(1880–1963), revolutionary and publicist. Born in Dünaburg (Dvinsk; mod. Daugavpils, Latvia), Rafail Abramovich (originally surnamed Rein) studied in a modern (nonclassical) secondary school and later at Riga Polytechnic University. He was involved in the student revolutionary movement and in 1901 joined the Bund. He then began publishing in the revolutionary press in Yiddish.
(1917–1991), Communist ideologue, cultural tsar of Hungary in the post-1956 Kádár era. György Aczél grew up in an orphanage, worked in construction, and performed as an actor. He participated in the Ha-Shomer ha-Tsa‘ir youth movement and later joined the underground Communist Party in 1935. Arrested in 1942, he worked as a forced laborer. During the German occupation, he participated in the resistance movement and in rescuing Jews.
(1884–1947), Communist Party figure and historian. Born in Grodno, where he had a traditional elementary education, Samuil (also Shmuel or Sam) Agurskii joined the Bund during the revolution of 1905. From 1906 to May 1917 he lived in England and then America, where he was involved with the anarchist movement and wrote for the Yiddish press. Between July 1918 and March 1919 he was Jewish commissar in Vitebsk, where he published the Yiddish Communist newspaper Der frayer arbeter. Viewing EVKOM (the Commissariat for Jewish National Affairs) as an alternative to Jewish community organizations, he brought Vitebsk’s Jewish schools, Jewish charities, and burial society under its jurisdiction. In 1918 he joined the Russian Communist Party. In April 1919, after moving to Moscow, he and Stalin, then People’s Commissar for Nationality Affairs, signed the decree “About the Closure of the Central Bureau of Jewish Communities.” Between 1919 and 1923 he twice visited America, where he helped establish the Communist Party of the USA.
(1766–1828), Talmudist, kabbalist, and Hasidic master in Staroselye (Starosselje) in the province of Mohilev. In his youth, Aharon ha-Levi became a follower of Shneur Zalman of Liady, founder of Ḥabad (Lubavitch) Hasidism. Horowitz studied under the guidance of Shneur Zalman with Dov Ber, who was Shneur Zalman’s son and successor. The two were close companions until they had a serious quarrel; although this rift was of a personal nature, it was also over matters of Ḥabad philosophy: Dov Ber frowned on all but completely authentic ecstasy in prayer but Aharon was tolerant of even sham ecstasy.
(1878–1947), Hebrew and Yiddish writer. Zalman Aronsohn, known by the pseudonym Anokhi (“I Am”), was born in Liady, Belorussia, where his father served as rabbi and head of a yeshiva. Anokhi studied at the Telz yeshiva and with a circle of Musar scholars in Minsk; he then lived for a period of time in Gomel, dedicating himself to secular studies and associating with Hillel Zeitlin, Uri Nisan Gnessin, and Yosef Ḥayim Brenner. Anokhi then moved to Odessa, where he was arrested and jailed for six months because of his involvement with a group of anarchists. Following his release, he left for Vilna before traveling around Europe, and even spent a year in Palestine (1910–1911).
(ca. 1759–1837), scholar and chronicler. Born in Třebíč (Ger., Trebitsch), Moravia, Avraham Trebitsch was the son of Re’uven Ḥayat and his wife, Fradl. He studied at yeshivas in Mikulov (ca. 1771) and Prague (ca. 1775). Later that decade, he was based in Mikulov, where he held the post of secretary to the Moravian Land Rabbinate and became a close associate of Mordekhai Banet and Neḥemyah Trebitsch. Trebitsch gained “familiant” status (i.e., the right to reside [and marry]) in Mikulov, started a family, and in 1799 purchased part of a house. He was, however, dependent on charitable donations from the Jewish community, and his daughters lived in poverty following his death.
(1596–1663), rabbi and halakhic authority in Poland–Lithuania. Born in Brest Litovsk, Avraham Yehoshu‘a Heshel moved with his father to Lublin when the latter was appointed rabbi of the community and head of the yeshiva. With the death in 1650 of Naftali ben Yitsḥak Kats, his father’s heir from 1644, Avraham Yehoshu‘a was appointed head of the Lublin yeshiva. In 1654, he became rabbi and head of the yeshiva of Kraków, succeeding Yom Tov Lipmann Heller.
(1846–1905), cantor and synagogue composer. Jacob Bachmann was born in the town of Berdichev, Volhynia province (present-day Ukraine). His early music education came as a meshoyrer (Heb., meshorer), an apprentice choir singer, for Moyshe Pasternak, a noted Berdichev cantor.
(1850?–1922?), banker, Zionist activist, and philanthropist. Nothing is known of Shemu’el Barbash’s childhood beyond the fact that he was given a traditional Jewish education. He also was familiar with modern Hebrew literature, had acquired some secular knowledge, and excelled in mathematics.
(1845–1923), rabbi, biblical scholar, and educator. Moritz (Me’ir) Beck was born in Pápa, Hungary, where he attended Jewish elementary school, Catholic secondary school, and Protestant high school. At the same time, he studied Hebrew, Torah, and the Talmud with a private tutor, Salomon Iosef Goldberg. In 1865, Beck left for Breslau to attend the Jewish Theological Seminary established by Zacharias Frankel, as well as the faculty of philosophy at the University of Breslau. In 1868, he earned his Ph.D. with a dissertation in biblical studies and in 1872 became a rabbi.
(1879–1953), engineer and Zionist leader. Growing up in the house on Dob Street in Budapest where Theodore Herzl’s uncle lived, Ármin Beregi knew Herzl personally. Beregi studied at the Technical University of Budapest and went on to work at the Ganz-Danubius factory as an engineer. While a student, he met Mózes Bisselisches, who later became a well-known Zionist leader. The two of them—with the help of several others—founded a group of Zionist organizations: Makkabea for university students (Beregi was its vice president in 1905), Ivria for high school students, Júdea for clerks, and Debóra for women.
(1916–1996), Yiddish novelist and critic; resistance fighter. Lili Berger (née List; “Lili Berger” is a pseudonym) was born in Malkin, in the Białystok region of Poland. Brought up in an Orthodox Jewish family, she attended Hebrew school for three years and also received a secular education at the Polish Jewish secondary school in Warsaw. In 1933, Berger moved to Brussels and studied pedagogy. Three years later she joined the growing number of Polish Jewish refugees in Paris and soon married Louis Gronowski, a leading figure in the Jewish section of the Communist Party.
(1789–1846), lieutenant colonel in the Polish armed forces at the time of the Duchy of Warsaw and during the January uprising of 1830–1831. Yosef Berkowicz was born in the Warsaw suburb of Praga, the only son of Berek Joselewicz. After attending Jewish schools, Berkowicz volunteered for military service in 1809 and served as a sergeant in the Napoleonic campaigns against Russia. In the course of these campaigns, he was wounded numerous times and received two medals for bravery. After the final defeat of the French Army, Berkowicz joined the army of the Kingdom of Poland; however, he was soon discharged (in March 1815) at his own request due to his previous injuries.
(1880–1968), mathematician. Born in Odessa, Sergei Bernshtein studied mathematics at both the Sorbonne and Göttingen, receiving his doctorate from the former in 1904. His dissertation presented the solution to Hilbert’s Nineteenth Problem, which dealt with analytic solutions of elliptic differential equations. Three famous mathematicians—Jacques Hadamard, Émile Picard, and Henri Poincaré—accepted his thesis. Upon arriving in Russia in 1905, however, Bernshtein learned that he would need to take general examinations and submit new dissertations for both master’s and doctoral degrees in order for his credentials to be recognized; he completed this work at Kharkov University.
(1855–1934), literary historian, ethnographer, critic, publisher, journalist, and educator. Henryk Biegeleisen was born in Touste (in the Skłatat region in eastern Galicia; a town with a population of 2,139 in 1880, of whom 40% percent were Jews). His father Wilhelm, a physician, had been a member of the National Guard in Lemberg (Lwów) during the Revolution of 1848 and belonged to a small circle of acculturated Jews in Galicia. On his mother’s side, Biegeleisen was a grandson of Naḥman Krochmal.
(1888–1949), poet and novelist. Elisheva Bikhowsky was born Elisabeta Zhirkova to a Christian family in Riazan, Russia. Her father, Ivan Zhirkov, taught at a rural elementary school and published schoolbooks and texts for general readers. Her mother, the daughter of an English family living in Moscow, died when Bikhowsky was three years old. Following her mother’s death, she was raised at the home of her English aunt in Moscow. There she studied at a girls’ high school and attended courses in pedagogy at a local teachers’ training institute, completing her program in 1910.
(d. 1625), merchant and banker. Although the Bocian family (also known as Poper or Popper) probably originated in Chęciny, its members were living in Kraków from the end of the fifteenth century. Volf (Ze’ev) Bocian, son of Yisra’el Gershon, was a merchant who became a supplier to the royal court of Sigismund III Waza.
(1832–1907), Czech industrialist, political leader, and historian. As the son of one of the most prominent Jewish families in nineteenth-century Prague, Bohumil Bondy himself became a major figure in the economic life of Bohemia and one of the leading entrepreneurs in the metal industry in the Czech lands. He demonstrated his unusual talents in this field during the economic crisis of 1873, when the factory he owned (located in Bubeneč, an industrial suburb of Prague) was the only one in Prague to survive the crisis without dismissing a single employee.
(1914–2000), Yiddish writer. Rokhl Boymvol was born in Odessa. Her father, Yehude Leyb (1892–1920), a Yiddish playwright and theater director, was murdered by Polish soldiers. A precocious child, Rokhl began rhyming even before she learned to read and write. Her first poetry collection, Kinderlider (Children’s Poems), appeared in Moscow in 1930. The literary critic Moyshe Katz wrote in his introduction, “Rokhl Boymvol is not a wunderkind who surprises by showing that a child can write exactly like a grown-up, seasoned master. She does it even better: in her writings we find what a grown-up master could not have done so honestly and naturally; she shows us the emotions of a maturing child.”
A small town in eastern Poland, south of Białystok. Brańsk was a royal town that was granted city rights under Magdeburg law in the fifteenth century. The privilege de non tolerandis Judaeis barred Jews from settling there, but in 1560 two Jews obtained permission from King Sigismund August to lease mills in the district. The town council granted them permission to reside in Brańsk on a temporary basis. Until the late eighteenth century, the number of Jews never reached more than a dozen. Many, however, lived on local estates belonging to the aristocracy and gentry who leased inns and mills to them. Larger Jewish settlements thus arose in the vicinity of Brańsk in private towns such as Tykocin, Orla, Boćki, Siemiatycze, and Ciechanowiec.
(1888–1960), philosopher, editor, and journalist. Born in Bosancea, Bucovina, Isac Brucăr studied philosophy in Bucharest, Jena, and Leipzig, receiving his doctoral degree in 1930 with a thesis on the philosophy of Spinoza, a recurrent topic of his later research. Brucăr combined an academic career, teaching at the department of psychology at the University of Bucharest, in different high schools, and, after World War II, at the Institute of Philosophy of the Romanian Academy. He also was a journalist who wrote for leading publications.
(1722–1811), medical doctor and early proponent of the Enlightenment among Polish Jews. Jacques Calmanson was born in Hrubieszów, Poland, where his father was probably a rabbi. Calmanson studied medicine in France and was fluent in French, German, and Polish as well as Yiddish and Hebrew. In addition to Germany and France, his travels took him to the Ottoman Empire and Russia. Calmanson eventually settled in Warsaw, serving as physician to the last Polish king, Stanisław August Poniatowski.
(1878–194?), impresario and theater director in Warsaw and Łódź. Dovid Celmajster was born in Warsaw into a merchant family. He received a thorough traditional education and a rudimentary secular education, and began working in theater in 1910, eventually with both popular and dramatic companies. In 1917, Celmajster produced the operetta Di dolar-printsesin (The Dollar Princess) at Kaminski’s Theater in Warsaw; in 1920 in Łódź he produced An-ski’s Der dibek (The Dybbuk), directed by Dovid Herman, with scenic design by Yitskhok Brauner (Broyner).
(1538–ca. 1615), rabbi. The family of Yitsḥak ben Avraham Chajes probably had its origins in Provence. He was active as a rabbi in Prostějov (Prossnitz, Moravia) and in Prague, where in the 1580s he became chief rabbi and head of the yeshiva. According to David Gans (Tsemaḥ David; 1592), Chajes remained in Prague until 1584, later moving to Poland.
Name of both a father and son who were Hungarian politicians and industrialists. Ferenc Chorin Sr. (1842–1925) was a leader in the mining industry; his son Ferenc Chorin Jr. (1879–1964) was a lawyer and industrial leader. Both served in the Hungarian parliament.
Jewish public bodies (communal and supracommunal councils) accumulated enormous debts running into hundreds of thousands of Polish zlotys in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and were unique to the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth. Though members of the aristocracy were sometimes lenders, the main creditors were overwhelmingly institutions of the Roman Catholic church, and some Greek Catholic and Greek Orthodox bodies lent money to Jewish institutions as well. Jewish public bodies were also among the church’s most important debtors; the numerous account books specifically for Jewish debts that many monastic orders held testify to this.
The word dog is used as a derogatory term in numerous biblical texts (Ps. 22: 17; 59:7, 15). The Talmud poses numerous restrictions on owning dogs, including “keeping them on a chain” (Bava kama 7:7), and also not owning angry dogs (15:2). While the Talmud, Shulḥan ‘arukh, and other Jewish sources disagree on what counts as an “angry dog” (one that bites, attacks, or barks), it is generally agreed that Jews are not supposed to own dogs that intimidate other people.
(1879–1959), Yiddish writer. Born into a poor family in Horodok, near Vitebsk, Tsadok Dolgopolski began working at a factory in Nevel while still young. In the late 1890s, he became an active member of the Bund and was imprisoned in Białystok. Self-taught, he passed the qualifying examinations for teachers and organized a school for Jewish children in his hometown. By 1898, he was writing short articles on labor issues for illegal and legal Yiddish periodicals.
(1876–1937), poet, journalist, art historian, and critic. Adolph Donath was born in Kromĕříž (Kremsier) in the Habsburg province of Moravia. After graduating from the German gymnasium in Kromĕříž in 1895, he moved to Vienna, where he studied law and philosophy (without taking a degree) and wrote for several newspapers, including the Neue Freie Presse, which was Vienna’s leading German-language daily, and Die Gesellschaft, a modernist cultural journal published in Leipzig (and later Munich).
(1910–1992), army general and public figure. After finishing the Frunze Military Academy in 1941, David Dragunskii commanded a tank battalion and then a brigade during World War II and was twice named Hero of the Soviet Union (in 1944 and 1945) for combat exploits in the crossing of the Vistula and the capture of Berlin. Altogether, he won 13 awards during his military career. He was one of a very few high-ranking Jewish officers who were retained in the armed forces after the late 1940s.
(1883–1968), Polish socialist politician. Bolesław Drobner (who used the pseudonym Jan Okoński) was born in Kraków to a well-known assimilated family. His grandfather had participated in the uprising of 1830 and his parents in that of 1863. In 1898, Drobner joined the Polish Social Democratic Party of Galicia and Silesia and between 1902 and 1906 was a member of the reformed Proletariat organization that took up the terrorist tradition of its predecessors and also organized strikes in the Kingdom of Poland during the Revolution of 1905–1907. Drobner himself took part in its activities in Warsaw, Łódź, and Sosnowiec.
Cases mounted in the first half of the 1960s in the Soviet Union involving a disproportionately high number of Jewish defendants. The nature of the Soviet regime—in which state ownership of all capital was a basic ingredient, and every sphere of life became highly politicized—made economic offenses political crimes of the first order. The phenomenon of economic trials dates from the regime’s inception, although the types of economic crime for which people were indicted and the harshness of the sentences varied from period to period.
(Fridliand; 1900–2008), Soviet political caricaturist and memoirist who was, for some time, the world's oldest living Jew. During his heyday, which lasted from the 1920s to the fall of the Soviet Union, Boris Efimov was an obedient satirist whose brilliant cartoons depicted Soviet policy on the pages of its major newspapers and magazines: Izvestiia, Pravda, and Krokodil. His career was interrupted for several years following the arrest in 1938 of his brother, the writer Mikhail Kol’tsov, who was shot as an enemy of the people in 1940. Efimov was devoted to his brother, trying to secure his release even after—unbeknownst to him—Kol’tsov had been killed. Either because he was valuable to Stalin or because of the peculiar randomness of the Soviet Terror, Efimov himself was spared and brought back to his former position, at first anonymously. He was the recipient of numerous Soviet medals and was named a member of the Academy of Arts. In addition to many collections of cartoons, he published four volumes of memoirs, beginning at age 70 and ending at 100.
(1925–1987), theater and cinema director. In 1943 Efros began studying at Iurii Zavadskii’s acting studio at the Mossovet Theater, where he played his first small roles. In 1945, on Zavadskii’s recommendation, Efros studied at the directing department of the State Institute of Theatrical Arts in Moscow. He completed his studies in 1949, at the height of the anticosmopolitan campaign, which made it impossible for him to obtain steady work in a Moscow theater. His efforts to pursue graduate studies (aspirantura) also proved unsuccessful.
