According to a World Jewish Congress study, there has been a sharp decline in the use of Jewish languages — principally Yiddish — in the Soviet Union to the point where only 14 percent of the country’s Jews now name a Jewish language as their mother tongue. The percentage of Jews giving the Jewish language as their mother tongue ranged from a low of nine percent in the Ukraine to a high of 41 percent in the tiny Baltic Republic of Lithuania among the 11 Republics for which data has been assembled. However, even the high figure for Lithuania represents a significant drop from the 62 percent reported some nine years earlier.
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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.
