The second Polish census will be taken on December 9th., and there will be a quarter of a million voluntary enumerators going about that day from house to house to register every inhabitant on Polish territory, the Yiddish daily “Volkscajtung” writes. The first census was taken on September 30th., 1921, it proceeds, but that was just after the Bolshevik invasion and everything was in a state of confusion, so that the census was not as complete and as accurate as it should have been. That was so particularly in the case of the national minorities. The enumerators paid little attention to the point about registering Ukrainian, Jewish or White Russian nationality. Many of them were concerned to increase artificially the number of Poles and make the proportion of minorities seem less important than it is. This time, when we are having our second census, the paper says, we must see to it that the question of the minorities is taken into proper account.
The President of the Warsaw City Council and the head of the Warsaw Statistical Office, Professor Limanowski, it continues, called a meeting of press representatives this week in order to get them to give publicity in their papers to the facts about the census. A Jewish pressman asked whether any arrangement was being made to allow the census forms to be filled in one of two languages, either in Polish or in the language of one of the national minorities in the country, Ukrainian, Yiddish or White Russian. Professor Limanowski replied that the Jewish population presented a great many difficulties in regard to the census, and the question would have to be given special attention. The language problem was a very real one, he said. He admitted that many members of the national minorities did not know sufficient Polish to be able to fill in their census forms in Polish, but the census forms have not yet been printed, he added, and the question will be finally decided by the various Ministries concerned.
The upshot of it is, the “Volkscajtung” comments, that in the present census, too, we are faced by the danger that the enumerators may use their positions in order to make it appear that the population of Poland of Polish nationality is larger than it really is, at the expense of the minorities. We must therefore insist that there should be a sufficient number of enumerators appointed who know Yiddish or the particular language of the various other minorities, and who know the conditions of Jewish, Ukrainian or White Russian life. We must also demand that there should be a Yiddish text on the census forms, for, it says, if the Polish Government can propose to the League of Nations that it should publish its information pamphlets in Yiddish, it must recognise the rights of the Yiddish language in its own country. If the Government wants to know the facts about each section of the population, it can do it only by approaching each citizen in his own tongue and the Jewish citizens must be approached in Yiddish.
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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.
