Complain of Slight Use of Yiddish As Jewish Workers Increase in Soviet Russia

The chair left vacant by the late Gustave Steiner, President of the Astoria Center of Israel, for five consecutive terms, was filled by Bernard D. Klein, First Vice-President, at the annual meeting of the membership of the Astoria Center of Israel, at the Center building in Long Island City.

The Yiddish language is little used for purposes of political and cultural work among the Jewish workers in the factories and industrial enterprises, the Yiddish Communist daily “Emess” complains.

The number of Jewish workers in heavy industry grows from day to day, it points out. Kiev alone now has forty thousand Jewish workers, the majority of them engaged in heavy industry. The number of Jewish members in the industrial professional union in the Ukraine, which in 1926 was ninety-six thousand, grew by 1931 to two hundred and twenty-six thousand, which represents an almost four-fold increase, the paper declares.

The growth in the number of Jewish workers in Central Russia is even greater. In the Moscow electrical station three thousand Jewish workers are employed. On the automobie works at Stalin there are thirteen hundred Jewish workers. In the shoe factory “Paris Commune,” there are over two thousand Jewish workers. Many thousands of Jewish workers are engaged in the dress factories. In the Leningrad shoe factory “Skorochod” nearly two thousand Jewish workers are employed, and there are a large number of Jews to be found in all other enterprises.

The great majority of Jewish workers come from the Jewish villages, the paper declares, and have not yet become assimilated in the proletarian melting pot. Many of them still speak Russian badly, in spite of which the Yiddish language is not used among them. In the factory “Petrowski” in Cherson, nine hundred Jewish workers are employed, but the entire work is conducted in Russian, and similarly in other Cherson factories where the Jewish workers number between sixty and seventy per cent. In the Minsk factory “Octiabr” there are a thousand Jewish workers, but throughout the premises not even a single notice appears in Yiddish.

The factory organization justifies itself by putting forward the excuse that it is conducting its work internationally, and therefore it is not necessary for it to devote special attention to Yiddish. This, however, the Yiddish press points out, is only a chauvinistic excuse which must be combatted.

The chair left vacant by the late Gustave Steiner, President of the Astoria Center of Israel, for five consecutive terms, was filled by Bernard D. Klein, First Vice-President, at the annual meeting of the membership of the Astoria Center of Israel, at the Center building in Long Island City.Other officers elected were Dr. Mandel Weinstein, Dr. Jacob N. Feinberg, and Henry Rubinstein, Vice-Presidents; Jacob Klein, Treasurer: Hyman Zipes. Financial Secretary and Dr. Samuel Streim, Recording Secretary.