City College’s Institute of Yiddish Lexicology has received $90,000 in grants, $45,000 each from the National Endowment for the Humanities and The American Friends of the Hebrew University, it was announced today by Dr. R. E. Marshak, president of City College. The Institute of Yiddish Lexicology is under the direction of Prof. Nathan Susskind of the College’s Department of Germanic and Slavic Languages.
It was established at the College in 1965, for the purpose of compiling a “Great Dictionary of the Yiddish Language,” one which would “contain all the wealth created in Yiddish during the past one thousand years,” Prof. Susskind said. The third volume of the Dictionary will be issued this spring, bringing the number of definitions of Yiddish words covered so far to 60,000. The entire Dictionary is expected to consist of at least ten volumes.
Work on the Dictionary originally began long before World War II in Eastern Europe. However, materials collected at that time were either lost or destroyed due to the war. Present work dates back to 1953 when a group of distinguished academic and lay leaders agreed, in cooperation with the YIVO Institute for Jewish Social Research in New York, to resume work on the Dictionary. A native of Czechoslovakia, Prof. Susskind came to this country in 1921, graduated from City College in 1929, and currently resides in Elmhurst, N.Y.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
