A Blast from Moment's (Yiddish) Past

Early 20th century Warsaw was a hotbed of Yiddish journalism. Thirty-eight percent of the city’s inhabitants were Jews: Most read only Yiddish and a smattering of Hebrew, so papers like the highly popular Der Moment (The Moment) were their primary source for news and entertainment. Did you read about the fistfight between 45-year-old Marsha Becker and her second husband, 25-year-old Yitskok Lerner, a waiter? Becker, a restaurant owner, was purportedly treating Lerner “as a servant,” so Lerner took Becker to rabbinical court to demand that she sign over the business to him. Der Moment described the scene: “Words were exchanged and Lerner slapped his wife. This didn’t seem to bother her at all and she blackened his face with the contents of an inkwell. No agreement was reached.”

The rabbinical court “was the place to find explosive stories,” says translator Eddy Portnoy, a professor of Yiddish at Rutgers University. Knowing their hard-working audiences were hungry for juicy news, Yiddish-speaking reporters hung around the court waiting for something to happen.

The entrepreneur who became Der Moment’s founder and editor was Zwi Hirsch Prylucki (also spelled Prilutski). A former journalist at a St. Petersburg Hebrew newspaper, Prylucki started Warsaw’s first Yiddish daily Der Veg (The Way) just after the 1904-1905 Polish revolution removed legal obstacles to an ethnic press. Although he knew that rabbinical court stories attracted readers, he believed that Yiddish journalism should be “a vehicle for popular education and for spreading a Jewish national renaissance,” says Kalman Weiser, professor of modern Jewish studies at Toronto’s York University.—Joan Alpert

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