The Soviet Government has been taking unusual steps to encourage the study of Yiddish, according to Western specialists who observe Jewish cultural trends in the Soviet Union.
A 40,000-word Russian-Yiddish dictionary, originally announced for publication in 1979, has been rescheduled for 1984; a Yiddish primer has appeared in 10,000 copies, and an advanced Yiddish study course has been set up in Moscow's Gorky Institute of Literature.
These moves in favor of Yiddish, the traditional language of Eastern European Jews, spoken by a quarter million people in the Soviet Union, come at a time when departures of Jews have slowed to a trickle. The slowdown has prompted a campaign by Jewish organizations abroad to revive emigration.
The limited official support for Yiddish in recent years, compared with the full backing given to the languages of many smaller Soviet ethnic minorities, has often been cited as evidence of official bias. The recent developments are seen by some as a possible response.
Soviet Jews are classified as an ethnic group, and censuses report the ethnic affiliation and languages spoken by respondents. The 1979 count reported 1.8 million Jews, ranking the Soviet Union third in the number of Jews, after the United States and Israel.
Data from the 1979 census, analyzed in May 1981 by Dr. Lukasz Hirszowicz in the scholarly journal Soviet Jewish Affairs, indicated that about 250,000 people had listed Yiddish either as their mother tongue or as a second language. The journal is published in London by the Institute of Jewish Affairs, an affiliate of the World Jewish Congress.
Dr. Hirszowicz, who is the journal's editor, said in an interview by telephone that the new dictionary now promised for last quarter of 1984, had in fact been largely completed by 1948. In that year, Stalin suddenly suppressed Jewish cultural life with the arrest of 24 Yiddish writers and other prominent Jews. They were executed in August 1952.
The files of the Yivo Institute for Jewish Research in New York, at Fifth Avenue and East 86th Street, show no previous Russian-Yiddish dictionary published in the Soviet Union. According to Dina Abramowicz, the institute's librarian, there was a reverse dictionary, from Yiddish into Russian, and it appeared in Minsk in 1940.
Yiddish publication saw a modest revival starting in 1959 under Nikita S. Khrushchev, focusing on the Yiddish literary monthly Sovetish Heimland.
Further active promotion of Yiddish began in the last few years, according to another observer, Dr. Elias Schulman of New York, who is an adjunct professor of East European and Jewish studies at Queens College and a literary critic for The Jewish Daily Forward.
He said in an interview that, starting in 1980, Sovetish Heimland began publishing a regular book supplement with each monthly issue of the magazine to add to the few Yiddish-language books being printed by the Moscow publishing house Soviet Writer. The May 1983 supplement, according to Dr. Schulman, is by Morris Ghitzis of Chicago, an unusual case of a book by an American Yiddish writer being published.
According to the specialists interviewed, the Yiddish section in the Institute of Literature was set up in 1981, offering a two-year course to train professional Yiddish language editors, proofreaders and translators. The journal Sovetish Heimland was said to have provided the teaching materials.
The appearance of the Yiddish primer for elementary school, the first since World War II, was reported earlier this year in Sovetskaya Kultura, the Culture Ministry newspaper. The primer was published in Khabarovsk, the Soviet Far Eastern city that adjoins the so-called Jewish Autonomous Region of Birobidzhan, and no copy seems to have reached the West so far.
The need for printing as many as 10,000 copies is not clear, according to Dr. Hirszowicz in London, since the entire Jewish population of the region is only 10,000.
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