(Jewish Telegraphic Agency Mail Service)
Data on the participation of Jews in the Communist Party in Russia were published here by the Yiddish Institute of Science.
The importance of the Jews in the Communist Party has very largely diminished, because the number of non-Jewish communists has grown in the same period in a much greater proportion, the figures show. The Jews in the Communist Party form at present 3.6 per cent of the total membership of the Party as against 5.2 per cent in 1922.
With the general increase of the membership, the number of Jews who are members has also increased. In 1922 the Jewish membership was 19,562; at the beginning of 1926 they numbered 37,000.
About half the Jewish Communists are active in the central Russian provinces. Their percentage to the general number of Communists in these provinces is less than 3 per cent, because these provinces are the centre of gravity of the Communist Party.
In the Ukraine there are 14,353 Jewish Communists and in White Russia, 3,922.
The mass of the Russian Communist Party consists of town-dwellers. The non-Jewish town population contains more Communists than the town dwelling Jewish population. Of the non-Jewish population in the towns in the Ukraine, 23 in every thousand are Communists as against only 9 in every thousand among the town-dwelling Jews.
The majority of the Jewish communists are engaged in general party work and have no connection and rarely any interest in Jewish affairs, so that the Jewish Communist Section, which concentrates in itself the whole work among the Jewish population, consists all in of only about 2,000 members.
There are 121 Jewish Soviets in the Ukraine. the figures further show, and these 121 places have a Jewish population of about 200,000. This means that about 15 per cent of the Jewish population in the Ukraine is governed by Jewish self-administrative organs conducting their business in Yiddish. The non-Jewish population which in these places constitutes a minority is dealt with by the Soviets in their own respective tongues.
None of the leading Jewish Communists, like Trotsky, Kameneff and Zinovieff was elected to executive office at the Communist Party Congress in Moscow yesterday, despatches from Moscow state.
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.
