A total of 82,448 Canadian Jews gave Yiddish as their “mother tongue” in the 1961 census, out of 254, 368 who gave Judaism as their religion, according to a breakdown of data on the 1961 count revealed here today by the Dominion Bureau of Statistics.
While the number of persons indicating their religion as Jewish had more than doubled in the 40-year period from 1921 to 1961–from 125,445 in the former year–the percentage of Jews giving their mother tongue as Yiddish has dropped steadily. In 1931, 95.4 percent of the Jews claimed Yiddish as their mother tongue; in 1941, the percentage was 76.2; in 1951, a little more than half, or 50. 6 percent specified Yiddish; but by 1961 the percentage had gone down to 32.4.
The term “mother tongue” is defined in the Canadian census as “the language a person first learned in childhood and still understands and, in the case of infants, the language spoken in the home, ” In general, the data showed, the percentage of the Jewish population reporting Yiddish as the mother tongue is larger in the bigger communities, smaller in the smaller cities or in the suburbs.
Broken down by the three largest centers of Jewish population–Montreal, Toronto and Winnipeg–the figures showed these changes in the 20-year period, 1941-1961; In Montreal, the 1961 percentage of Yiddish-mother-tongue Jews was 37.7, compared with 79. 9 in 1941; in Toronto, the 1961 figures showed 47. 5 percent as against 79. 2 percent in 1941; in Winnipeg, the 1961 percentage was 46.5 compared with 90.1 percent in 1941.
The census data also showed that, in the 10-year period 1951-1961, about 37, 000 Jewish immigrants had been admitted into Canada.
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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.
