The Hebrew alphabet lost five characters by a decree of the Ukrainian Commissariat of Education, acting upon request of the Jewish section of the Communist party.
The ancient alphabet has five double letters, for the sounds equivalent to ch, m, n, z, ph, the double being used only at the end of a word and called the final character. The Commissariat of Education now ordered the Yiddish language schools to eliminate from the reading and writing in the classrooms and in the publication of text books the “long chaf, long mem, long nun, long zadic, long phe.”
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