am chofshi be’artzeinu,...To be a free people in our land,
Eretz-tziyon (v)'Y(e)rushalayim