Leaders in the textile industry of Moravia. The Ehrenstamm family came to prominence in the early nineteenth century. Its head was Veit Ehrenstamm (1760–1827), son of Salomon Jakob Kolin, a minor Jewish merchant from Prossnitz (Prostĕjov) who during the 1750s had been involved in the wool trade, purchasing fabrics from importers and then selling them piecemeal to hawkers and peddlers. After he lost his fortune as a result of the ban imposed by the Habsburg government on textile imports, his son, who had in the meantime adopted a German name, turned to different economic enterprises.
(1889–1968), jurist and legal scholar. After attending elementary and secondary school in Tarnopol and Lwów (then Lemberg), Ludwik Ehrlich studied philosophy, Polish studies, and law at the university in Lwów (1907–1911), graduating with a doctorate in law. He did supplementary studies at universities in Halle (1911–1912), Berlin (1913), and Oxford (1913–1916), and then lectured on modern history at Oxford (1916–1917) and at the University of California at Berkeley (1917–1920). In the United States, he supported the movement for Poland to regain independence, and worked for the inclusion of Upper Silesia in the Polish state.
(1930–1989), historian, writer, and publicist. From 1947 to 1952, Natan Eidel’man studied history at Moscow State University. Despite his academic brilliance, he was unable to pursue graduate studies (aspirantura) after his father, the journalist Iakov Eidel’man, was arrested in 1950 on charges of “bourgeois nationalism.” Natan Eidel’man instead found a position teaching history at a night school near Moscow, where he worked from 1952 to 1955.
(ca. 1530–ca. 1580), physician and skeptic. Born in Braunschweig, Germany, Eilburg moved to Poznań in 1546. After a brief stay there, he moved to Ancona, Italy, where he studied medicine. Around 1552, he moved to Oleśnica in Silesia, and subsequently appears to have lived in various places in that region, and perhaps Moravia or Poland. He was imprisoned twice and was perhaps excommunicated, though it is not clear if this was a result of his unorthodox views.
(1754–1823), Hasidic master. Kalonimos Kalman Epstein of Kraków was born in Neustadt (now Prudnik), Poland, to a prestigious rabbinic family. He is considered one of the most influential masters of the third generation of Hasidism. Epstein settled in Kraków early in his life and was primarily a disciple of Elimelekh of Lizhensk (1717–1786/87), who, as a student of Dov Ber, the Magid of Mezritsh (1704–1772), had been sent to Kraków to spread the teachings of the Ba‘al Shem Tov. When Epstein met Dov Ber, Kraków had no discernible Hasidic presence, and Epstein is considered to have been the first major Hasidic master in that city.
(1828–1908), Hungarian journalist, publisher, and member of parliament. Born into an impoverished merchant family in Pest, Miksa Falk began writing articles for both German- and Hungarian-language newspapers as early as age 14. In the wave of conversions during the 1840s, he and his brother Zsigmond became Christian. Of all of Falk’s associates, he alone retained a tenuous connection to Judaism. In 1847, he received a Ph.D. from the University of Pest and later continued his studies at the Vienna Polytechnic. In 1848, he returned to Pest, where he became an editor of the German-language newspaper Ungar during the first few months of the revolution. In September 1848, Falk returned to Vienna and lived there until 1867, writing political articles for several newspapers.
(1867–1945), painter. Born in Kecskemét, Hungary, Adolf Fényes was one of his country’s most distinguished Jewish painters. The motifs of his works can be considered a metonym for the struggle to create a Hungarian Jewish identity, particularly during the decades immediately before and following World War I.
(1896–1961), microbiologist and pioneer in the sociology of knowledge. Born in Lwów, Ludwik Fleck graduated from Lwów University’s medical school in 1920, eventually specializing in microbiology. In 1923 he married Ernestina Waldman; they had one son, Ryszard (Arieh), born in 1924. After 1925, Fleck headed a bacteriological laboratory at Lwów General Hospital and served as director of a private medical laboratory.
(1844–1896), labor activist and a leader of the Paris Commune. Leó Frankel was born into a large, wealthy German-oriented family in Óbuda, Hungary, where his father, Albert, was the official doctor of the city’s shipyard. The family sent Frankel to Germany in 1861 to learn to be a goldsmith. There he became involved with the labor movement, especially with the ideology of Ferdinand Lasalle.
(1863–1924), writer, journalist, and historian. Azriel Natan (Nosn) Frenk was a seminal figure in early Hebrew- and Yiddish-language journalism and literature in Warsaw. Renowned for translating the Zohar, Hasidic legends, and Polish literature, he also wrote numerous popular works on the history of Polish Jews.
(1756–1828), Hungarian maskil and rabbi. Born in a small community in southern Germany, David Friesenhausen studied with Yosef Steinhardt in Fürth. Mosheh Sofer, the rabbi of Pressburg, knew Friesenhausen in his youth and would later testify to his reputation as one of the outstanding students in the yeshiva. Until the age of 30, Friesenhausen devoted himself exclusively to Torah study, but then—seized by an intellectual restlessness—he immersed himself in mathematics and astronomy.
(1888–1967), Hungarian poet, playwright, novelist, essayist, and diarist. The descendant of the illustrious Fürst family, he dropped the “r” from Fürst for the more poetic Füst, meaning “smoke” in Hungarian. Milán Füst’s early poems appeared in Nyugat, the premier modernist literary journal in Hungary. His fame as a poet rests on several dozen poems, and he was among the first to introduce free verse into Hungarian poetry, though his poems are a blend of both classical and modern qualities. He produced verses that are universal and timeless expressions of the tragedy of the human condition, conveyed in language that is alternately high-flown and quotidian.
Prominent residents of Tartu (Ger., Dorpat), a town in eastern Estonia. Members of the Gensch family were active in the public and cultural life of the town from the nineteenth century. The father, merchant Barukh Gensch, was involved with local charitable associations, including the Lines Tsedek (Righteous Lodging for the Night) Society.
(1892–1946), architect, theorist, teacher, and a leader of the Constructivist group in Soviet avant-garde architecture. Moisei Ginzburg was born in Minsk into an architect’s family. With limited access to higher education in Russia, he went abroad for his architectural training. He gained a classical education in this field at the Academia di Belli Arti in Milan and then opted for more technical training at the Riga Polytechnical Institute, graduating in 1917. After spending four years in Crimea studying Tatar folk architecture, Ginzburg settled in Moscow, where he taught architectural history and theory at the Moscow High Technical School and in the architecture faculty at the Vkhutemas Art School.
(1878–1945), industrialist. Leó Goldberger studied at the Evangelical High School in Budapest and in 1900 received a juris doctor degree. In 1867, his grandmother had been Hungary’s first Jewish woman to be ennobled and had thus been allowed to use the predicate Budai (or Buday; “of Buda”) before her name; hence he is also known as Leó Budai-Goldberger. As the second-born son, Goldberger did not at first intend to continue the tradition of working in his family’s factory. But after the early death of his older brother in 1913 and a long period of recession, he took over the management enterprise from his father. At the time, the factory, with headquarters in Óbuda, concentrated on manufacturing cotton fabrics.
(1913–2000), scholar and critic. Born in Podbiel in northern Slovakia, in his teens Eduard Goldstücker was a member of the Zionist youth group Ha-Shomer ha-Tsa‘ir, then joining the Communist Party in 1933. He studied German literature at Charles University in Prague. After the German invasion in 1939, he and his wife Marta escaped to Britain, where he wrote a B.Litt. thesis on German literature at Oxford and worked for the Czechoslovak government in exile. His mother and other family members died in the Holocaust.
(1867–1941), literary scholar, critic, and translator who played an important role in the development of Jewish literature in Russia. The son of a lawyer who had been one of the first Jews to receive a law degree from Kharkov University, Arkadii Gornfel’d suffered a serious childhood illness and remained disabled throughout his life. He studied Jewish subjects at home, and mastered German and French while still a child. After graduating from the Simferopol gymnasium, he studied law at Kharkov University (1886–1891) and simultaneously attended A. A. Potebnya’s seminar on the theory of literature. At the University of Berlin from 1891 to 1893, he took courses on philosophy and psychology, studying with Moritz Lazarus.
(1888–1956), educator and public figure in Estonia. Born in Brest-Litovsk, a large center of Jewish communal life, Samuel Gurin grew up in a poor neighborhood in a family of seven children. He studied at a heder and then at a primary school, and then moved with his family to Warsaw, where he completed high school and studied history at the university. As a student, Gurin was affiliated with the Bund; later he turned to the Russian social democrats, and for a period was a member of the Menshevik Party. However, he soon became disappointed with party politics.
(1843–1890), Russian Jewish intellectual and crown rabbi. Born in Kleck, Belorussia (mod. Kletsk, Belarus), Ḥayim Yonah Gurland received a maskilic education at the Vilna rabbinical seminary. After graduating in 1860, he was accepted at the University of Saint Petersburg, where he studied Semitic languages under the convert Daniil Khvol’son (Daniel Chwolson), whose work on the Babylonian god Tammuz he translated into Hebrew. Gurland also translated the fables of Lockman (Ar., Lugmān) from Arabic into Russian, and in 1863 was awarded a gold medal for his thesis on the influence of Arabic philosophy on Maimonides.
(1889–1927), Czech sculptor. Oto Gutfreund was born in Dvůr Králové nad Labem. He attended local schools, studied ceramics at Bechyné from 1903 to 1906, and then took up applied arts at Umprum (the school of applied arts) in Prague between 1906 and 1909. While in Paris in 1909–1910, he studied at the Grande Chaumière under Émile Antoine Bourdelle, visiting Belgium, England, and Germany before returning to Prague in 1911.
(1878–1955), Olympic champion and architect. Alfréd Hajós (born in Budapest as Arnold Guttmann) came from a working-class Hungarian Jewish family; in his youth he converted to Christianity. The word first summarizes and characterizes Hajós’s athletic career. He won the 100-meter and 1,200-meter swimming championships in the first modern Olympic Games in Athens in 1896. With this achievement he was not only Hungary’s first Olympic champion, but also the first in the world, as swimming had not been part of the ancient Olympic Games. From 1898 to 1904, he was also on the team that won the first Hungarian soccer championship. Although he stopped competing in 1904, he remained active in the sporting world, and led the Hungarian Soccer Association in 1905 and 1906.
(1826–1900), industrialist. Born in Warsaw to a family that had moved from the Poznań district in the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century, Bernard Hantke was raised in a Polonized home that had discarded Jewish traditions; he was educated in institutions attended by very few Jews. His grandfather had been a grain merchant in the Poznań district, and Hantke’s father, Adolph, owned a haberdashery store in Warsaw and was a moderately successful fabric merchant. Hantke’s sister’s conversion to Christianity led some biographers to assume that he too had converted, yet there is no documentary evidence to support this contention. Unlike most of the other Jewish entrepreneurs in contemporary Poland, Hantke made his initial fortune in farming and only later reinvested the money in industry—a path far more common for the non-Jewish industrialists of Congress Poland districts. He began his career as a farmer on an estate in Drybus, but soon returned to Warsaw to be a partner in a plant that manufactured agricultural machines and implements. In 1867 he founded a factory to produce chains, nails, and agricultural implements, and in 1879 he acquired the only factory in Warsaw that made rolled steel.
Hungarian industrialists and cultural figures. The Hatvany-Deutsch family played a decisive role for several generations in the economic and—later—the cultural life of Hungary.
(1851–1942), Hungarian general and minister of defense. Born Samu Kohn in Rimaszombat (now Rimavská Sobota, Slovakia), Samu Hazai (he changed his name in 1876) completed his studies at the Commercial Academy of Budapest and then became manager of his father’s distillery. Hazai started his military career in 1873 as a common honvéd (soldier). His excellent performance led him that same year to the Ludovika Military Academy in Budapest, where as a cadet he converted to Christianity. In 1874, he passed the officer’s exam and the following year became a professional soldier.
(1879–1960), rabbi and biblical scholar. Born in Białystok, Ḥayim Heller earned a doctorate from the University of Würzburg in Germany and was appointed rabbi of Łomża in 1912, a position that he resigned from within months. In 1914, he was elected rabbi of Suwałki, but World War I broke out before he could accept the position, and he moved to Gomel.
(1816–1879), journalist, prose writer, and poet. Born in Mladá Boleslav (Ger., Jungbunzlau), Bohemia, Isidor Heller attended both a yeshiva and a secondary school; he hoped to become a rabbi. In 1832 he left for Prague, where he attended the New Town Gymnasium and, briefly, Prague University. In 1837 he went to Nancy, France, where he tried unsuccessfully to join the French Foreign Legion and to support the liberal party in the Spanish civil war (1833–1840). He hoped that he could obtain French citizenship in reward for the five-year military service.
(1884–1954), bacteriologist and serologist, creator of the Polish school of immunology. Ludwik Hirszfeld was born in Warsaw and studied medicine at the universities of Würzburg and Berlin, where he was graduated with highest honors in 1907. He then obtained a post at the Institute for the Study of Cancer in Heidelberg. Following his groundbreaking work, he transferred to the Institute of Serology, where in 1910 in collaboration with Emil von Dungern he demonstrated the hereditary factors of different blood groups. In 1911, he became a professor in the department of hygiene at the University of Zurich. During World War I he was in Serbia, where he organized efforts to combat a typhoid epidemic and discovered paratyphoid C. He was awarded honorary citizenship for his work by the king of that country.
(1806–1887), community leader. Leó Holländer’s father, Mark, originally from Tarnopol, immigrated to Hungary and was the first Jew to settle in Eperjes (Prešov), a royal free city, in 1780. The wealthy merchant was elected as rosh medinah, the head of Sáros county Jewry, in which capacity he served as an influential intercessor with local and Viennese authorities. Leó was instructed by private tutors from abroad; later, he completed eight years of gymnasium studies at the famous Eperjes College. It was here that Holländer formed close ties with the local gentry, which would serve him in good stead later. In 1833, he joined Ferenc Pulszky, the budding liberal politician and future president of the Hungarian Academy, for a five-month grand tour to visit sites of antiquarian interest in Italy, where they also received the pope’s blessing. Holländer’s hobby was antiques, and he came to own one of the most important coin collections in the country, later donated to the National Museum.
(1895–1942), Yiddish poet, writer, and artist. Ber Horovits was the only son of a Jewish family from the rural village of Majdan, in the Carpathian Mountains of eastern Galicia. He received a traditional Jewish education at home, from private tutors, while at the same time studying at a Ukrainian elementary school. In 1914, he graduated from the Polish gymnasium in Stanisławów (now Ukr., Ivano-Frankivs’k). During World War I, he was recruited into the Imperial Austro-Hungarian Army and was sent to various areas of the empire. He ultimately arrived in Vienna, where he enrolled as a medical student and was stationed at a military hospital. During his time in the army, he wrote Yiddish poems that reflected his war experiences.
(1879–1952), Polish socialist activist, feminist, and psychiatrist. Kamila Horwitz-Kancewiczowa was born in Warsaw to a middle-class Jewish family in which both Polish and Yiddish were spoken. After completing gymnasium in Warsaw, she went abroad in 1898 to study medicine, first in Berlin and then in Zurich, and became active on the Foreign Committee of the Polish Socialist Party (PPS).
(1751–1812), maskil, political activist, journalist, and author. As a young man, Zalkind Hourwitz left his village near Lublin and set out for Berlin. There he tutored children of wealthy families—perhaps even coming into contact with the philosopher Moses Mendelssohn—before making his way to Metz and ultimately to Paris in 1774. Whether hawking used clothing or eking out a living teaching foreign languages to the young, he avoided starvation only with the support of his friends. In his spare time he studied Ovid, Molière, Voltaire, and Rousseau.
(1882–1947), violinist. Bronisław Huberman was born in Częstochowa, Poland and was a child prodigy who began to take violin lessons at the age of six. He appeared in public for the first time a year later, playing at a benefit concert for the poor. Huberman studied violin in Warsaw, with, among others, Isidor Lotto at the Warsaw Conservatory. He began to study with Joseph Joachim in Berlin in 1892, and also took lessons briefly with Hugo Heermann in Frankfurt and Martin Marsick in Paris.
(1896–1966), Soviet mathematician who specialized in logic and the history of mathematics. Ianovskaia was born Sof’ia Neimark in Pruzhany, now Belarus, the daughter of an accountant. She grew up in Odessa and attended a classical gymnasium. During the revolution, she was a student at the Odessa Higher Women’s Courses. Ianovskaia joined the Bolsheviks and served as a political commissar during the Civil War. Captured by the Whites, she faced a firing squad but survived.
(1887–1944), historian, librarian, and rabbi. Tobias Jakobovits was born in Lakompak (Lackenback), in the Hungarian part of the Habsburg monarchy. He studied at the yeshiva in Bratislava (Pressburg), and continued at a rabbinical seminary in Berlin and in the philosophical faculty at the German University in Prague.
(1899–1970), economist. Michał Kalecki was born in Łódź to a middle-class Jewish family. His regular studies were made difficult by familial and financial problems, so he mastered mathematics and economics on his own. His research on economic fluctuations resulted in an appointment to a position at the Institute of Business Cycles and Prices, a position from which he resigned in 1936 to protest the firing of two colleagues for political reasons. Kalecki gained international acclaim after he published Próby teorii koniunktury (An Essay on the Theory of the Business Cycle; 1933), a study that anticipated the theories of John Maynard Keynes. In 1930, he married Adela Szternfeld.
