00H. [Over 100 Issues of the Forverts from the End of the Holocaust] Cahan, Abraham [Ab.], editor

FORVERTS. FORWARD. 117 OF 195 ORIGINAL COMPLETE WARTIME ISSUES FROM JANUARY 16 - JULY 29, 1945. VOLS. XLVIII-XLIX, WHOLE NUMBERS 17,195-17,389. [BROKEN RUN] פארווערטס

New York, N.Y. and Philadelphia: Jewish Socialist Press Federation, 1945. Item #43406

All 1st Edition. Original Newsprint, Unbound as issued, Full Newspaper Size (42 x 58 cm). Weekdays: 8 pages, Fridays 8-10 pages, Saturdays 10 pages, Sundays 14-16 pages (marked as "2 sections"), totaling 1136 pages among 117 Complete Issues. In Yiddish with occasional English.

Includes 96 New York editions and 21 Philadelphia editions from the end of WW II in Europe and the ongoing, nearly finished, war with Japan.
Issues include the moving Kroyvim Gezucht (“Seeking Relatives”) column, a standard part of the paper from its earliest days, but now serving an even more central role confirming the dead and uniting surviving family members as the Holocaust in Europe began to draw to a close.

Some news headlines from the front pages include:

Feb. 1: RUSSIANS 40 MILES FROM BERLIN
Feb. 2: RUSSIANS 30 MILES FROM BERLIN
March 16: THE AMERICAN ARMY'S OFFENSIVE MOVED TROOPS 200 MILES INTO GERMANY
March 18: PATTON'S ARMY TOOK KOBLENZ
March 20: PATTON'S ARMY TOOK MAINZ
March 24: THE ARMIES OF PATTON AND MONTGOMERY APPROACHED THE RHINE RIVER
April 15: AMERICA IS MOURNING OVER ROOSEVELT'S DEATH
May 2: HITLER TOYT [HITLER IS DEAD]
May 8: THE WAR IS OVER
May 31: RUSSIANS ARRIVE IN SAN FRANCISCO; THE BATTLE OF OKINAWA BEGINS; JAPAN IS INVADED
June 25: BY DEFEATING THE GERMAN WAR MACHINE, THE RED ARMY PARADED IN MOSCOW
June 27: SAN FRANCISCO CONFERENCE FOR THE UNITED NATIONS
July 27: THE LABOR PARTY WON ELECTIONS IN ENGLAND; ATTLEE IS THE PRIME MINISTER

During World War II, the Forverts employed several reporters who covered various aspects of the war on the front lines, in London and Moscow, and within Jewish communities affected by the conflict. Most of the photos printed in the Forverts are appearing publicly for the first time, direct from Forverts reporters themselves. Some photos also come from the Jewish Telegraph Agency (JTA), supplemented by occasional archival images of U.S. and British generals, Red Army commanders, Mussolini, Hitler, Himmler, and other Nazi officials.

A few photos include:

April 15: Funeral cortege of the late Franklin D. Roosevelt.
April 29: Caption – "Commanders toast junction. The commanding General of Russian 58th Infantry Division holds glass of vodka preparatory to toast celebrating Red-Yank junction at Torgau, with Maj. Gen. Emil Reinhardt (right) commanding 69th U.S. Infantry Division. Russian soldiers are in background."
May 6: Caption – "A sea of sourness, as far as the eye can see, the German soldiers captured by the Russians in Berlin."
May 8: Marshal Zhukov, Marshal Konev, Marshal Rokossovsky, Gen. Bradley, Gen. Montgomery, Gen. Clark, Gen. Simpson, Gen. Hodges, Gen. Patch, Gen. Patton.
May 20: Caption –"Up against a wall in Germany is seen here a group of Gestapo agents, seized for trial as war criminals."
June 29: Caption –"Night life in Paris."
July 1: Caption – "15,00 Yanks home. The Queen Elizabeth, 85,000-ton ship of joy, brings nearly 15,000 soldiers, sailors, nurses and civilians into New York harbor. Striking view was taken from Coast Guard helicopter." [The original picture is kept in the American (US) Embassy Second World War Photograph Library: Classified Print Collection, Catalogue number: NYP 74029]

Famously, the Forverts also included Yiddish cartoons. Some examples include:

