‘folkstimme’ Disputes Polish Official Who Claims Yiddish Has Diminishing Influence

Poland’s only Yiddish newspaper, “Folkstimme,” has taken issue with an official of the Polish Ministry of Education who claimed that the Yiddish language was having a diminishing influence in Jewish life. That dispute was the only item of opinion or comment to appear in the latest edition of the paper which has been reduced to weekly status after having appeared four times a week for the last 22 years.

The edition of Saturday, Sept. 21, just received here, carried no column of Jewish news from outside Poland, formerly a regular feature. There was no editorial. The column of excerpts from the Polish press was devoted to reprints of an article from the Polish magazine “Literary Life” by Stanislaw Mauersberg, director of the department for minorities education of the Education Ministry. Mr. Mauersberg dated the beginning of Jewish education in Poland from 1944 when Jewish schools were established as private institutions in Lublin. They were taken over by the Government in 1949, he said, at which time there were 18 Jewish schools in the country, five with Yiddish as their language of instruction and one with Hebrew. According to the writer, there were only 11 Jewish schools in 1950, none of them employing Yiddish or Hebrew as the language of instruction although Yiddish was taught as part of the language curriculum. “This was the result of the diminishing influence of Yiddish as, even in Israel, the official language is Hebrew,” Mr. Mauersberg wrote. Folkstimme said, in comment, that Yiddish was “far from being a dead language.” The paper expressed surprise that Mr. Mauersberg cited Israel in support of his contention. “There must be other reasons for the abolition of Yiddish as the teaching language in Jewish schools,” Folkstimme said.