(1871–1937), rabbi, educator, and publisher. Born in Kołaczyce, Galicia, Yekuti’el Kamelhar was educated in Tarnów, where he was exposed to Hasidism. He gained experience as a religious educator, heading a group of Talmud students in Korczyna (from 1890) and in Rzeszów (from 1897). At the end of the nineteenth century, Kamelhar was involved in establishing several pioneering new yeshivas in Galicia, modeled after those in Lithuania and Hungary. He was appointed head of the Or Torah yeshiva in Stanisławów in 1907. An Orthodox activist, Kamelhar helped to found societies that supported a religious education network, and took part in the attempts to organize a rabbinic convention in Kraków in 1903.
(1866–1950), Hebrew poet, playwright, translator, and scholar. Aharon (Armand) Kaminka was born in Berdichev, Kiev province. In 1880, he was sent to Berlin to study at the rabbinical college founded by Esriel Hildesheimer. At the age of 17, in Hamburg, he founded a society called Ahavat Tsiyon (Love of Zion).
(1921–1992), novelist, playwright, and short-story writer. Ferenc Karinthy was part of a literary family whose members have been present on the Hungarian cultural scene for nearly a century. In a two-volume family history published in 2003, Márton Karinthy, a theater director and the oldest living member of the family, reveals that his great-grandparents, both of whom had hailed from observant Jewish homes, converted to Christianity in the 1870s before they were married, so that their children would be born Protestant. (This revelation put the lingering doubt about the family’s origins to rest.)
(1843–1915), educator and cultural policymaker. Mór Kármán was born in Szeged, Hungary, where he came under the influence of Rabbi Lipót (Leopold) Löw, a pioneer of Neolog Judaism in Hungary. Kármán studied philosophy, pedagogy, and philology at the University of Vienna, and received his doctoral degree from the faculty of humanities of the University of Pest in 1866.
(1907–1941), Estonian Revisionist Zionist leader. Pinḥas Katz was born in Daugavpils, Latvia. After his graduation from high school in 1923, he worked in several businesses. In 1926, he moved to Estonia to study law at the University of Tartu, an institution famous for liberal academic traditions and a popular place for Latvian Jewish students. He joined Hasmonea, a Zionist Jewish student organization that gradually advocated Revisionism.
(Klein; 1921– ), gymnast, five-time Olympic champion, and coach. Ágnes Keleti won 10 Olympic medals, including 5 gold, in gymnastics over three Olympic Games. In 2000, she ranked third all-time among women athletes for most Olympic medals and fourth all-time as a winner of Olympic gold medals. Keleti is the most successful Jewish female athlete in Olympic history and was ranked among the world’s top five gymnasts from 1952 until 1956. Between 1947 and 1956, she won the All-Around Hungarian Championships 10 times.
(1891–1942?), poet. Dovid Kenigsberg was born in the provincial town of Busk, in the Tarnopol district of eastern Galicia. He received a general education in secondary schools in Brody and Czernowitz, and learned ancient Greek and Latin. In 1911, he worked as a bookkeeper in Lwów. Scholars claim that he first wrote poetry (in German and Polish) when he was 15, but his first piece was printed in the collection Yugnt (Youth; 1909), edited by Yankev Zrubovl.
(1815–1882), rabbi, historian, and essayist. Gutmann (Gumpel) Klemperer was born into a family that had been in Prague for several generations. His father was a leader of the Zigeuner Synagogue, and his mother stemmed from the family of Yom Tov Lipmann Heller. Klemperer studied at yeshivas in Prague and Bratislava (Pressburg), at the Piarist gymnasium in Prague, and finally at the faculty of philosophy at Charles University. His first wife was the daughter of his teacher Rabbi Elias Bunzelfedern (1799–1843). In 1843, Klemperer became a preacher in Tábor, and then served as the local rabbi from 1845 until his death. Begining in 1868, he also held the title of district rabbi.
Printers and publishers active in Prague. In the early sixteenth century, Prague became the leading center of Hebrew printing in Central and Eastern Europe, the first prayer book being produced there in 1512. From 1514 onward, the leading figure in the local group of printers was Gershom (also Gerson or Hermann) ben Shelomoh ha-Kohen (d. 1544). Between 1514 and 1522, this group issued four prayer books and an elaborate Pentateuch with a commentary by Rashi (1518; reprinted in 1530). Kohen is listed first in all the colophons, and his symbol—a pair of hands raised in blessing—appears on the opening page of the Pentateuch (1518) and the Maḥzor (1522). After 1522, the group disbanded. In 1526 Kohen, together with his brother Gronem, printed the earliest Passover Haggadah, containing more than 60 lavish woodcut illustrations (mostly by Ḥayim Shaḥor) in the style of Holbein and Dürer. This work became the preeminent model for subsequent Haggadahs and is widely regarded as a masterpiece.
(1840–1908), industrialist, banker, and philanthropist. Zsigmond Kohner’s family moved to Pest from Leipzig. His father, Adolf Kohner, joined Zsigmond’s uncle’s firm, specializing in the produce and feather trade. Zsigmond’s mother, Lujza Sváb, was a member of a distinguished entrepreneurial and landowning family.
(ca. 1720–1806), rabbi and posek (decisor; one who is recognized as having sufficient authority to rule on questions of Jewish law). Shemu’el Kolin’s name (sometimes rendered as Kelin, Keln, or Kell) is derived from his birthplace in Bohemia. His father, Natan ha-Levi, was a wealthy merchant and grandson of Natan Note ben Shelomoh Spira (1585–1633), the kabbalist and rabbi in Kraków and author of the classic Megaleh ‘amukot.
(1912–1975), Soviet theater and cinema actor. Born in Rechitsa, Belorussia, Kopelian moved to Leningrad with his parents and began his studies at the Architecture Faculty of the Leningrad Academy of Arts, at the same time performing as an extra with the Bolshoi Dramatic Theater (BDT). In his second year of studies he transferred to the BDT studio school, joining its troupe in 1935. He continued to perform at the BDT throughout his life, appearing on stage in 80 different roles.
(1844–1906), statistician. József Kőrösy was born in Pest to a poor family, and was forced to interrupt his university studies as a consequence of his financial circumstances. He went to work for the Első Magyar Általános Biztosító Társaság (First Hungarian General Insurance Company), and was the economic columnist for the newspapers Pesti Napló (from 1868) and Reform (from 1870). He was appointed director of the Statistical Office of Budapest (Fővárosi Statisztikai Hivatal) in 1870. During the 30 years of his tenure in that position, he developed the agency into a renowned institution.
(1814?–1889), teacher, author, and rabbi. Izaak Kramsztyk was a leading figure in the period of Jewish–Polish rapprochement in the 1860s and in the movement for religious reform. The son of a merchant and prominent member of the Jewish community of the Warsaw suburb of Praga, Kramsztyk hailed from a family with deep rabbinic roots. After receiving a traditional education, he decided, against his parents’ wishes, to attend the rabbinical seminary that had been founded in Warsaw in 1826. He stayed on at this school as a Talmud instructor from 1837 until its close in 1863. In keeping with the spirit of reform and acculturation, he conducted his lessons in Polish and, in 1852, became the first rabbi to preach in that language in a Jewish house of worship in Warsaw—the so-called “Polish” synagogue on Nalewki Street.
(1885–1942), Polish painter and illustrator. Roman Kramsztyk was a scion of two of the most prominent Jewish families of Warsaw, the Kramsztyks and the Fajans, who belonged to the Polonizing Jewish elite. This small group played a significant role in the social and intellectual life of nineteenth-century Poland. Baptized as an infant, Kramsztyk considered himself a Pole and a Polish artist. It was only during World War II that Jewish motifs began to appear in his work.
(1890–1971), architect, teacher, and a leader of the Rationalist group in Soviet avant-garde architecture. Born into a teacher’s family in Ryazan, Vladimir Krinskii was able to complete his secondary education in Saint Petersburg, thanks to the intercession of a prominent patron, and study at the Art School of the Imperial Society for Support of the Arts. He then enrolled in the Academy of Fine Arts, graduating from its architecture department in 1917.
Wealthy rabbinic family in Galicia. Several members of the Kristianpoller family were rabbis in Brody from the end of the eighteenth century. The dynasty began with Me’ir Kristianpoller (1740–1815), who served for a time as rabbi of Kristianpol (Pol., Krystynopol; about 60 km north of Lwów), from which the family adopted its name. In 1785, he was appointed rabbi of Brody and served in that capacity for 30 years until his death. He wrote novellae on the Talmud, titled Yad ha-Me’ir (1874).
(1879–1929), Social Democratic politician, publicist, and editor. Zsigmond Kunfi was born in Nagykanizsa, Hungary, the son of a civil servant of Jewish origin, and converted to Calvinism. Kunfi was never interested in religion, but as Zoltán Rónai (his friend and brother-in-law) wrote, he labored under the weight of “an invisible yellow star.” At Kolozsvár (now Cluj, Romania) University, Kunfi earned a doctorate and a degree that enabled him to teach Hungarian and German, which he did at a gymnasium in Temesvár (now Timişoara, Romania) for five years. As a teacher, he contributed to local and Budapest democratic and Social Democratic papers and journals and criticized Hungarian policies in Neue Zeit (published in Stuttgart).
(1873–1920), architect. Born in Budapest-Óbuda to a traditional Jewish family of tailors, Béla Lajta (originally Leitersdorfer) became the most important protomodernist architect in Hungary, bridging the art nouveau of Ödön Lechner and modernism proper. With Joseph Hoffmann, Adolf Loos, and Ian Kotěra, Lajta was one of the most significant architects between 1900 and 1920 in Habsburg lands. Talented in music, drama, sculpture, and painting, he ultimately graduated from Budapest Technical University in 1896 as a student of Alois Hausmann and Imre Steindl; he then was awarded a travel grant to Italy, Germany, France, Spain, and Russia. Lajta worked in the offices of Alfred Messel in Berlin, Norman Shaw in London, and Ödön Lechner in Budapest.
(1852–1921), Hungarian banker and business leader. Born in Pest, Leó Lánczy (Lazarsfeld) studied at a commercial school and at the age of 16 worked at the warehouse of the Laczkó and Gomperz Company. He then switched to a banking career, first working for the Anglo-Hungarian Bank. When this institution failed after the 1873 stock market crash, Lánczy became the managing director of the Hungarian General Mortgage Company. Like his brother Gyula (1850–1911), the historian, Lánczy converted to Christianity as a young man.
(1879–1943), lawyer, community leader, and Bundist. Leib Landau was born in Kirov, Russia, to a traditional Yiddish-speaking Jewish family. As a child, he moved to Przemyśl, the city in which he spent most of his life. Upon graduation from gymnasium, Landau studied law and became a celebrated attorney who defended Jewish civil rights. Between 1905 and 1914, Landau was a leading member of Galicia’s Żydowska Partia Socjalno-Demokratyczna (Jewish Social Democratic Party; ŻPS).
Eighteenth-century Lithuanian artist and engraver. Herszek Lejbowicz seems to have been born in Sokal, a small settlement not far from Minsk, sometime in the 1720s or 1730s. Nothing is known of his childhood years or education. He followed in the footsteps of his father, Lejb Zyskielowicz, working as a coppersmith and engraver. In the spring of 1747, Michał Kazimierz Radziwiłł invited father and son to his palace at Nieśwież to prepare an album of family portraits.
Ethical work in Yiddish. The Seyfer lev tov (Book of the Good Heart) was first printed in Prague in 1620. Nothing is known about its author, Yitsḥak ben Elyakim of Posen (Poznań). The book has 20 chapters that present appropriate Jewish behavior from a religious perspective; it deals with the conduct of the Jew in the religious context (mainly the synagogue) as well as in everyday life.
(1868–1939), Yiddish and Hebrew writer, physician, and communal activist. Gershn Levin was born in Lublin and moved to Warsaw, where he completed medical studies in 1896. An energetic promoter of improved hygiene, he collaborated with Yisra’el Ḥayim Zagorodski (1864–1931) to write Ḥayenu ve-orekh yamenu: ‘Etsot ve-ḥukim lishmor beri’ut ha-guf (Our Life and Longevity: How to Stay Healthy; 1898). Levin’s views are particularly expressed in the chapter “Gidul-banim” (Childrearing), a critique of traditional heder education that contained a plea for children’s rights.
Rabbis and political activists. Aron Lewin (1879–1941) was a leader of the Agudas Yisroel movement and a deputy in the Polish parliament. His younger brother Yeḥezkel Lewin (1898–1941) was a Zionist leader and rabbi of the progressive (Reform) community of Lwów. They were sons of Natan Lewin, rabbi in Rohatyn and Rzeszów, and maternal grandsons of the noted scholar Yitsḥak Shmelkes of Lwów.
(1897–1981), economist. Evsei Liberman was chair of the economics and engineering department at the Kharkov Institute of Economics and Engineering (1947–1963) and from 1963 headed the statistics department at Kharkov State University. He was a key figure in the debates over economic reform in the Soviet Union following Stalin’s death.
(1917–1997), Polish prose writer. Born in Zurich into a Polonized Jewish family, Leo Lipski (originally Lipschütz) spent his childhood and youth in Kraków where he studied psychology and philosophy and made his literary debut. He fled to Lwów in 1939, where he was arrested by the Soviets and sent to labor camps in 1940. Managing to leave the USSR with the Polish Army, he fell ill with typhoid fever and encephalitis in Tehran and, as a result, was discharged from the army. After briefly studying in Beirut, Lipski settled in Tel Aviv in 1944. Partially paralyzed and unable to speak clearly, he typed his works with one hand, later switching to dictation. In 1975 he traveled to Paris with the poet Lucja Gliksman, who cared for him.
(1809–1868), lawyer and journalist. Born in Warsaw, Ludwik Ozjasz Lubliner attended a Piarist (Catholic) school against the wishes of his observant parents. As a student at a polytechnical college, he then joined the uprising of 1831, during the course of which he received numerous injuries and was decorated with military honors.
(1891–1976), Soviet historian and literary critic. Margolis (later Margulis) was born in Rovno (Rivne), Ukraine. He graduated from the history department of Kiev University and taught Jewish history at the Jewish Pedagogical Institute in Kiev in the early 1920s. At the end of the 1920s, he headed the historical section of the Institute of Jewish Proletarian Culture at the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences in Kiev. At this time, he was also affiliated with the Jewish Section of the Moscow-based Communist University of the Peoples of the West, known in Yiddish as the Mayrevke.
(1880–1934), political figure. Born Róża Pomeranc in Tarnopol, Pomeranc married Izaak Melcer, legal adviser for the state railways in Lwów, in 1906 (the marriage was childless). Melcer studied at universities in Vienna and Paris, and also spent three years in Leipzig at a conservatory. She was fluent in several languages.
(1767–1831), rabbi, thinker, and harbinger of the Haskalah. Born in the small town of Smorgon’, Belorussia, Menasheh of Ilya married at age 15 but was divorced after a short time; he remarried at 17 and went to live with his new wife in her hometown, Ilya. From a very young age he attracted attention as a self-taught scholar of exceptional ability; he subsequently adopted the approach to study pursued by the school of the Gaon of Vilna.
(1858–1913), socialist, publisher, writer, and editor of the first Polish-language Jewish daily newspaper. Born to a well-to-do assimilated banking family in Warsaw, Stanisław Mendelsohn attended medical school. As a student at Warsaw University in 1875–1877, he helped to establish the first Polish socialist circle.
(1906–1943), Jewish council leader in Sosnowiec during World War II. A businessman active in local politics, Mosheh Merin became a Zionist representative on the Sosnowiec Jewish community council in January 1939. When the Germans occupied the city on 4 September of that year, he presented himself as the council’s representative, although he was not officially its chair. That same month, however, he was appointed head of the Sosnowiec Jewish council.
Russian family of dancers and actors. Asaf Messerer (1903–1992) studied privately with Mikhail Mordkin in 1919 in Moscow and was later singled out by Aleksandr Gorsky, who placed him in an experimental class at the Bolshoi Ballet School (from which Messerer graduated in 1921). He then joined the ballet as a principal dancer.
(1851–1932), politician, journalist, writer, and member of the Hungarian parliament. The younger brother of Mór Mezei, Ernő Mezei studied law in Pest and worked as a journalist from the time of his youth. His original family name was Grünfeld, which he changed in 1875 together with the rest of his family (his brother Mór had already taken this step in 1860). By the age of 20 he was already working as a political analyst for the opposition newspaper Ellenőr. Three years later, when Egyetértés, the leading daily of the constitutional opposition (Independence Party, the most nationalistic of the liberal parliamentary parties) was founded, Mezei joined its staff as an editorial writer. During the period 1875 to 1877, he published several booklets on contemporary political issues (on government activity, civil marriage, and the like). He had therefore already established himself as a known publicist in the capital before embarking on a political career in 1881.
(1824–1898), poet, translator, and essayist. Fabius Mieses was born in Brody, Galicia, where his father exposed him to the ideas of the Hebrew Haskalah. As a youth, Mieses studied philosophy with David Lokatsher, a former student of Naḥman Krochmal. In 1840, Mieses went to the home of his father’s uncle Yitsḥak Mieses (a philosopher and researcher of Kabbalah) in Kraków; subsequently, Fabius married his relative’s daughter.
