Last Daily Yiddish Newspaper Is Expected to Fold

The world’s last daily Yiddish newspaper, Unzer Wort, or Our Word, will fold at the end of this month, victim of the rising costs that have killed several bigger French dailies, staff members said Tuesday.

Unzer Wort had dwindled to three or four issues a week in recent years.

It was staffed by half a dozen full-time personnel, mostly in their late 70s, aided by volunteers who sought to preserve the former language of East European Jewry.

The newspaper, whose now-aged French readers were former immigrants who came to France from East European countries in the 1930s and ‘40s, got a new lease on life with the fall of communism.

Subscription demands arrived from East European countries where small Jewish communities had survived Nazi extermination and anti-Semitic Communist pressures, and daily circulation had crept up to 4,000. But new costs made closing the paper inevitable, staff members said.

Sales were several times higher in the 1950s, when three Yiddish dailies appeared in Paris.