Official Soviet figures on the distribution of various nationalities in the Soviet Union, made available here today, indicated that the proportion of Jews to the general population ranged from a high of 20.4 percent in Czernowitz to a low of 4.7 percent in Moscow.
The data, based on information from the Soviet Central Statistical Bureau, also cited naming by Jews in various cities and regions of their mother tongue. Those naming Yiddish as such ranged from a high of 75 percent of all Jews in Kovno to a low of 37 percent of Jews in Tashkent.
The figures also showed that Jews were 19.9 percent of the population of Kishinev and of Kiev, 14.8 percent in Odessa, 11 percent in Homel, 9.5 percent in Shitomir, 6.9 percent in Vilna, 5.6 percent in Leningrad and five percent in Riga. The Jews naming Yiddish as their mother tongue also included 70 percent of the Vilna Jews, 48 percent of the Riga Jews and 43 percent of the Kishinev Jews.
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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.