Polish-language Jewish academic journal. Published by the Menora publishing house and edited by Zygmunt Ellenberg, Miesięcznik Żydowski (Jewish Monthly) appeared in Warsaw between 1930 and 1935; the periodical targeted Jewish and Polish intelligentsia. Miesięcznik Żydowski’s editorial offices were located in Łódź, but its administration and press were in Warsaw. As the journal was financed by subscription, the publishers found it difficult to maintain its continuity. They tried to remedy the problem by printing double issues; however, in 1934, publication was suspended for six months. In all, a total of 46 issues were published.
(1911–1991), theoretical and nuclear physicist. A member of the USSR Academy of Sciences from 1966, Migdal was born in Lida, Belarussia. He began his studies at the Leningrad State University Department of Physics in 1929, only to be expelled in 1931 because of nonproletarian origins. He completed his university studies in the evening division. From 1931 to 1936, while working as an engineer at a factory, Migdal was able to carry out some scientific work. In 1936 he became a graduate student at the Leningrad Physics and Technical Institute, where he wrote and defended his dissertation for the degree of candidate of sciences.
(1896–1991), historian and Communist Party activist. Isaak Mints was born in the village of Krinichki, Ekaterinoslav province. As a youth, he participated in the revolutionary movement and circulated propaganda to workers in Verkhnedneprovsk and Ekaterinoslav. In 1917, he joined the Bolshevik Party and became a Red Guard, joining the Red Army in 1918. He finished the war as a commissar of the Chervonnii Cossack corps.
(1820–1890), Yiddish author. Born in Piotrków, Poland, Yankev Morgenshtern subsequently moved to Łódź. He acquired the nickname Yankl Lerer (Yankl the Teacher) from his job teaching poor women the rudiments of elementary Hebrew and Yiddish writing. To make ends meet, he worked as a wedding jester and tried his hand at matchmaking. He later used the pseudonym Y. Katchko for his writings.
(1666–1739), communal scribe, preacher, author, and burial society official; a descendant of Yehudah Löw (Maharal of Prague) and an ancestor of El‘azar Fleckeles. A native of Prague, Me’ir Perles studied under Avraham Gombiner (the “Magen Avraham”) in Kalisz. He traveled through Germany and Holland, working for Samson Wertheimer (a court Jew and rabbi in Vienna) and remaining under his patronage after returning to Prague.
Mosheh Me’ir ben El‘azar Perles of Prague
(1894–1967), Hebraist and historian. Otto Muneles was descended from an old Jewish family in Prague, records of which date to the sixteenth century; one of his ancestors was Avraham Muneles, who wrote an index to the Shulḥan ‘arukh. From 1904 to 1912, Muneles attended the German gymnasium in Prague and studied halakhic literature at a Talmud Torah school. From 1912 to 1915, he studied classical philology at the German University in Prague and continued to pursue Judaic studies.
(1868–1949), manufacturer, Zionist activist, and philanthropist. Born in Pinsk where his father was a distiller, Yitsḥak Naiditsch was raised as a Karlin Hasid, though when he completed his heder education he was taught modern subjects and Russian by a tutor. At age 15, Naiditsch joined the Ḥibat Tsiyon movement and formed a friendship with Chaim Weizmann. In 1889, Naiditsch settled in Moscow, where he built factories to produce liquor and invented a method to extract alcohol from potatoes. The Russian Ministry of Finance sent him abroad to promote trade.
(1897–1942?), pseudonym of Yitskhok Farberovitsh, writer of books on the Polish Jewish criminal underworld. Urke Nakhalnik was born in the Łomża region in 1897 to a middle-class family. As a boy, he went to heder and later attended the local yeshiva with the intention of becoming a rabbi. At the age of 14, following the death of his mother, he ran away to Vilna, where he taught Hebrew and Bible. While there, he was caught stealing from his employer and was sentenced to prison for a short time. Following his release, he worked at a variety of jobs, including as an assistant to a wagon driver. This association led him into the company of professional thieves and criminals. From that point on, he spent much time in and out of prison.
Town in northern Romania, on the Someşul Mare River, 24 km north-northwest of the city of Bistrița. The first documented reference to Năsăud (Ger., Nussdorf; Hun., Naszód) dates to 1264. In 1762, imperial authorities turned this small market town into the center for a regiment of frontier guards; it remained as such until 1851.
(1896–1930), publicist and literary critic. Born in Krolevets, Ukraine, Nepomniashchii was raised in a traditional Jewish family that after numerous moves finally settled in Poltava. His father was a supporter of Ḥoveve Tsiyon who devoted special attention to the Jewish education of his eldest son. Nepomniashchii showed an inclination for writing at an early age. While still a child he took part in editing a children’s magazine. As he grew older he was sent to a nearby yeshiva where, along with studying Talmud and Jewish law, he read Hebrew poets Ḥayim Naḥman Bialik and Sha’ul Tchernichowsky.
Writers, poets, and educators. Born in Trisk (Turzysk), Volhynia, the Olitski brothers—Leyb, Borukh, and Mates—each made meaningful contributions to Yiddish education and literature. The eldest, Leyb (1895–1975), was an educator who wrote novels and short stories for adults and children. The second brother, Borukh (1907–1941), had a strong reputation as a poet and teacher of Yiddish language and literature. Mates (1915– ), the youngest, is a poet and educator, first in Europe and later in New York.
(1914–2003), rabbi and halakhic authority, known primarily for his book She’elot u-teshuvot mi-ma‘amakim, a collection of halakhic rulings issued in the Kovno (Kaunas) ghetto during the Holocaust period. Ephraim (Efroim) Oshry was born in Kupishok, in the district of Panevėžys (Ponevezh) in Lithuania. He studied in the finest yeshivas in Lithuania—Khelm, Ponevezh, and Keneset Yisra’el in Slobodka. Oshry discussed halakhic issues and the clarification of Talmudic passages with prominent authorities, including Ḥayim Ozer Grodzenski and Avraham Duber Shapira, with whom he maintained a particularly close relationship.
(1844/46–1930), rabbi, Polish Sejm deputy. A child prodigy, Avraham Tsevi Perlmutter was ordained as a rabbi at age 14 and was a disciple of some of the leading rabbis of his era, including Ḥayim Halberstam of Sandz (Nowy Sącz), Shim‘on Sofer of Kraków, and Dov Berush Meisels of Warsaw. At first Perlmutter served as rabbi in a series of small communities, including Osięciny, Pabianice, and Raciąż. While officiating in Raciąż, he learned Russian at the urging of the provincial governor, but only after receiving the approval of his father and of the rebbe of Gostynin, to whom he was close even though Perlmutter was not a Hasid.
(1843–1913), Torah scholar and early advocate of religious Zionism. Yeḥi’el Mikha’el Pines was born into a well-to-do family in Ruzhany in the district of Grodno, where he received both a traditional and a general education. From his early years, Pines was a prolific essayist and sharp-witted polemicist; as early as 1867–1869 his articles appeared in the pages of the Hebrew periodicals Ha-Melits, Ha-Magid, and Ha-Levanon.
(1913–1966), theoretical physicist, member of the USSR Academy of Sciences, and professor. Born in Warsaw to an educated family (his father was a chemical engineer and his mother a doctor), Isaak Pomeranchuk moved with them first to Rostov-on-Don, and then to the Donbass. He began his studies at the Ivanovo Institute of Chemical Technology, transferring to the Department of Physics and Mechanics of the Leningrad Polytechnic Institute; he completed his degree in 1936.
Merchants and communal leaders in Bohemia in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The Popper family came from Bresnitz (Břesnice), a commercial junction in southern Bohemia owned by the Kolowrat barons, one of the few noble families of Slavic descent that remained in Bohemia after 1620. During the seventeenth century, the Popper family provided a range of services to the Kolowrats, particularly granting credit. Under Kolowrat patronage, the Popper family business expanded substantially, also moving into commerce.
The concept of possession by and exorcism of deceased souls (dibukim; dybbuks) who inhabited the bodies of unwilling hosts is based on the kabbalistic concept of gilgul (transmigration), found in the Zohar and other medieval sources. ‘Ibur neshamah (soul impregnation) is a related concept also found in kabbalistic sources; it refers to the penetration of a kabbalist’s soul by the additional soul of an ancient sage who aids him in a spiritual quest. ‘Ibur neshamah was valued as a positive, highly prized form of possession.
(1902–1969), educator, journalist, and Zionist politician. Oskar Rabinowicz was born in Aspern, Austria, but was raised in Boskovice, Moravia. His father, a Hebrew teacher and cantor, had grown up in the household of the Sadegora rebbe but gave his son a secular education.
Nineteenth- and early twentieth-century term for physical anthropology, or the study of human difference, with scientists proceeding from the common assumption that Europeans were racially superior to non-European peoples. Jews played a central role in race science both as practitioners and objects of study. As many Jews were doctors, they were especially well placed to become race scientists and in a position to combat claims of inherent Jewish difference and/or degeneracy. The rise of antisemitism at the end of the nineteenth century provided further impetus for Jews to employ race science because antisemites used its “evidence” to justify anti-Jewish prejudice.
(1853–1921), economist and financial agent for the Russian government. Although Artur Rafalovich was born and raised in Odessa, he lived in France from the 1880s on, where he wrote a series of economic studies. His analyses remain valuable today as a resource for learning about the economic history of Europe.
Town in eastern Transylvania, at the confluence of the Mureş and Gurghiu Rivers, 32 km north-northeast of the city of Târgu Mureş. The first reference to Reghin (Ger., Sächsisch-Reen; Lat., Regun; Hun., Szászrégen) dates to 1228. In the second half of the nineteenth century, it experienced substantial economic development and was designated as a free royal town in 1863.
(1818–1894), Hebrew writer and scholar, historian of ancient Jewish literature, the Bible, and Jewish philosophy. Ya‘akov Reifmann was born in Łagów, Poland. He spent his childhood in nearby Opatów, where he acquired a basic religious education, but subsequently spent most of his life—including the days of his extensive and highly diversified scholastic achievements—in Szczebrzeszyn, near Zamość, where he relocated after marrying. There he was introduced to classic Jewish philosophical literature and was profoundly influenced by Maimonides’ Guide of the Perplexed. Reifmann, who lived most of his life in poverty, learned German on his own, and, like others who followed the Haskalah, read the writings of German philosophers, which introduced him to scholarly research methods.
(1921–1970), mathematician. Alfréd Rényi was born in Budapest. His father, Artúr, was a mechanical engineer and translator; his mother, Barbara (Borka), was a photographer and the daughter of philosopher Bernát Alexander (1850–1927). It was from his mother’s side that Rényi acquired a love of literature and Greek philosophy; in secondary school his studies focused more on humanities than on sciences.
(1845–1906), rabbi and Zionist. A disciple of Rabbis Esriel Hildesheimer of Eisenstadt and Avraham Shemu’el Binyamin Sofer, Mosheh Aryeh Roth was born in Hanusfalva, Hungary, and married the daughter of his uncle, Mordechai Roth, the head of the Jewish community in Hunsdorf. After his marriage, Roth settled in Altendorf, near the Galician border.
(1902–1989), Yiddish educator, journalist, and memoir writer. Ester Shnayderman (Shneyderman; Shneiderman; Rosenthal) was born in Częstochowa, Poland. After receiving a primary education at a Russian elementary school and passing external examinations for secondary education, she studied at Warsaw University and worked at the Central Yiddish School Organization (TSYSHO). In 1926, she was sent to the Soviet Union, where she soon began to work with Yoysef Liberberg, director of the Kiev-based Institute of Jewish Proletarian Culture (IJPC). Like many other activists in the left wing of the Labor Zionist movement, which had been her initial ideological affiliation, she joined the Communist Party. As a graduate student, she headed the Communist Party organization at the IJPC, later becoming a research fellow at the institute’s Pedagogical Section and also lecturing at the Kiev Pedagogical Institute.
(1912–2003), Yiddish poet, editor, and cultural activist. Hadasah Rubin was born into a poor family in Iampol’, Ukraine. In 1921, her family moved to Zbarazh in Galicia and later to Kremenets, where she finished high school. In her youth Rubin was an ardent member of the Communist Party, and consequently spent a few years in a Polish prison. She emerged with her revolutionary zeal intact and a bundle of poems under her arm. Traces of this youthful restlessness, which pervaded her early political sensibilities, stayed present in her work throughout her literary career. Even though she later renounced communism, she maintained her original ideals, namely freedom, equality, and friendship among nations.
(1869–1935), Polish socialist, Yiddish writer and editor, and physician. Feliks Sachs was born in Warsaw to a lower middle-class Jewish family. A native Yiddish speaker, he completed gymnasium in 1888 and subsequently entered the faculty of medicine at Warsaw University, earning his degree in 1895. At the university, Sachs attended illegal meetings of radical students and became a convinced Marxist. In 1898, he joined the Polish Socialist Party (PPS) and in 1899 sat on the executive committee of the party’s Warsaw division. Sachs coedited the party’s central organ, Robotnik, with Józef Piłsudski in 1899–1900.
Town in the extreme west of Romania, in the Crişurilor Plain, 14 km east of the border with Hungary and 40 km southwest of Oradea. The first written reference to Salonta (Hun., Nagyszalonta) dates to 1332 and was found in a papal document. Destroyed by the Turks in 1598, the town was rebuilt by the free soldiers of Prince István Bocskay in 1606. The town was ravaged by severe fires in 1658 and 1847, and by floods in 1816.
(1933–1998), musicologist, radio and television host, and journalist. Iosif Sava (originally Segal) was born in Iaşi to a family of musicians—his grandfather, Iosif Segal (1868–1927), after whom he was named, was a violinist and a close friend and collaborator of Avrom Goldfadn, the founder of the Yiddish theater. Sava’s father, Bernard Segal (1897–1958), was a violist in the Iaşi philharmonic who also made his mark as a composer and conductor at the Jewish theater in Iaşi.
Prominent rabbinic family. Several members of the Schmelkes family served as rabbis and community leaders in Galicia from the middle of the nineteenth century. Most prominent among them were the rabbis of Przemyśl: Yitsḥak Yehudah Schmelkes (1828–1905) and his nephew Gedalyah Schmelkes (1857–1928).
(1905–1938), Soviet mathematician who contributed to the calculus of variations, topology, and number theory. Lev Schnirelmann went to Moscow in 1921, aged 16, and immediately enrolled at Moscow University. He was admitted without a formal high school diploma because mathematics professor Nikolai Luzin was impressed by his potential. Soon Schnirelmann became an active member of Luzitania, a group of young and talented mathematicians that formed around their professor. Later this group gave rise to the powerful Moscow mathematical school.
(1877–1948), feminist, journalist, and politician. Rózsika (Róza) Schwimmer was born in Budapest into a middle-class Jewish family; her father was a produce merchant. Schwimmer studied at an evening commerce school in Temesvár (Timişoara, Romania) in 1893–1894. Following the bankruptcy of her father’s business, her family moved back to Budapest. There, she first worked as a governess and then as a bookkeeper and a correspondent clerk. She also wrote for various journals such as the Pester Lloyd. From 1904, she supported herself as a journalist and lecturer. From 1911 until 1913, Schwimmer was married to a journalist whose surname was Bédy.
Town in northern Romania in the county of Maramureş, on the Someşului Plain at the southwestern foot of the Gutîi Mountains and on the Seinel River, 48 km northwest of Baia Mare. The first documented reference to Seini (Hun., Szinyérváralja or Szinérváralja) dates to 1334, and the first indication of a Jewish population comes from the second half of the eighteenth century. A census of Jews in Maramureş in 1768–1769 recorded 2 Jewish families with 6 people living in Seini. In 1839–1840 there were 151 Jews; a century later, the census of 1930 counted 673 Jews (13% of the total town population). The Jewish community was established by the end of the 1700s, with its own rabbi, and it later affiliated strongly with Orthodoxy. In 1885, it became the administrative center for the surrounding rural communities.
(1899–1968), Russian poet, playwright, and novelist. Il’ia Selvinskii’s achievements include the epic poem Ulialaevshchina (The Lay of Ulyalaev; 1924, pub. 1927) and the novel in verse Pushtorg (Fur Trade; 1928). He was one of the first Soviet poets to write about the Holocaust.
(1905–1986), physicist, member of the USSR Academy of Sciences from 1979. Born in Saint Petersburg, Shal’nikov grew up in a family associated with the Russian intelligentsia. One of his childhood friends was the composer Dmitri Shostakovich. In his youth Shal’nikov was drawn to literature, and in the 1920s he attended lectures given in the literary circle of Nikolai Gumilev.
(1889–1943), Hasidic master and educational theorist; communal leader of special prominence during the Holocaust. Son of Elimelekh Shapiro of Grodzisk and a descendant of Yisra’el Hapstein (the Magid of Kozhenits [Pol., Kozienice]), Kalonymus Kalmish Shapiro was the rabbi of Piaseczno, a small town just outside Warsaw; he later moved his main residence to Warsaw.
Shapiro, Kalonymus Kalmish ben Elimelekh of Piaseczno
(1835–1911), rabbi and halakhic authority. Shalom Mordekhai Shvadron was born in Złoczów, Galicia. At the age of 16, he married in Biały Kamień and for two years was supported by his father-in-law. He then returned to Złoczów and for several years engaged in commerce, trading in wine, timber, flax, and cattle.
