Hatikvah  "Hatikvah" (, , lit. English: "The Hope") is a 19th-century Jewish poem and the national anthem of Israel. The theme of the romantic composition reflects the Jews' 2,000-year-old hope of returning to the Land of Israel, restoring it, and reclaiming it as a free and sovereign nation. Its lyrics are adapted from a poem by Naftali Herz Imber, a Jewish poet from Złoczów (today Zolochiv, Ukraine), which was then in the Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria under Austrian rule. Imber wrote the first version of the poem in 1877, while he was a guest of a Jewish scholar in Iași, Romania. The text of Hatikvah was written in 1878 by Naphtali Herz Imber, a Jewish poet from Zolochiv (), a city nicknamed "The City of Poets", then in Austrian Poland, today in Ukraine. In 1882 Imber immigrated to Ottoman-ruled Palestine and read his poem to the pioneers of the early Jewish villages—Rishon Lezion, Rehovot, Gedera, and Yesud Hama'ala. Imber's nine-stanza poem, "Tikvatenu" ("Our Hope"), put into words his thoughts and feelings following the establishment of Petah Tikva (literally "Opening of Hope"). Published in Imber's first book , 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. Hatikvah was chosen as the organisational anthem of the First Zionist Congress in 1897. The British Mandate government briefly banned its public performance and broadcast from 1919, in response to an increase in Arab anti-Zionist political activity. A former member of the "Sonderkommando" reported that the song was spontaneously sung by Czech Jews at the entrance 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. It did not officially become the national anthem until November 2004, when an abbreviated and edited version was sanctioned by the Knesset in an amendment to the Flag and Coat-of-Arms Law (now renamed the Flag, Coat-of-Arms, and National Anthem Law).