Yiddish Press in Soviet Loses Many Readers

The circulation of the Jewish Communist press is constantly decreasing among the Yiddish speaking workers in the factories and works, the Kharkov Yiddish daily Stern complains.

Berditchev, which a couple of years ago had a large number of subscribers to the Stern, has only 118 now. Mostly they are members of the artisan cooperatives and very few of them workers.

At Dniepropetrovsk (Eketeranoslav) the industrial center with thousands of Jewish workers in the metal works and in other works, the Stern has no more than 331 subscribers. The total number of subscribers to any of the Yiddish papers in towns like Zaporke, Herson, Nikolae, Zinovievsk, Stalino, Poltava, etc., is ridiculously small. Nikolae, for example, has thirty-seven, and Zinoviesk eleven. The same decline is observed also in small towns.

“The belief that most of Jewish readers are not interested in Yiddish must be emphatically refuted,” the paper said. “The blame lies with the local party and trade union organizations. We have found in practice that where there is a big political enlightenment movement there is a demand for the Yiddish press and the Yiddish book. For instance, the town Shpole is no bigger than the town Vasilkov and yet there are fifty-four subscribers to the Stern in Shpole and only four in Vasilkov. Zvenigrodko has sixty-two subscribers and Korostishev nineteen. Horodnice, Kanive and several other towns have one subscriber each, while Bar, which is no bigger, has 112.”

The paper concluded by demanding that the local party workers see to it that another 1,000 readers are obtained for the Stern in time for the tenth anniversary for the paper, which occurs shortly.