(1909–1992), Soviet poet, playwright, and polemicist. A graduate of the law faculty of the Kiev Institute of Economics (1930), Tsesar’ Solodar’ was a war correspondent during World War II, and joined the Communist Party in 1943.
(1932–2003), playwright and critic. Dumitru (Dolfi) Solomon attended elementary school and high school in Bârlad, Romania. After graduating from Bucharest University (1955), he worked as an editor for Gazeta literară (1955–1962) and Luceafărul (Evening Star; 1962–1964). He made his mark in literary society with essays and critical studies, contributing to Romania’s major journals in the field. In 1964, he began a career in cinematography, first as a director at the Film Studios of Bucharest (until 1972), and then, until 1989, as a script reader and executive producer. At the same time, he was a prolific playwright and drama critic. After 1989, he served as editor in chief of the theatrical culture reviews Teatrul, azi (Theater Today) and Scena (Stage).
(1872–1945), revolutionary and Soviet public figure. Aron Sol’ts was born near Vilna to a well-established merchant family. While a student in secondary school, he became active in worker revolutionary circles in Vilna. In 1895, Sol’ts enrolled in Saint Petersburg University and simultaneously began studying Marxism; in 1898 he joined the Rossiiskaia Sotsial-Demokraticheskaia Rabochaia Partiia (Russian Social Democratic Workers Party) and helped distribute the illegal paper Rabochee znamia (Workers’ Banner). He was expelled from the university for participating in the student demonstrations in 1899.
Yiddish-language sports periodical. The passion of a significant number of Jews in interwar Poland for organized sports was reflected in the pages of Sportcajtung (Sport News). Edited by L. Koprowicz and published in Warsaw between April 1931 and August 1939, this biweekly, illustrated periodical played an important role in encouraging enthusiasm for sports. Earlier attempts to publish weeklies of the same title in Warsaw and Łódź in 1924 had been unsuccessful.
(1854–1937), Hebrew scholar, translator, journalist, editor, and a founder of the Czech Jewish movement. August Stein was born in Nový Knín, near Dobříš, into a family of a liberal rabbi and teacher of religion. Stein studied law in Prague at the Charles Ferdinand University and received a doctorate in 1880. As a student, he worked as a clerk in the law office of Alois Zucker, a criminal law professor. At the same time, he served as private tutor to Bohuš Rieger, future professor and son of František Ladislav Rieger, leader of the Old Czech Party. Stein originally supported this party before becoming a Social Democrat.
(1897–1992), painter, set designer, woman of letters, and translator. Born in Buzău, Romania, to a middle-class family, Margareta Sterian attended the Ranson Academy and the École du Louvre in Paris between 1926 and 1929. On her return to Romania in 1929, she studied sociology at the University of Bucharest and participated in ethnographic research conducted by Dimitrie Gusti in the village of Drăguş. As a result of this experience, she produced a series of portraits, titled Copii din Drăguş (The Children of Drăguş), which was exhibited with other works at her first personal exhibition, organized in 1929 at the Mozart Hall in Bucharest.
(1877–1918), librarian and socialist theoretician. Ervin Szabó was born in northern Hungary in a region that is now part of Slovakia. He changed his name from Samuel Armin Schlesinger and converted to Calvinism while still in his teens. Later, as a revolutionary, he expressed no attachment either to Judaism or Christianity. Szabó studied at the faculties of law and administration at universities in Budapest and Vienna, and earned a doctorate in 1903. Beginning in 1904 he worked as founder and director of the Budapest Municipal Library, where he adopted the model of the American public library, unknown until then in Hungary. Even today, the Hungarian library network remains named for him.
(1889–1943), editor and publisher. Lajos Szabolcsi was the son of journalist and editor Miksa Szabolcsi (1857–1915), the brother of music historian Bence Szabolcsi (1899–1973), and the father of literary historian Miklós Szabolcsi (1921–2000). Lajos completed his studies in Hungarian and French at the Philological Faculty of Pázmány Péter University in Budapest and then studied in Munich and Paris. He received his doctorate in philosophy in 1907 in Budapest. Upon completion of this degree, Szabolcsi started working for the Jewish weekly Egyenlőség, edited by his father. He himself became associate editor in 1911 and full editor in 1915 upon his father’s death, remaining in this position until the paper was banned in 1938. Szabolcsi was already very ill when he was taken into the forced labor service in 1940–1941.
Bankers and entrepreneurs in Lithuania and Warsaw. The family’s most prominent members were Moses David Szereszewski (also spelled Szereszowski; 1844–1915), a banker and businessman in Warsaw; and his son Rafał (1869–1948), who was a banker, businessman, and senator of the Republic of Poland.
(1869–1944), writer and journalist. Born Mór Weisz in the crowded Jewish quarter of old Pest, Dezső Szomory reinvented himself as an ivory-tower aesthete and a dandy who knew little about the world of crass reality. Of course he knew a great deal about it, and let his readers know this, though always in a teasing, suggestive manner. In 1890, to avoid being conscripted into the army, he fled to Paris, and stayed there for 17 years. In A párizsi regény (The Paris Story; 1929), he evokes the years he spent abroad with a mixture of lyricism and irony, which makes this his most consistently satisfying book.
To treat the many types of talk characteristic of Jews of Eastern Europe, this entry begins with a general overview, which discusses speech in relation to the multilinguism of East European Jewish culture, followed by four more specific articles: Storytelling; Professional Talkers; Blessings, Curses, and Other Expressions; and Argots. For further general discussion, see Language; for sermonizing, see Preachers and Preaching; for jesters, see Badkhonim. See also Humor, article on Oral Tradition; Proverbs; and Riddles.
(1869–1931), rabbi, essayist, and advocate of nonviolence. Born in a village in the Grodno district, Aharon Shemu’el Tamares (who often signed his publications with the pseudonym Aḥad ha-Rabanim ha-Margishim) studied at Kolel ha-Perushim in Kovno, followed by two years at the Volozhin yeshiva. In 1893, he became the rabbi of the village of Milejczyce (in the Białystok region), succeeding his father-in-law.
(1874–1955), historian. In 1893, Evgenii Tarle entered the Kiev University Historical-Philological Department. As a young man, he drew close to the Social Democrats and published articles in left-wing newspapers. In May 1900, he was arrested at an illegal gathering. After a month and a half of imprisonment, Tarle was exiled to Kherson province, then to Warsaw. There he finished his master’s degree, having written his thesis on Thomas More’s social views. In 1903, Tarle was appointed privatdocent at Saint Petersburg University, where he became one of the most popular lecturers. In 1913–1918 he held a professorship at Iur’ev University.
(Tenczer; 1836–1905), journalist and public figure. Pál Tencer was a pivotal figure of nineteenth-century Hungarian Jewry, or at least of the Neolog (Reform) community in Budapest, although much of the information available about him would not make this evident. A true portrait of him inevitably seems vague, illustrated by the fact that he used a varying spelling for his name (Tencer, rather than Tenczer, as others spelled it), and the fact that the newspaper Egyenlőség—the public forum with which he was most closely associated—celebrated his sixtieth birthday a year early. Major manuals, encyclopedias, and biographical collections give contradictory—and to a large extent false—information about him. All this appears to be a result of his role as an éminence grise, an expression that seems to characterize him most appropriately.
An ancient town in the central northern region of Romania, on the Arieş River, 30 km southeast of Cluj. Known in German as Thorenburg and in Hungarian as Torda, Turda was an important center for salt mining and trading. Jews were not allowed to live in Turda until the middle of the nineteenth century, as Austrian imperial authorities imposed a ban (introduced between 1693 and 1700) to prevent them from settling in mining areas. It was only after 1850 that restrictions were gradually lifted; they were formally repealed in January 1860.
Created as an all-encompassing umbrella organization in April 1999, the United Jewish Community of Ukraine (Ob”edinennaia Evreiskaia Obshchina Ukrainy; OEOU) aimed to serve as the “political wing” of the All-Ukrainian Jewish Congress (Vseukrainskii Evreiskii Kongress; VEK). The latter was founded in April 1997 by a group of wealthy Ukrainian Jewish businessmen, led by Vadim Rabinovich and supported by Reuven Asman, a Lubavitch leader in Kiev.
(1879–1964), political economist. Born in Hungary, Evgenii Varga, known in Hungarian as Jenő Varga, studied in Berlin, Paris, and Budapest and became a professor of economics at the University of Budapest. In 1919, he took part in the Communist Revolution and became a commissar of finance and then chairman of the Supreme Council of the National Economy in the Hungarian Soviet Republic of Béla Kun. Following the collapse of the revolution, he emigrated to Austria and then to the USSR, where he worked as a close adviser to Lenin and Stalin, mainly as an economist and expert on the world economy and the capitalist system.
(1821–1888), philanthropist, public figure, and businessman. Avram Varshavskii (sometimes spelled Warshawski) was from a wealthy family in Poltava. He had a traditional Jewish education supplemented with secular subjects, and was a supporter of the moderate Haskalah.
Town in northeastern Romania, in the region of southern Bucovina and the present county of Suceava. Traversed by one of the important trade routes linking Moldova to Transylvania, Vatra Dornei was for a long time administratively dependent on the town of Câmpulung Moldovenesc. The Jews’ early presence in the area was primarily linked to the establishment of the first sawmills, marking the beginning of the forestry industry. It was only during the second half of the nineteenth century that Vatra Dornei acquired greater importance with the discovery of natural resources for creating spa facilities and the growing realization of the tourism potential in the area. Jewish entrepreneurs were involved in the exploitation of these resources from the outset.
(1868–1937), Polish Communist activist and leader. Born in Kraków into an assimilated family that favored the country’s independence, Adolf Warski (orig. Warszawski) was one of the founders of the Związek Robotników Polskich (Polish Workers Union; ZRP) in 1889. In 1893, he helped organize the Socjaldemokracja Królestwa Polskiego i Litwy (Social Democratic Party of Poland and Lithuania; SDKPiL), which, as its name implied, renounced the independence of Poland as one of its goals and directed its activities to the tsarist empire, where it sought a proletarian revolution. From 1902 to 1913, Warski was a member of the party’s Central Executive and played an active part in the Revolution of 1905–1907, during which he was arrested several times by tsarist police.
(1837–1919), entrepreneur, Jewish community leader in Warsaw, follower of the Ger Hasidic dynasty, and member of the Polish Council of State. Nothing is known about Joel Wegmeister’s family background. As a successful merchant and entrepreneur, he was active in a large number of mainly religious associations, some of which he founded, as well as in the Warsaw Jewish community. In addition, he strove to increase the influence of Ger Hasidism on Polish Jewry.
(late 1450s–1539), convert to Judaism who was burned at the stake for apostasy in 1539. Weigel was also known as Katarzyna Malcherowa or Katarzyna Zalaszowska, and was the wife of a Kraków city councilman, Melchior Weigel.
(1919–1996), composer and pianist. Mieczysław Samuilovich Weinberg (Moisei Vaynberg) was born in Warsaw, the son of a violinist and Yiddish theater music director. Graduating from the Warsaw Conservatory with a degree in piano in 1939, Weinberg fled the Nazi invasion of Poland that year, settling in Minsk, where he studied composition under Vasilii Zolotarev at the Belorussian state conservatory. After Hitler’s invasion in 1941, Weinberg relocated to Tashkent in Soviet Central Asia. There he met his wife, daughter of the Soviet Jewish theater director and political leader Solomon Mikhoels. In 1943, Weinberg’s first symphony came to the attention of Soviet composer Dmitri Shostakovich. The result was an immediate friendship that subsequently defined Weinberg’s musical and personal life. With Shostakovich’s assistance, he moved to Moscow, quickly establishing himself as the latter’s junior colleague in the world of Soviet composers of the 1940s and 1950s.
(1869–1943), physician, community activist, and politician. Salomon Weinzieher was born in Białystok to an assimilationist Jewish family. After graduating from high school in Piotrków Trybunalski, he studied medicine at the University of Warsaw but was expelled after a year because of his affiliations with radical socialist organizations. Subsequently he was accepted, through personal connections, to the University of Kiev where he joined a Polish students’ group. After graduating from medical school, he remained active in the underground movement associated with the Polish Socialist Party. He was not a Zionist; indeed, as a Polish nationalist he regarded Zionism as a reactionary movement that alienated Jews from their civic duties in Poland.
(1815–1905), scholar of rabbinic literature. Born in Velké Meziříčí (Ger., Gross-Meseritsch) in the Habsburg province of Moravia, Yitsḥak Hirsh Weiss (known also by the German form of his name, Eisik Hirsch Weiss) attended heder in his native town. At the age of eight, he began studying at the local yeshiva, and spent the years 1828–1834 attending various other yeshivas in Moravia and Hungary.
(1889–1943), journalist, writer, and translator. Gustav Winter (brother of politician Lev Winter), was born in the Czech village of Radenín near Tábor in southern Bohemia, and studied at Charles University in Prague and at the Sorbonne. Fully integrated into the Czech linguistic and cultural milieu, in 1913 he began to teach Czech and French language and literature at a secondary school in Prague.
(1882–1935), economist, Sejm deputy, representative of the Central Office of the Merchants Association in Poland, a Jewish organization committed to cooperation with the Polish authorities. Born in Warsaw and raised in an acculturated environment, Wacław Wiślicki attended the Leopold Kronenberg High School for Commerce and then studied economics in Brussels. In 1907, tsarist authorities arrested him for supporting the revolutionary youth movement.
(1755–1830), businessman and public figure. Szymon (Shiml) Wolfowicz was a leading figure among Vilna’s Jews during the last quarter of the eighteenth century. Though born into the wealthy elite (into which he also married), Wolfowicz criticized the ways in which organizational leaders and their subordinates operated, and he demanded changes in the administrative system. When a struggle erupted over the appointment of the young Rabbi Shemu’el ben Avigdor, Wolfowicz stood at the head of those who supported the rabbi, against the members of the city’s kahal.
(Pseudonym of Rokhl Bernshteyn; 1869–1942), Yiddish poet and writer. Virtually forgotten today, Yehudis is notable for her bold poems, several dramatic pieces, short stories, fragments of a novel, translations from Russian, and a memoir of her youth. Born into a well-to-do merchant family in Minsk, Bernshteyn was educated by private tutors and began working in her parents’ shop at age 12. Her subsequent exposure to the socialist movement, and through it to Russian culture, led her to read widely on her own. She and her husband, Shmuel Bernshteyn (whose family name was the same as hers), a leading Jewish intellectual in Minsk, hosted authors whose involvement in the new Yiddish literature inspired her to write.
(1580–ca. 1646), halakhist and grammarian. Yitsḥak ben Shemu’el ha-Levi was born in Ludmir and was a student of Yehoshu‘a Falk. Yitsḥak’s younger brother was David, author of Ture zahav on the Shulḥan ‘arukh and known as Taz. After a period of time in Lwów, Yitsḥak ben Shemu’el served as rabbi of Chełm for an unknown number of years and was appointed rector of the yeshiva in Poznań in 1627. His responsa were published in Neuwied in 1736, and some of his insights are recorded in his brother’s Ture zahav. In his legal decisions, he was considerate of his congregants’ needs and tried to be lenient in rulings connected with running a Jewish household. With respect to other scholars, including great legal authorities, he was not afraid to express dissenting opinions.
(d. 1703), rabbi and Talmudist. Born to a rabbinic family in Krzemieniec (Kremenets), Yosef Shemu’el ben Tsevi served as a rabbinic judge in Kraków from 1663 to 1689, when he was appointed rabbi of Frankfurt am Main. There, he established a yeshiva. A scholar of the Talmud and of halakhah, he also had bibliographic and lexicographic interests—along with, apparently, an interest in astronomy and in Kabbalah.
(1889–1929), Yiddish author and publisher. Kalmen Zingman (last name also rendered Singman) was born in Slobodka, near Kovno. He received a traditional Jewish education, but difficult family circumstances forced him to start working at an early age. In 1909, his poem “Baym Nyeman” (At the Nieman) appeared in the miscellany Shtraln (Rays), edited by A. Litvin (Shmuel Hurvits; 1862–1943). During World War I, Zingman found himself among refugees from the theater of operations. He wound up in Kharkov, where he worked as a small businessman, continuing to dream about a literary career.
(1895–1949), writer, poet, editor, dramatist, publicist, and member of parliament. As a second-generation contributor to the modernist journal Nyugat (West), Zsolt followed a career path similar to that of writers from Nyugat’s first generation. He began as an admirer and imitator of Endre Ady, and became a journalist and editor in Nagyvárad (mod. Rom., Oradea). In 1925, he moved to Budapest, where he wrote spirited political pieces for several newspapers. In 1929, he became editor in chief of A Toll (The Pen), a bourgeois-liberal periodical.
(1682/85–1694), Jewish youth in Prague whose father was accused of murdering him “out of hatred for the Christian faith.” The death of Shim‘on Abeles in February 1694 illuminates the tensions that beset Prague’s Jewish community in the late seventeenth century. Coming at the height of the Catholic Habsburg Counter-Reformation, in which the Jesuit order played a leading role in reshaping Bohemian religion and culture, the case signaled a new stage of repression for Prague’s Jewish community.