In a boxing ring, a boxer is down ("Germany"), and his coach ("Goebbels") tries to revive him (March 11).
A harakiri knife is offered to a Japanese general on a velvet cushion (May 20).
President Truman plays piano and sings: "We don't want pieces of other countries, we don't need other peoples' money, we want peace for the whole world." Stalin and Churchill behind his back: "Nice tenor, but not for us" (May 29).
In a barber's shop, an American soldier ("Occupation army") cuts the hair of a Japanese in the form of rifle bayonets ("Militarism"). "I want your head clean" (July 1).
Fifty years later: - I am telling you, Hitler is dead! – I am pretty sure, Hitler is alive!
Churchill puts his head in the lion's mouth ("Elections"), Mussolini as a Roman Emperor, Mussolini as a beggarman, Hitler as a garden scarecrow, Truman tailors his suit using Roosevelt's sizes, Franco under narcotics, etc.

In addition to news about the war, issues also include opinion, a weekly supplement of photographs with captions in English, a satire section, and new publications of poetry and serialized literature. The paper also features in depth essays on a variety of topics, including History, Literature, Jewish Demography and Sociology, Economic issues, Jewish Thought, and Jewish life in Europe under the Holocaust.

”The first issue of Forverts appeared on April 22, 1897, in New York City. The paper was founded by a group of about 50 Yiddish-speaking socialists who had organized three months earlier as the Forward Publishing Association. The paper's name, as well as its political orientation, was borrowed from the German Social Democratic Party and its organ Vorwärts.
Forverts was a successor to New York's first Yiddish-language socialist newspaper, Di Arbeter Tsaytung (The Workingman's Paper), a weekly established in 1890 by the fledgling Jewish trade union movement centered in the United Hebrew Trades, as a vehicle for bringing socialist and trade unionist ideas to Yiddish-speaking immigrants, primarily from eastern Europe .
Chief among the dissident socialists of the Forward Publishing Association were Louis Miller and Abraham Cahan. These two founding fathers of The Forward were quick to enlist in the ranks of a new rival socialist political party founded in 1897, the Social Democratic Party of America, founded by the nationally famous leader of the 1894 American Railway Union strike, Eugene V. Debs, and Victor L. Berger, a German-speaking teacher and newspaper publisher from Milwaukee. Both joined the SDP in July 1897.
The circulation of the paper, which was described as one of the first national newspapers, grew quickly, paralleling the rapid growth of the Yiddish speaking population of the United States.
By 1912 its circulation was 120,000, and by the late 1920s/early 1930s, The Forward was a leading U.S. metropolitan daily with considerable influence and a nationwide circulation of more than 275,000 though this had dropped to 170,000 by 1939 as a result of changes in U.S. immigration policy that restricted the immigration of Jews to a trickle.
Early on, The Forward defended trade unionism and moderate, democratic socialism. The paper was a significant participant in the activities of the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union; Benjamin Schlesinger, a former president of the ILGWU, became the general manager of the paper in 1923, then returned to the presidency of the union in 1928. The paper was also an early supporter of David Dubinsky, Schlesinger's eventual successor.
In 1933-34, The Forward was the first to publish Fred Beal's eyewitness reports of bureaucratic privilege and of famine in the Soviet Union, accounts of the kind that much of the liberal and left-wing press disparaged and resisted. His story corroborated that of the paper's labor editor, Harry Lang, who had visited Soviet Ukraine.
In response to the first reports of atrocities against the Jewish population of German-occupied Poland, special correspondent A. Brodie complained of exaggerated dispatches and lack of facts. But as accounts accumulated in the winter of 1939-40 of mass arrests, forced labor, massacres, executions and expulsions, the paper discerned the outline of the unfolding Holocaust.
In 1953, The Forward took the position that Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were guilty but held that the death sentence was too harsh a punishment” (Wikipedia).

The paper was for a period known as “The Jewish Daily Forward;” Thus in the 1970s, Achvah, The Jewish Gay Union of the San Francisco Bay Area titled its newsletter, “The Jewish Gaily Forward.”

OCLC: 990401590. Extent of holdings are generally either fragmentary or not noted.

Various shades of toning, as expected, originally folded in quarters but now laying mostly flat (see photos). Minimal wear at folds, Minor tears on folds are seen in 22 issues. All issues are complete, with no missing or incomplete pages. Very Good Condition overall, very displayable. (HOLO2-163-30).

Price: $6,000.00