Yiddish daily gives new life to ‘dying language’
It’ll be computer scrolling, not ancient scrolls, for Jewish culture lovers when the world’s most famous Yiddish newspaper relaunches its website on Monday in a bid to stave off extinction.
Forverts, founded in 1897 when Yiddish-speaking Jews from Eastern Europe were pouring into America, has been shrinking relentlessly in recent decades as new generations of immigrant families abandon their ancestral language.
But now the newspaper, which also appears in English as the Forward, will be reborn for the 21st century with a website targeting what the New York-based institution believes is an untapped younger and more international audience.
Publisher Sam Norich said Forverts has dropped from peak circulation of 250,000 a day in the 1920s, when it was one of the most widely read newspapers in the United States, to just 2,000 in a weekly edition.
Now the print publication will be cut to once a fortnight, while the currently barebones website will be transformed with news, blogs and podcasts from correspondents as far apart as Jerusalem, Buenos Aires and Moscow.
“We’re really putting our focus on the website as our main product, and the print will be a focus on the best of the website, rather than the website being a byproduct,” Norich said.
Before the state of Israel was created after World War II, Yiddish was the main language for the masses of Jews living in Europe, while Hebrew was confined to sacred use.
But Yiddish began vanishing once Hebrew was resurrected in Israel and immigrants in America started to switch over to English.
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