(1845–1906), historian, journalist, and fiction writer. Ignác Acsády (Adler until 1875) was born in Nagykároly, Hungary, the oldest son of a wealthy landowner. Acsády’s father served as head of the Jewish community of Hajdúszoboszló for almost 30 years and was a member of the board of Hajdú county. Acsády earned a law degree in 1869 and a doctorate in 1877 at the University of Budapest. With his wide interest in the humanities, he decided against limiting his career to law.
(1868–1939), paremiologist (collector of proverbs), Polish state official, and advocate for assimilated Jews. Born in Warsaw, Samuel Adalberg received his elementary education at the Szkoła Realna (1878–1888), the first modern school widely attended by Warsaw Jews. There he was regarded highly by the principal, Samuel Dickstein, and also formed a friendship with Shemu’el Poznański, who later became rabbi of a progressive synagogue and a social activist.
Operation to murder Jews of the Generalgouvernement in Poland. From March to December 1942 nearly two million Jews were murdered, including most Jews of the Generalgouvernement together with approximately 135,000 Jews from Germany, Austria, Bohemia-Moravia, Slovakia, Holland, France, Yugoslavia, and Greece. Aktion (Operation) Reinhard was headed by Odilo Globocnik, who was Lublin District SS and Police Leader. The aktion received its name in the summer of 1942, apparently in memory of Reinhard Heydrich, who had been assassinated by Czech resistance fighters in late May of that year.
The Soviet and Post-Soviet Period: 1917–2000
From the End of World War II until the Collapse of the Communist Bloc
World War II, the Holocaust, and Displaced Persons
(1907–1945), painter. Imre Ámos’s birthplace, Nagykálló, was the first center of Hungarian Hasidism, and the memory and legend of its famous rabbi, Yitsḥak Isaak Taub and his remarkable song, “Szól a kakas már” (Hear the Sound of the Rooster), persist today. Because of his father’s early death, Ámos was raised by his maternal grandfather, the town’s melamed. He completed his studies at the School of the Arts in Budapest, and his initial experiments with style followed the decorative manner of the Nabi group.
Libraries and Other Repositories in Eastern Europe
Libraries and Other Repositories outside of Eastern Europe
The first generation of Jewish artists in Eastern Europe (beginning with Mark Antokol’skii, Maurycy Gottlieb, and their younger contemporaries) received professional training at state art academies and private schools in Warsaw, Vilna, Saint Petersburg, Odessa, and Kraków. By the end of the nineteenth century, Jews had become a visible group in these institutions, and it was already possible to discern signs of ethnic solidarity among them. This tendency was first articulated in Russia in the 1880s, when, goaded by antisemitic sentiment expressed by administrative personnel and attacks by fellow students, Jewish artists were brought together not only by their exceptional position but also by their understanding of their particular artistic and social challenges.
(1866–1935), Polish historian and diplomat. Szymon Askenazy was born in Zawichost, southwest of Lublin, to a wealthy Orthodox family. He was a descendant of Tsevi Hirsh ben Ya‘akov Ashkenazi (1660–1718), known as Ḥakham Tsevi, who had held positions as a rabbi in Altona, Hamburg, Amsterdam, and Lwów. Askenazy studied law at Warsaw University, graduating in 1887, and subsequently took up history at the University of Göttingen, where he received his doctorate.
(1796–1866), rabbi and halakhic scholar. A leading figure in the Hungarian Orthodox rabbinate during the mid-nineteenth century, Yehudah Aszód achieved renown both as an expert halakhic adjudicator and as an outspoken opponent of educational and religious reform. Unlike some of his younger Hungarian contemporaries, however, Aszód did not promote a uniformly strict and antimodernist approach. Instead, he exemplified a more pragmatic and less doctrinaire Hungarian Orthodoxy than that which later became the norm. Toward the end of his life, he also gained a reputation as one who possessed great mystical abilities.
Leading wealthy rabbinic family in Galicia. Beginning in the seventeenth century, many members of the Babad family served in rabbinic posts in Poland and Lithuania; others were quite wealthy and held a variety of leadership positions in their communities. The founder of the line was Yitsḥak Krakover (1650–1705), rabbi of the city of Brody from about the year 1690. His children were called by the name Babad, an acronym for Bene Av Bet Din (Children of the Head of the Rabbinic Court); in state records they are referred to by the name Rabinowitz. Some of Krakover’s sons were merchants; two of them, Mordekhai (d. 1752) and Ya‘akov Yokel (d. 1748), were communal leaders in Brody in the first half of the eighteenth century, as were a number of their descendants.
(1823–1891), Hebrew poet and community leader. A branch of the illustrious Bacharach family settled in Hungary around the last third of the eighteenth century. The Bachers (the shortened form of the family name was used among non-Jewish circles; in Hebrew they continued to be called Bacharach) settled in Liptószentmiklós (now Liptovský Mikuláš, Slovakia) in northwest Hungary. When Simon Bacher was born, the town had a fairly large Jewish community, and was famous as a seat of traditional learning (El‘azar Löw, author of the Shemen rokeaḥ, had just come to serve as rabbi and maintained an important yeshiva), but was also known for its sympathy for the Haskalah.
(1892–1943), community leader and head of the Białystok ghetto during the Holocaust. Born in Volkovysk, Efrayim Barash was an engineer who had studied in Germany. He was a member of the town council and Jewish community board, president of the Jewish Commerce Bank, and chair of the local Zionist federation. He moved to Białystok in 1934 to become the Jewish community’s executive director.
(d. 1770s), Polish communal leader and lobbyist. Barukh ben David Yavan was born at the beginning of the eighteenth century in Konstantynów, Volhynia. He came from an eminent family that descended from Rabbi Shalom Shakhnah of Kraków and received an education encompassing not only traditional Jewish learning (he studied Talmud under Ya‘akov Yehoshu’a Falk) but also an extensive non-Jewish curriculum, including German, French, Latin, and Polish.
(1641–1718), biblical exegete, bibliographer, printer, and cantor. Shabetai ben Yosef Bass was born in Kalisz, Poland. His parents were murdered in wartime violence in 1655; Bass and his older brother, Ya‘akov Strimmers (d. 1686), a renowned kabbalist, survived and fled to Prague. In Prague, Bass received a traditional education; studied secular subjects, including Latin; and, because of his pleasant voice, was taught liturgical singing. He subsequently accepted a position as a basso (bassista) singer in the Altneuschul in Prague, from which the surname Bass (Heb., Meshorer) is derived.
(1895–1991), actor, Hebrew writer, poet, and translator. Miriam Bernstein-Cohen was born in Kishinev. Her father, the physician Ya‘akov Bernstein-Cohen (1859–1929), was a Russian Zionist leader. The images and sounds of the 1903 Kishinev pogrom that shocked Bessarabian Jews were embedded in her memory and recorded in her autobiographical work, Ke-Tipah ba-yam (Like a Drop in the Ocean; 1971). After the pogrom her family moved to Kharkov, where Bernstein-Cohen attended the German gymnasium, and where she acted, for the first time, in plays staged at her school.
(1872–1942), Orthodox journalist; Zionist; and Agudas Yisroel politician. Born in Pressburg (Hun., Pozsony; mod. Bratislava), Sámuel (Samu) Bettelheim studied at the renowned yeshiva in his city. In 1897, he was among the founders and the president of the first legally recognized Zionist society in Hungary, the Yagdil Torah Society, renamed Ahavat Tsiyon in 1899. Although its members were hesitant to call themselves Zionists, Rabbi Simḥah Bunem Sofer permitted students from the yeshiva to join and thus eased their way.
(1856–1906), painter. Sándor Bihari (known as Alexander in the West) was one of the leading artists of late nineteenth-century Hungary, and a major representative of that country’s realist school of the 1880s. Although Bihari did not use specifically Jewish themes in his work, his career epitomized the contributions of Jews to Hungarian culture. Born in Rézbánya, a small town in Bihar county, he later lived in Debrecen and Nagyvárad (Rom., Oradea). Bihari was among the scores of Jews who freed themselves from the squalor of small-town life by utilizing their cultural and artistic abilities. In 1878, he made his way to Vienna where he studied painting under Carl Wurzinger and other Geneva masters; in Paris, he studied under Jean-Paul Laurens.
(1880–1948), novelist, publicist, editor, dramatist, and screenwriter. As was the case with other writers of the second generation of Hungarian Jewish literature, Lajos Bíró saw himself not only as culturally Hungarian but also as a modernist in the artistic sense and as a political and social liberal. Members of his generation were active in the antifeudal opposition, a movement that developed and refined socialist liberal values. Most second-generation writers neither worked within Jewish frameworks nor participated in Jewish cultural affairs. When attacked, they defended the role of Jewish intelligentsia and their own attempts to assimilate; following the revolutions of 1918 and 1919, they responded to the counterrevolutionary regime’s open persecution of Jews.
The birth of a child in the premodern period was accompanied by many fears, anxiety, and a sense of powerlessness. There were many possible dangers for both the mother and the baby. In traditional Jewish life, these dangers were perceived as connected not only to objective difficulties, but also to the influence of the world of demons and evil spirits.
(1840–1898), Yiddish author. Born in the Latgale region of Latvia in the Russian Empire to a working-class family, Oyzer Bloshteyn spent his early teenage years studying at a yeshiva. At 15, he was attracted to Enlightenment ideas and began studying German and Russian; after briefly becoming a teacher, he subsequently devoted himself to a career as a writer. During the last two decades of the nineteenth century, Bloshteyn was among the most prolific and popular authors of popular Yiddish works in Eastern Europe, publishing more than 50 novels and short stories, generally with the Matz publishing house in Vilna. Although Bloshteyn died in Warsaw in 1898, his work was read widely by Yiddish readers well into the interwar period, particularly in Galicia.
Cross-Cultural Relations, Conflicts, and New Directions
Enlightened Absolutism, Cultural Reform, and Emancipation
Jewish Settlement and Population Patterns
Moravian Exceptionalism: The Political Jewish Community
(d. 1533), tax collector and financial adviser to Polish kings Aleksander Jagiellończyk and Zygmunt Stary. Known as Abraham of Prague, Abraham Judeus Bohemus moved from Bohemia to Poland at the end of fifteenth century. There he lived in the Kazimierz district of Kraków before settling in Lwów. Along with the Fiszel family and Ozer from Opoczno, Bohemus was one of the chief financiers of the Polish court.
(1830–1907), Czech rabbi. After completing gymnasium in Prague (one of his teachers was the playwright Václav Kliment Klicpera), Filip Bondy studied philosophy at Prague University. He was simultaneously tutored in Jewish theology and Hebrew literature by Shelomoh Yehudah Rapoport, the city’s chief rabbi, as well as by Daniel Frank, rabbi of Brünn (Brno), who ordained him in 1857. That same year he also earned his doctorate of philosophy. Bondy’s exceptional linguistic gifts enabled him to master not only Czech and German, Hebrew and Aramaic, and Latin and Greek, but also English, Italian, and French.
Book Design in the Late Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries
The Nineteenth-Century Shift toward Modernity
Town in the extreme north of Romania, at the foot of Rodna Mountains and on the Vişeu River (157 km east of Baia Mare). The first documentary reference to Borşa (Hun., Borsa) dates to 1365, but a Jewish presence was not noted until 1728, when immigrants from Galicia and Bucovina settled in the area. The first synagogue was founded in 1783, and a burial society was set up in 1815.
(1893–?), agronomist and Soviet Jewish activist. Abram Bragin was a key figure in the movement to establish an official Jewish territory in the Soviet Union. Born in Krasnopole, Ukraine, Bragin studied law at Kiev University and belonged for a time to the socialist Zionist party Tse‘ire Tsiyon. His connection with Tse‘ire Tsiyon’s form of labor Zionism got Bragin interested in movements to the land as “solutions” to the “Jewish question.” Bragin therefore became more interested in agronomy and eventually became a leading agronomist who combined his training in agricultural production with principles of socialist Zionism to devise a program for settling Jews in farming colonies within the USSR.
(1916–2001), writer. While studying law at the University of Warsaw (1934–1939), Kazimierz Brandys, the younger brother of writer Marian Brandys, worked in socialist youth organizations and wrote for leftist journals. He spent World War II in Warsaw, hiding on the Aryan side. After 1945, as a member of the Writers Union and of the editorial boards of Kuźnica and Nowa Kultura, he promoted socialist realism, a new literary doctrine sponsored by the Communist regime.
(1902–1941 or 1942), writer, poet, publicist, and member of the Esperanto movement. Mieczysław Braun (Braunstein, Bronsztejn, or Braunstein) collaborated with both the interwar Polish and Polish Jewish press (Skamander, Wiadomości Literackie, Nasz Przegląd, Nowy Dziennik, Ster). After fighting in the Polish–Soviet war of 1920, he studied law in Warsaw from 1922 to 1926, and then worked as an attorney in Łódź. He died of typhus in the Warsaw ghetto.
(1883–1925), popular entertainer, circus strongman, and folk hero. Billed as “the strongest man in the world” in the 1920s, Zishe (Siegmund) Breitbart was better known to his Yiddish-speaking audiences as Shimshn-hagibr (Samson the Mighty). Breitbart was born into a family of blacksmiths in Łódź. According to his autobiography, he began casting iron in his father’s workshop at the age of four. Breitbart eventually embarked upon a career as a circus acrobat and strongman, as well as an actor on the Yiddish stage.
A brivnshteler (letter-writing manual; Heb., igron) is a collection of formulas for composing letters on topics ranging from business to courtship to family life. In addition to providing templates for composition, the collections were widely used for teaching handwriting skills. Because many of the manuals were bi- or even trilingual, they served as textbooks for learning Hebrew, German, Russian, Polish, and respectable, educated Yiddish.
Rabbinic family, originating in Bohemia, that settled in Galicia, Lithuania, and Hungary. The surname Broda (Braude, Broide, Braudo) indicates that the family’s origins were likely in the city of Brod, though the name could also be a Hebrew acronym for bene rabanim ve-dayane emet (the sons of rabbis and judges of truth).
(1880–1942), Yiddish prose writer. Rokhl Brokhes was born in Minsk. With the encouragement of her father, Volf Brokhes, a maskil, she learned Hebrew and could read modern literature in that language. Her father died when she was nine, and soon after his death, Brokhes went to work as a seamstress. Later she taught needleworking at the Minsk Jewish Vocational School for Girls.
(1812–1889), rabbi and Talmudic scholar. Jacob Brüll was born in Rousínov (Ger., Neu-Raussnitz) in the Habsburg province of Moravia. He attended several yeshivas in Hungary (Bonyhád, Pressburg, and Buda) before returning to Moravia, where he was ordained by Michael Wronik, rabbi of Rousínov, and Neḥemyah Trebitsch, chief rabbi of Moravia. He later married Trebitsch’s daughter, Regina. Brüll served as rabbi of Kojetín (Kojetein), Moravia, from 1844 until his death.
(1919–2004), scientist and Jewish community leader. Nicolae Cajal was born in Bucharest, the son of Marcu Cajal (1885–1972), a professor and one of the first specialists in pediatrics in Romania. Cajal graduated as a doctor in medicine and pharmacy from the Faculty of Medicine at Bucharest University (1946) and eventually took his degree as a doctor of medical sciences (1959). Specializing in microbiology and virology under the guidance of Ştefan Nicolau (1896–1967), Cajal became his professor’s spiritual heir and collaborator in 1945.
A family of physicians, pharmacists, community leaders, and Jewish scholars in Poland from the second half of the sixteenth century until the twentieth century. Branches of the Calahora family were also known by the names Kalahora, Kolahari, Kalafri, Landsberg, and Pozen.
Dissemination of East European Cantorial Music
East European Cantorial Music in the United States
The Provisional Government that succeeded the tsars in March 1917 abolished censorship. However, two days after the Bolsheviks seized power in November 1917, they reintroduced censorship and extended it to films, art, and music. Though labeled a “temporary measure,” censorship lasted until the late 1980s. Even labels on bottles were subject to censorship; the knowing eye could discern the censor’s individual number, stamp, and date of issue. Violation of censorship rules could be construed as “divulging state secrets,” a crime punishable by imprisonment.
Sources of Funding, Collection, and Distribution
Avraham Landau of Chekhanov (Ciechanów; 1784–1875) was an important rabbi and Hasidic leader in central Poland. He was primarily a disciple of Fishel of Strikov (1743–1822), one of the founders of Hasidism in central Poland. Landau became rabbi of Chekhanov in 1820 and remained there for the rest of his life, despite offers from larger communities. He did not formally become a tsadik until after the death of his friend, Yitsḥak Me’ir of Ger (1789–1866), when many of the latter’s Hasidim came to him.
(Pseudonym of Aleksandr Mikhailovich Glikberg; 1880–1932), Russian poet. Born to a pharmacist’s family in Odessa, Sasha Chernyi was baptized at the age of 10 in order to bypass the numerus clausus. In 1895 he ran away from home to Saint Petersburg. In 1904 Chernyi debuted as a feuilletonist in the Zhitomir newspaper Volynskii vestnik (Volhynian Messenger). In 1905, his poem “Chepukha” (Gibberish) appeared in the satirical magazine Zritel’ (The Spectator), signed Sasha Chernyi. Although his first poetry collection, Pestrye motivy (Sundry Themes [or Sundry Tunes]), came out in 1906, Chernyi considered the next collection, Satiry (Satires; 1910), his true entrance into literature.
