A sharp decline in the use of the Jewish language is disclosed today in the re### of a survey made in Minsk, the capital of Soviet White Russia.
The survey shows that the number of readers of Jewish books in the Minsk Central Library has decreased from 29,000 in 1928 to only 7,000 this year. This is at a time when the number of readers in the non-Yiddish departments of the library has considerably increased.
The decrease cannot be explained by lack of government subsidy for the library, since the budget of the library has been increased constantly during the last five years. The local government has also increased the number of books in the Jewish department of the library. The Moscow press demands that the White Russian Commissariat of Education should start an investigation to establish the reasons for the apathy of the Jewish readers.
More than 14,000 sets of various Jewish newspapers and periodicals from all parts of the world are now ###e possession of the Press Archive of the Institute for Jewish Proletarian Culture in Kiev, the Moscow press reports. The Institute receives daily 250 periodicals from different parts of Soviet Russia and foreign countries. The Institute serves with its Press Archives individual research workers as well as Soviet institutions interested in studying Jewish life all over the world.
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