Founded in 1897, the Jewish Daily Forward, or the Forverts as it was known in Yiddish to its readers, became a Jewish household name for decades. By the 1920s it was the most successful Yiddish newspaper in the US, selling over 250,000 copies a day.

Under the leadership of Lithuanian-born co-founder Abraham Cahan, it was synonymous with the voice of the Jewish immigrant and life on the Lower East Side, but also reported on major international events involving Jews. With the dwindling of Yiddish after the Second World War, the paper remodelled itself as an English-language weekly, and still covers all aspects of the Jewish world. Now it has opened its photo archive to produce a collection of images that chronicle Jewish life in the 20th-century. Here, we publish a selection.

A Living Lens: Photographs of Jewish Life from the Pages of The Forward is published by Norton, at £17.99