APPENDIX: PROMINENT JEWISH CHESS PLAYERS
Jewish Conversions to Christianity after 1772
Jewish Converts to Christianity in Pre-Partition Poland (before 1772)
Compendia of instructions for the preparation of Jewish food or addressed to the Jewish reader constitute the single largest body of literature written by and for Jewish women. These cookbooks initially arose during the first half of the nineteenth century in response to the social aspirations of those who wished to add culinary refinement to the kosher kitchen. Among the earliest extant examples are several small Yiddish manuscripts from Bohemia, Moravia, or neighboring areas; they were in all likelihood intended to teach young brides to cook or to supervise a servant in the kitchen.
The Decline and Disappearance of the Councils
(1760–1854), merchant, leading member of the Warsaw Jewish community, and its chief rabbi. Ḥayim Dawidsohn was born in Pińczów and, after the death of his father, grew up at the home of the wealthy Tsentseminer family, Warsaw bankers to whose daughter he was wed as a young man. Thanks to an inheritance from his father-in-law and to the sharp business acumen of his wife, Dawidsohn’s family amassed a great fortune, acquired among other means by obtaining the leasehold for taxes on kosher meat. His teacher, Ya‘akov Lorbeerbaum of Lissa (Leszno), ordained him. In 1797, on the basis of the Prussian law regarding Jewish surnames, Ḥayim became the first member of his family to assume the family name of Dawidsohn.
Salt-mining town in northwestern Romania, on the Someş River 60 km northeast of Cluj. The first documented reference to Dej (Ger, Desch; Hun., Dés) dates to 1061. After legislation in 1693–1700 had prohibited Jews from settling in mining towns, authorities in Dej decided in 1722 to forbid Jewish residence. No Jews lived there until 1834; and just three were mentioned in 1838.
(1820–1892), Orthodox community leader, religious court judge, and chronicler. Ḥayim Natan Dembitzer was born in Kraków, where he served from 1849 as a dayan (religious court judge) and magid (preacher); by 1856 he was appointed head of one of the community’s religious courts. In the 1850s, he was active in the first stages of Galician Orthodoxy’s response to the challenges of modern culture, organizing a group of rabbis who took defensive stands in several public halakhic controversies. The leader of the group was Dembitzer’s teacher, the dayan Shelomoh Kluger of Brody.
(1858–1884), early Polish socialist, writer, and editor. Szymon Dickstein, who used the pseudonym Jan Młot, was born in Warsaw to a lower middle-class Jewish family. In 1872, he completed gymnasium and then studied medicine at Warsaw University. Even as a university student, Dickstein took an active role in illegal socialist circles.
(1907–1978), journalist, editor, and Zionist activist. Born in Riga, Aryeh Disenchik studied at the local university and then at the school of international commerce in Vienna. He served as the parliamentary correspondent for the Riga newspaper Dos folk and as an editor of the newspapers Morgen post and Ovent post. Active in the Jewish scouting movement, in 1923 he was among the founders of Betar, eventually joining its international leadership in Paris. For a time, he worked as an aide to Vladimir (Ze’ev) Jabotinsky, the leader of Revisionist Zionism.
Prominent Moravian family that took its name from its patriarch, Jacob Moses Wimer (d. 1763), who came from Dobruschka, a small town near Königgrätz (Hradec Králové) in Bohemia. In 1730 Wimer moved to Brünn (Brno) as a widower with two children, and despite the fact that Jews were forbidden to live in that city, was given permission to settle and to deal first in precious stones and jewelry, and later in spices and tobacco. In 1750 he was granted a monopoly on the tobacco trade for the royal cities of Moravia. Dobruschka’s daughter Esther married Adam Oppenheimer of Vienna, a relative of the court purveyor Samuel Oppenheimer. Dobruschka’s son Solomon (1715–1774) married Schöndl, daughter of Löbl Hirschl of Rzeszów and Güttel Jacobi of Prossnitz.
(1882–1940), literary historian and teacher. Oskar Donath was a proponent of coexistence for Czechs, Germans, and Jews in the Czech lands (and later in Czechoslovakia). Born in Újezd, near Přeřov (Prerau) in the Habsburg province of Moravia, Donath studied Slavic languages and philology at the University of Vienna, where he earned his doctorate. He taught the Czech language at the German gymnasium in Hodonín (Göding) from 1907 to 1913, then in Brno (Brünn) from 1913 to 1930, and finally in Prague from 1930 to 1940. While in Brno, he also was an adjunct instructor at the Jewish gymnasium, which opened in 1920.
Founded in 1869 as a coal and steel center by the Welsh engineer John Hughes, Donets’k was originally named Iuzovka (Hughes’ Town), but took on the name Stalino between 1924 and 1962. The city is the capital of the Donets’k Oblast’ (region) in southeastern Ukraine. Its population of 164 in 1870 grew to more than one million by 1989. The steel and coal industries continue to dominate its economy today.
(1908–1971), Soviet Yiddish poet. Born in Krosno (Vinnitsa region) and named after his father, who died before his birth, Shike (Ovsei, in Russian) Driz was raised by his grandfather, a tinsmith. Driz first studied with a private melamed and later transferred to a Soviet Yiddish elementary school. Later he moved to Kiev, where he worked in a factory and studied at the Kiev Art School and later at the Kiev Art Institute. An aspiring sculptor, perhaps inspired by his grandfather’s craftsmanship, he turned to writing Yiddish poetry in the late 1920s. Some 20 years later, he was forced to rely on his practical skills, working at menial masonry works when public Yiddish literary activity was forbidden. Driz’s first collection of Yiddish verse, Likhtike vor (Radiant Life), appeared in Kiev in 1930 and his second, Shtolener koyakh (Might of Steel), was published in 1934.
(1910–1993), Soviet government figure. The son of a white-collar worker, Veniamin Dymshits was born in Feodosiia. In 1931, he began working as a construction foreman at the Kuznetsk Metallurgical Plant, and later participated in building the Azov (Azovstal’) and Krivoi Rog (Ukr., Kryvyy Rih) metallurgical plants. In 1941, he was appointed director of the Magnitostroi Trust, which constructed blast furnaces at metallurgical sites. From 1946 to 1950 he headed the Zaporozhstroi Trust, which rehabilitated large-scale industry in Zaporozh’e (Ukr., Zaporizhzhia). In 1945 and again in 1950, he was awarded a Stalin Prize.
A Possible Motivation for the Translations
The Link between the Translations and the Muscovite Heresy
(1885–1963), Estonian community activist and philanthropist. Born in Pinsk, Belorussia, Hirsch (Grigori) Eisenstadt studied economics at the Kiev Institute of Commerce between 1908 and 1913. After graduation, he joined his parents in Riga, Latvia, working for an oil company. In 1914, he was transferred to Tallinn, Estonia, where he had a business career and was active in local Jewish life.
(1890–1942), Hungarian community leader. Sándor Eppler was born in Pest into a family affiliated with the Neolog movement. His father served as chief secretary of the Shas Ḥevrah (Talmud Study Society), and his uncle Viktor Sussmann was an Orthodox rabbi in Budapest. Eppler remained stringently observant his entire life. After completing elementary school, he spent three years at a commercial academy, where he gained financial and business training. The many statistical tables accompanying Eppler’s writings testify that his early training was valuable. At age 18, he became an employee of the Neolog Pest Israelite Community (PIH), thanks in large part to his personal contacts.
(1913–1996), mathematician. Born in Budapest to parents who taught mathematics and physics at the high-school level, Pál Erdős became interested in mathematics and showed exceptional talent at an early age. In college, he belonged to a group of students, most of them Jews, who became lifelong friends, all renowned mathematicians, such as Tibor Gallai (Grünwald), György Szekeres, Géza Grünwald, and Pál Turán. Their talents were stimulated and nurtured by their superior education; they were also decisively influenced by the Hungarian mathematical monthly Középiskolai Matematikai Lapok (Mathematical Journal for Secondary Schools), which was dedicated to problem-solving.
Interwar Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union
(1866–1918), literary and intellectual figure. Berta Fanta (née Sohr) came from an assimilated, well-to-do Jewish family living in the small town of Libochovice (Libochowitz), near Prague. She was an intellectual who hosted a famous philosophical salon. The gatherings that took place in the Fanta family’s home over the two-decade period before World War I were attended by professors at the German university in Prague, including Albert Einstein and Christian von Ehrenfels; intellectuals of the younger generation, such as Franz Kafka and Max Brod; and occasional visitors, such as the anthroposophist Rudolf Steiner.
(1802–1884), rabbi, theologian, and scholar. Born in Boskovice (Ger., Boskowitz) in the Habsburg province of Moravia, Hirsch Bär (Hebrew name, Tsevi Hirsh) Fassel attended yeshivas in Boskovice and Pressburg (mod. Bratislava). Upon his return to Moravia, he married Jozefa Arnstein, with whom he had eight children. In 1836, he was offered the rabbinate of Prostĕjov (Ger., Prossnitz) despite strident opposition from Moravia’s chief rabbi, Neḥemyah Trebitsch (1779–1842), who was wary of Fassel’s predilection for religious reform.
(1870–1912), Hebrew literary critic. Born in a village in Crimea, Menaḥem Feitelson received a traditional and secular education from his father, a maskil who worked as a melamed. In 1884, while still an adolescent, Feitelson published articles and impressions in the local press. He then turned to literary criticism as the main focus of his writings. Feitelson’s most significant early essays were about Mendele Moykher-Sforim (Sholem Yankev Abramovitsh; 1891) and Ben-Avigdor (Avraham Leib Shalkovich; 1893). In 1891, he issued his only published book, a booklet titled Meḥkarim be-divre yeme Yisra’el (Studies on Jewish History). At various points he lived in Melitopol, Ukraine, as well as in Galicia and Austria.
(1877–1972), economist, politician, writer, and publisher. Miksa Fenyő—who changed his name from Fleischmann in 1895—was raised in Mélykútin in modest circumstances (his father was a tailor) but graduated from the prestigious Lutheran Central Gymnasium of Budapest. After finishing his legal studies, he maintained a law practice in Budapest from 1900. In 1903, he became vice secretary of the Magyarországi Gyáriparosok Országos Szövetségének (Hungarian Federation of Industrialists; GyOSz), its secretary from 1904, acting director from 1907, and director from 1918. From 1912, he was the director of the Center for Hungarian Customs Policy and the editor of the periodical Magyar Gyáripar. In 1913, he converted to Catholicism.
(1873–1933), neurologist, psychiatrist, and psychoanalyst. Sándor Ferenczi was born and raised in Miskolc, though his family had roots in Galicia. His father, Bernát (Baruch) Fraenkel, who changed the family name to Ferenczi in 1879, ran a well-known bookshop and publishing house. Ferenczi graduated from the medical faculty of the University of Vienna and settled in Budapest in 1895. There he worked as a physician at several hospitals, opening a private surgery practice in 1900. As a physician, Ferenczi developed ideas that went beyond the dominant, purely positivistic, and reductionist biological and medical thinking of his age, and sought philosophical and psychological explanations for the “secrets” of life and matter, as well as for unconscious phenomena. In 1903, he opened a neurological practice at the outpatients’ clinic of the Workers Health Insurance Association.
Songs of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries
Ritual Requirements and Customary Practices
(1847–1916), rabbi and historian. Born in Kromĕříž (Ger., Kremsier) in the Habsburg province of Moravia, Adolph (Abraham) Frankl-Grün attended yeshiva in Lipník nad Bečvou (Leipnik), where he studied with Moses Bloch (1815–1909). Thereafter he attended the Jewish Theological Seminary in Breslau, where his teachers included Zacharias Frankel and Heinrich Graetz.
(1794–1881), rabbi, Torah scholar. Born in Křenice (Krimnitz) near Touškov (Tuschkau) in western Bohemia, Samuel Freund was noted for his keen intellect and unusual memory. He studied at the Triesch (now Ťrešt’) yeshiva under El‘azar Löw (1758–1837), in Leipnik, Moravia under Barukh Fränkl-Te’omim (1760–1828), and in Prague under Betsal’el Ranschburg (1760–1820). While in Prague, he lived in the house of Koppel Frankel, the father of Zacharias Frankel, the latter of whom became the head of the Jewish Theological Seminary of Breslau, and whom Freund assisted in Talmudic studies.
(1808–1874), rabbi and Hasidic leader in Hungary. Born in Sátoraljaújhely, Tsevi Hirsh Friedman grew up in the house of Mosheh Teitelbaum and ultimately became his foremost disciple. Friedman continued his Talmudic studies at the yeshiva of Tsevi Hirsh Heller (Ḥarif) in Bonyhád. He was also close to Ḥayim Halberstam of Sandz.
(Pseudonym of Aleksandr Arkad’evich Ginzburg; 1918–1977), poet, songwriter, playwright, screenwriter, and prose writer. Born in Moscow and raised in Sebastopol, Galich was celebrated in the 1940s and 1950s for his dramatic works (including Vas vyzyvaet Taimyr [The Taimyr Is Calling You]) and screenplays (Vernye druz’ia [Eternal Friends]; Na semi vetrakh [To Seven Winds]). His lasting fame, however, rested on the songs—widely understood as countercultural and satirical—that he wrote and performed beginning in the early 1960s. Accompanying himself on guitar, Galich staged shows throughout the Soviet Union at universities, clubs, and private apartments.
From Annexation until Emancipation (1772–1867)
From Emancipation through the End of Empire (1867–1918)
(1804–1886), Hungarian rabbi and author. Born in Ungvár and orphaned at the age of eight, Shelomoh Ganzfried was raised by the chief rabbi of that city, Tsevi Hirsh Heller, and later followed him to Bonyhad. After his marriage he turned to commerce, but the failure of his business drew him to a rabbinical career.
(1906–1968), Soviet mathematician. Born in Saint Petersburg into a family of physicians, Aleksandr Gel’fond studied at the Bauman Higher Technical School in Moscow, and later at the physics and mathematics faculty of Moscow State University. After completing his studies in 1927, he entered a postgraduate program. During his university and postgraduate years, Gel’fond worked under the guidance of Viacheslav Stepanov and Aleksandr Khinchin.
(1881–1914?), Czech poet, caricaturist, and journalist. Gellner was born in the town of Mladá Boleslav, southwest of Prague, into the family of a small textile factory owner whose business had just collapsed. As a secondary school student, Gellner began writing poetry, drawing, and translating Goethe and Heine for school magazines. His subsequent studies were erratic: over the next decade he abandoned studies at a technical university in Vienna, a mining academy in Příbram, and art schools in Munich and Dresden. While living in Příbram, Gellner often visited the circle of anarchists in nearby Prague, led by the poet Stanislav Kostka Neumann, and contributed poems and drawings to his magazine Nový kult. After 1905, Gellner lived mainly in Paris; in 1911, he settled down in the Moravian city of Brno, where he joined the newspaper Lidové noviny and edited its Sunday supplement Večery. He became known for his satiric poetry and caricatures.
(1853–1944), director of the Girls’ Orphanage of the Pest Israelite Women’s Association and cofounder of the first Zionist girls’ association in Budapest. Katalin Gerő’s mother was Zsófia Benkő, whose family had been successful and respectable residents in the village of Hévízgyörk northeast of Budapest from the eighteenth century. Katalin’s father, László Gerő, was an intellectual and son of a Polish freedom fighter who had found shelter for his family in Hungary. The early death of Zsófia left László with six children and little experience in running the farm. As a result, he quickly became impoverished and abandoned his children.
(1870–1908), a founding member of the Russian Socialist Revolutionary Party and one of the leaders of its Combat Organization. Grigorii Gershuni was born near Kaunas, Lithuania. Some sources describe him as a chemist, while others call him a pharmacist. He joined the revolutionary movement, and by the late 1890s had become an important promoter of socialist and anarchist ideas.
Town in Ukraine, close to the Romanian border; now part of the region of Chernivtsi. Jews settled in Gertsa (Rom., Herța) in the second half of the seventeenth century, the result of a privilege granted in 1672 by Prince Gheorghe Duca (renewed in 1817 and 1824). A yeshiva had been founded there in the eighteenth century. In the first decades of the nineteenth century, Rabbi Eli‘ezer Volf, a Hasid, settled in the town.
(1871–1939), historian and social activist. Iulii Gessen was born in Odessa and graduated from the commercial school in that city; he also studied history independently. In 1895 he was employed by the newspaper Odesskie novosti (Odessa News); a year later he moved to Saint Petersburg, where he worked in a bank until 1905. Apparently heavily influenced by social activists such as Ahad Ha-Am and Simon Dubnow, from 1905 Gessen was active in the work of the Society for the Promotion of Culture among the Jews of Russia (OPE).
(1816–1878), chief rabbi of the Warsaw community, businessman, and Talmudic scholar. The son of a wealthy merchant, Ya‘akov Gesundheit grew up in the Warsaw suburb of Praga. He worked as a merchant and became one of the most outspoken opponents of Hasidism during the period in which the movement grew into the leading force among observant Jews in Warsaw.
(From Yid., Gezelshaft kultur; Culture Society), the All-Ukrainian Society for Promoting the Development of Jewish Culture, an independent organization, Communist in ideology, that worked mainly in Yiddish. Gezkul’t was founded in Kiev on 26 September 1926 (the date of its charter) and was active until the early 1930s.
