SUPPRESSION OF YIDDISH PRESS AND SPEECH
It appears also that the similarity of the Yiddish and German languages further laid the Jews open to distrust. The use of Yiddish, in conversation, in correspondence, over the telephone, in the theatre, etc., was prohibited by legal, military and civil authorities under penalty of heavy fine and imprisonment. In Lodz, Vilna, Riga, Warsaw, and other Jewish centers, the performance of plays in Yiddish was prohibited and theatres closed.
Letters from foreign countries to Russia, in any language except Yiddish were generally passed by the censor after scrutiny, but letters in Yiddish were as a rule not delivered at all.
In July, 1915, the commander of the Russian forces issued the following absolute order:
“On the basis of the power entrusted to me according to Paragraph 6, Article 415, Section 6, I prohibit postal and telegraph communications within the district occupied by the army entrusted to me, in the Jewish, German, and Hungarian languages.”[33]
By this order the Russian government not only branded the entire Jewish people as spies and traitors, but also prevented hundreds of thousands of Jewish soldiers at the front from communicating with relatives and friends, because many of the soldiers had been prevented by educational restrictions from learning to read and write Russian. To the Jewish soldier unable to read or write was thus denied even that scant comfort which his Russian comrades might derive from the stereotyped communications checked on the regulation postal card and mailed by field-post.
At the beginning of the war the military censors assumed command of the entire press of Russia. That they used their power with the utmost unfairness against the Jewish press was charged without contradiction in the Duma by Professor Milyukov, Deputies Bomash, Suchanov and others, who pointed out that if the aim of the censor was to suppress every truth and encourage every lie against the Jews, they could not possibly have pursued a more consistent policy. Deputy Bomash furnished the following concrete instances of perversion of facts by the censorship.
1. It systematically expunged or mutilated the names of Jews to whom the cross of St. George had been awarded.[34]