MONTREAL — The fate of the Jewish Program, the venerable hour-long radio show on CFMB that has run at noon on Sundays for 47 years, will not be decided until mid-August, the station’s programming director, Walter Centa, told The CJN.
“It’s pending,” Centa said in a telephone interview. “We’re not precipitating on any decision. We will probably wait until some time in August to come down with a final verdict.”
The show’s future became uncertain following the June 7 death of Nachum Wilchesky, its founder and producer since 1962, the same year CFMB began broadcasting.
Centa said the possibilities include the Jewish Program’s being cancelled or moved on the program grid. “We won’t rule either out,” he said.
Centa noted that CFMB, which airs at 1280 kHz on the AM band, is licensed by the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) as a private/public broadcaster. He said the station is required by its mandate to air in at least 19 languages weekly.
However, Centa noted: “It is becoming more difficult to maintain 19 languages while at the same time maintain[ing] revenue throughout the 19.”
Part of the problem seems to be that there is no accurate way to assess how many people listen to CFMB programs because the Bureau of Broadcast Measurement (BBM), which measures the ratings of television and radio stations, surveys only those that broadcast in English and French.
Therefore, Centa said, a potential CFMB advertiser “usually has an affinity with a third language, and therefore, does not require numbers, [as] media advertising agencies [do].
“We have never generated figures on market share.”
Miriam Samuels, a former actor with the Yiddish theatre who took over the English, Yiddish and Hebrew-language show during Wilchesky’s final weeks, is now listed on the CFMB website as its producer.
Samuels has produced three shows since Wilchesky’s death, but said the situation is “week to week.”
“If I stay well, I could do it,” said Samuels, who is a senior. “I would like to continue it if possible,” she added, using a “simple” format of music, interviews and the like.
After starting to host the show, she found she was “OK at it, something I did well.”
All the materials Wilchesky used for the Jewish Program were his own and are in the family’s possession, Samuels said, but for now, she has been able to use materials from the Jewish Public Library.
Another Jewish-oriented show called Chai Montreal, produced by Milton and Lisa Winston, airs in English in the Sunday 1 to 2 p.m. slot, immediately after the Jewish Program.
The two one-hour shows are the only Jewish content on CFMB, which broadcasts at 50,000 watts. Its coverage extends as far as Mont Tremblant to the north, Ottawa to the west, Quebec City to the east, and Plattsburgh, N.Y., to the south.
Other languages heard on CFMB include Italian, Spanish, Greek, Portuguese, Polish, Russian, Chinese, Persian and Bengali.
In saying that cancellation is being considered as an option for the Jewish Program, Centa also conceded that “any changes come with its negatives and positive.
“I’m not going to shy away from the fact that revenue has to be part of the equation,” he said.
Then, alluding to the revenue challenges of Radio Shalom (CJRS), the non-profit all-Jewish content community radio station that airs on the AM band at 1650 kHz, Centa said: “We know, unfortunately, how things are at the other radio station, with all-Jewish content. I’m not inventing that. The papers have brought that forth.”
CFMB was founded in 1962 by Casimir Stanczykowski, a Polish immigrant who, as a teen, fought the Nazis in the Polish underground.
He died in 1981 in a traffic accident.