The establishment of the 800 to 900 ghettos in Poland, the Soviet Union, and Romania between late 1939 and mid-1942 introduced radical and rapid changes in Jewish communal and individual life, and was a multifaceted and complicated phenomenon. Those changes and the coping strategies Jews invented in response can best be examined from three perspectives—physical space; social welfare; and educational, cultural, and religious activity.
The Gintsburg Circle and the Legal Position of Russian Jewry
(1904–1977), activist, teacher, journalist, and memoir writer. An ardent member of the Communist Party who was arrested during the purges of the 1930s and sentenced to 18 years in the gulag, Evgeniia Ginzburg is renowned for her compelling articulation of that ordeal in her two-volume memoir Krutoi marshrut. Translated as Journey into the Whirlwind and Within the Whirlwind, her account ranks with and complements Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s fiction in its suspenseful, introspective description of one woman’s “journey” through the Stalinist gulag.
(1868–1915), Hebrew writer. Ezra Goldin was born in Luna, a town in the Grodno region. In 1886 he moved to Warsaw, and a year later published his first book, Shire no‘ar (Poetry of Youth). This was an anthology of both original and translated poems from Russian, with nationalist themes and emotional tones that were typical of Ḥibat Tsiyon poetry. He soon abandoned poetry and turned his attention to prose, publishing stories and articles in Hebrew and Yiddish in the local press.
(1932–2002), prose writer, playwright, and screenwriter. Fridrikh Gorenshtein was born in Kiev; his father, a professor, was repressed in 1935. A graduate of the Dnepropetrovsk Mining Institute (1955), Gorenshtein also completed a course in screenwriting (1963). Between 1963 and 1980, he wrote 15 screenplays, including Solaris (dir. Andrei Tarkovskii; 1972) and Raba liubvi (Slave of Love; dir. Nikita Mikhalkov; 1976). In the Soviet Union, Gorenshtein was permitted to publish just one piece, the story “Dom s bashenkoi” (House with a Turret; 1964); however, his novella, Stupeni (Steps), was included in a celebrated “unofficial” collection, Metropol’ (1979). In 1980 he emigrated to Germany, where he remained until his death in 2002.
(1906–2001), Yiddish prose writer. Born in the Lithuanian town of Krakes, Shira (or Shirke; original surname unknown) grew up in poverty, with little attention from her parents. She moved to Palestine in 1924, but in 1929 arrived in Odessa with a group of disillusioned members of the Gedud ha-‘Avodah labor corps. Led by Mendl Elkind, they attempted to recreate their commune in the Soviet Union by establishing the agricultural settlement of Vojo Nova (“New Way [of life]” in Esperanto) in Crimea. At that point, Shira Kushnir (as she was known then; Kushnir may not have been her surname at birth) was a single mother of three daughters.
(1883–1912), Bundist, writer, and theorist on Jewish nationalism. Bronisław Grosser was born in Miechów, Congress Poland, to a middle-class Jewish family. Raised in a wholly Polish cultural milieu, he regarded himself as fully Polish during his childhood. Even though Grosser’s parents had not converted, they had severed their ties to the Jewish community to such an extent that Grosser did not know about his Jewish origins until the second decade of his life. During his years at a gymnasium in Warsaw, Grosser first began to wrestle with his Jewish background, gradually moving away from the assimilationist spirit in which he was raised. At 13, he studied Hebrew with his uncle.
(1866–1940), lawyer, communal advocate, and chief counsel of Mendel Beilis. Born in Ekaterinoslav, in 1876 Gruzenberg moved with his family to Kiev, where he attended a Russian gymnasium. Upon earning a law degree from Saint Vladimir University in 1889, Gruzenberg moved to Saint Petersburg to begin his profession. Despite his talents, he remained an apprentice lawyer until 1905 because of a government decree that admitted non-Christians to the bar only by personal authorization from the minister of justice.
Advocates of the Haskalah and then of Polish Jewish assimilation. Abraham Gumplowicz (1803–1876) was a wealthy merchant and politician. His son Ludwik (1838–1909) was a legal historian and sociologist. Abraham’s grandson, Maksymilian Ernest (1864–1897), was an attorney, historian, and Slavic studies specialist. Maksymilian’s son Władysław (1869–1942), a physician by training, was a geographer and journalist.
(1909–1994), variety artist. Born in Kharkov, Anna Guzik was the daughter of Iakov Guzik, founder of the Yiddish Traveling Folk Ensemble of Musical Comedy. She first appeared in her father’s troupe in 1924, acting in Avrom Goldfadn’s comedies and operettas and appearing in stage versions of Sholem Aleichem’s works. She sang, danced, acted, read feuilletons from the stage, and performed Jewish folk songs. In the mid-1930s Guzik toured the USSR with a Jewish folk music ensemble and also appeared on the Russian stage in musical comedies. In 1939 she won a national contest for variety performers.
(1770–1804), Hebrew playwright and poet. Born in Troplowitz (Pol., Opawica), Silesia, Yosef Ha-Efrati (also known as Joseph Troplowitz) served as a private tutor for a wealthy household in Ratibor (Pol., Racibórz) until 1791. Between 1791 and 1794, he lived in Prague. Many of his poems were printed in the Hebrew periodical Ha-Me’asef, which also published his translation (from German) in 1788 of works by Heinrich Von Kleist.
Town in northeastern Moldavia, located within 50 kilometers of Botoşani and 73 kilometers of Iaşi. A Jewish presence in Hârlău apparently existed during the reign of Stephen the Great (1475–1504), as the prince hired the Jewish doctor Şmil of Hârlău to work at his court in Suceava. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Jewish craftsmen and merchants, encouraged by Moldavian rulers, began to arrive from Poland, some settling in Hârlău.
By the end of the eighteenth century, Hasidism, in its various groupings, was striking a responsive chord in ever-broadening circles of East European Jews. The central feature of Hasidism from its inception has been allegiance to a holy master (rebbe or tsadik) who has loyal followers. People do not qualify as Hasidim, no matter how great their admiration for Hadisic ideas, unless they are loyal to a particular rebbe, whether Belz, Satmar, Bobov, Lubavitch, Ger, or the like. The place where the rebbe resides defines where his “court” is located (the regal analogy holds), whence the Hasidim of that dynasty receive particular rules and acquire their individual identity and contribute to the upkeep according to their means. Thus, in pre-Holocaust times, the Belzer rebbe resided in Bełz in Galicia and the Gerer rebbe in Gur (Ger in Hasidic parlance) in Poland; the Belzer Hasidim, in the larger towns, had their Belzer prayer houses and the Gerer theirs. After the Holocaust, the rebbes who survived retained their old town names but, of course, lived elsewhere: the Belzer rebbe, for example, in Jerusalem, and the Gerer rebbe in Ashkelon.
(1874–1938), Zionist leader, rabbi, and Polish consul in Palestine. Born in Czortków, Galicia, Bernard Hausner was involved in Zionist activity during his high school years. He was ordained by the rabbinical seminary in Vienna and received a doctorate in philosophy from the German University in Prague. When he returned to Galicia in 1903, he taught Jewish studies at the government high school in Lemberg (Lwów) and also participated in Zionist activities. As an administrator, he granted financial aid to needy students, and initiated programs to encourage the involvement of Galician Jewry in the fields of crafts, industry, and agriculture.
(d. 1787), Hasidic leader. Ḥayim Ḥaykl ben Shemu’el was a leading disciple of Dov Ber, the Magid of Mezritsh, and did much to introduce Hasidism in Lithuania. According to Hasidic tradition, he had begun his career as a cantor in Karlin, and had been a close disciple of Eliyahu, the Gaon of Vilna, before coming to Hasidism.
Professionalization and Nationalization of Jewish Medicine
The Generation of Transition (1880–1900)
(1888–1951), journalist and Zionist activist. Leo Herrmann was born in Landškroun (Landskron), Bohemia. After studying law in Prague, he joined the Bar Kochba Association, the organization of Prague Zionists, in 1906, and served as its chairman between 1908 and 1909. That year, he invited Martin Buber to Prague to deliver his famous “Three Speeches on Judaism,” a presentation that had a decisive influence on Zionism in that city. Herrmann was editor of the Prague Zionist weekly Selbstwehr (Self-Defense) from 1910 to 1913; under his editorship it became a respected political and literary journal. He also contributed to the Jüdische Volksstimme (Jewish People’s Voice) in Brünn (Brno) and the Jüdische Zeitung (Jewish News) in Vienna.
(1859–1916), early Polish socialist. Born in Warsaw in 1856 to a well-to-do assimilated Jewish family that had taken part in the 1863 Polish uprising, Helena Heryng (née Kon) was a member of the first circle of socialists in Warsaw. The older sister of Feliks Kon, a Polish socialist, Heryng was among a circle of women who helped to found the socialist movement in the second half of the 1870s. Arrested in 1878 along with her mother, Paulina Kon, for socialist activity, Heryng was sentenced to Siberian exile, where she met and married her husband, Zygmunt Heryng.
(1854–1931), early Polish socialist, economist, translator, and publicist. Zygmunt Heryng was born in Warsaw to a middle-class assimilated Jewish merchant family that “had been Polonized for several generations,” according to his memoirs. Heryng claimed to have taken part in patriotic demonstrations in Warsaw during the Polish uprising of 1863. In 1868–1869, while a gymnasium student in Warsaw, he first encountered socialist literature and became an activist. After graduation, Heryng studied briefly at the Commercial Academy in Vienna and subsequently, in 1875–1878, at the Mining Academy in Saint Petersburg.
(1873–1953), Hebrew and Yiddish writer. Shelomoh Hillels was born in the town of Bar, Podolia. When he was six years old, his family moved to Soroca, Bessarabia, where he received a traditional Jewish education. Following his marriage, he began to read Haskalah literature, including the works of Kalman Schulman, Avraham Mapu, and Yehudah Leib Gordon. In 1891, he published his first story, “Ikar ‘ivri” (A Hebrew Farmer), in the Hebrew periodical Ha-Tsefirah. The story reflected his interest in agricultural settlement in Argentina.
(1823–1891), ophthalmologist and president of the Jewish Community of Pest. Ignác Hirschler was born in Stomfa, where his father was a merchant. The family moved to Pest in the 1830s, and Hirschler studied at the prestigious Piarist secondary school, where he experienced antisemitism firsthand. In his autobiography, he wrote: “Sitting at the Jewish desk in the back of the classroom, I felt the poisoned sting of humiliation, which influences a person’s spirit and frame of mind more adversely than is generally believed.”
(1815–1887), historian, publicist, and businessman. Simon (Sinai) Hock was born into family that had been in Prague for several generations. He studied at the city’s yeshiva and the Jewish Normalschule. In 1835, he helped found Aurora, the Prague society for youth participating in morning prayers, a group committed to blending religious tradition and ideas of the Enlightenment. During the 1840s, Hock wrote about the impact of political conditions on Jewish life in Bohemia and on religious reform; his articles were printed anonymously in the newspapers Die Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums and Der Orient.
(1893–1945?), poet and translator. One of the most important Yiddish writers in Hungary, Yoysef (Hun., József) Holder was born to a Hasidic family in Nagybocskó (Rom., Bocicou Mare; Hun., Veliky Bichkif; the town is now divided between Romania and Ukraine) near Máramarossziget (Rom., Sighet Marmației, in Maramureş), where Yiddish was spoken as a matter of course. He left the Hasidic milieu quite early, yet continued to speak his first language. At age 15, he wrote Hebrew poems and a story about the famous yeshiva of Pressburg; he published this story in the Kraków monthly Ha-Mitspeh. After writing for other Hebrew papers such as Ha-‘Olam (London), Ha-Tsefirah (Warsaw) and ‘Al ha-mishmar (Jerusalem), Holder found his calling as a Yiddish poet.
(1808/12?–1878), bookseller, printer, and journalist. Little is known about Leon (Leib ben David) Hollaenderski’s family background, childhood, and adolescence. As a printer and bookseller of Polish literature in the border region of Suwałki near Lithuania, Hollaenderski was vulnerable to police persecution and decided in 1843 to move to France.
During World War II, Jews produced art in concentration camps, in ghettos, or while in hiding. Unlike artistic production undertaken by outsiders in the name of propaganda, or to confirm the events after the killing had ended, art created by victims under Nazi domination may be viewed as a form of documentation, witnessing, and spiritual resistance that plays a very important historical role as evidence from the victim’s perspective.
The sufferings of Jews under the Nazi regime were reflected in their music and musical life. Music offered Jews a way to express their humanity in inhuman conditions, to escape from reality and give voice to their yearning for freedom, and to find comfort and hope.
After World War II, Holocaust survivors found consolation in the claim that Jews had heroically resisted the Nazis on a large scale, and that even if not every Jew had engaged the enemy in armed combat, all Jews had exhibited high moral standards. Survivors from Eastern Europe demonstrated their solidarity and identification with the myth of Jewish valor by censuring the questionable conduct of a small fraction of Jews suspected of collaboration with the Nazi regime. During the war, the Jewish underground in Eastern Europe had assassinated several Judenrat functionaries, ghetto policemen, and informers, while concentration camp inmates had occasionally killed brutal former kapos stripped by the Germans of their authority. After liberation there were survivors who wanted to settle scores with Jewish collaborators still alive. This wish for revenge led to prosecutions of putative collaborators in Jewish honor courts, administrative tribunals mandated by local Jewish communities to investigate individuals whose behavior under Nazi occupation was called into question, and to condemn and sanction those whose actions were deemed reproachable.
(fl. 18th century), scholar and liturgical poet. Leah Horovitz (her entire first name was Sarah Rivkah Raḥel Leah) was a descendant of a family that had had distinguished rabbis and scholars in its ranks for centuries. Her father, Ya‘akov ben Me’ir Horovitz (1680–1755), was the rabbi of Bolechów and later of Brody, where he was also a member of the elite kloyz (circle) of scholar-mystics. Three of Leah’s five brothers also functioned as rabbis. Leah was married twice, first to Aryeh Leib, son of the rabbi of Dobromil, and then to Shabetai ben Binyamin Rapoport, the rabbi of Krasny. It is not known if she had children.
A Defining Cultural Role: The Second and Third Generations
(1861–1922), Hebrew essayist and editor. Born near Gomel in White Russia (mod. Homel’, Belarus), Sha’ul Hurwitz (also known as Shai Ish Hurwitz) received an enlightened Talmudic education and emulated the progressive tendentious scholarship of such authors as Mosheh Leib Lilienblum in Hebrew and Il’ia Orshanskii in Russian. After attending university classes in Saint Petersburg, Hurwitz studied Jewish laws concerning women, a project that culminated in his monograph Ha-‘Ivriyah veha-yehudiyah (Hebrew Woman, Jewish Woman; 1892).
Extremely wealthy Jewish dzierżawcy (estate lessees) in Lithuania. Presumably born at the turn of the eighteenth century, Shmuel (known in Polish as Szmojło) and his younger brother Yoysef Gdalye (known as Gdal), were the sons of a businessman from Ołyka on the Radziwiłł estates in Volhynia. In 1726, they moved to the town of Biała Podlaska, and began to lease estates from Anna Radziwiłłowa.
(1869–1949), writer, poet, critic, and editor. Hugó Ignotus’s father, Leo Veigelsberg (1846–1907) was a publicist and editor in chief of the leading German-language Hungarian daily Pester Lloyd. Ignotus (he formally adopted this pseudonym) was born in Pest but spent his childhood with his maternal grandfather in the Hungarian great plains. He went to high school in Budapest and completed law studies. While still young, he joined the editorial staff of the modernist literary weekly Hét (The Week), founded by József Kiss in 1890, and worked there between 1891 and 1906. Ignotus’s first book, A slemil keservei (Complaints of the Schlemiel; 1891), a narrative poem, received a favorable review by the leading literary critic of the time, Pál Gyulai.
(1898–1968), physicist. The son of a shoeshop owner, Leopold Infeld was born in Kraków. He studied at the Jagiellonian University with Władysław Natanson between 1916 and 1921 and was later able to study briefly in Berlin. Infeld was an assistant to the chair of theoretical physics at the Jagiellonian University between 1921 and 1924, when he went again to Berlin, and at the Jan Kazimierz University in Lwów from 1932, where until 1934 he held the position of docent (lecturer).
(Yeraḥmi’el Ze‘ev Volf; 1898–1979), Soviet microbiologist and immunologist. Born in the town of Mglin, Chernigov province, in the Pale, Vladimir Ioffe grew up in Perm. The education given in the Ioffe home was Jewish in character. The family read books on Jewish history and culture, written mostly in Hebrew and Yiddish. From his childhood Vladimir showed a particular interest in Hebrew, and at 10, together with his two brothers, he issued a children’s magazine in Hebrew called Kitme diyo (Ink Stains), comprising 32 pages of prose and verse. Ioffe’s study of Hebrew did not prevent him from graduating with honors from the local boys’ high school.
Signed into law by U.S. President Gerald Ford in 1975, the Jackson-Vanik Amendment to the Trade Act of 1974 was instrumental in eliminating barriers to the emigration of Soviet Jewry. Officially known as the [Wilbur] Mills–[Charles] Vanik Bill in the House of Representatives and as the [Henry] Jackson Amendment in the Senate, this amendment required that nonmarket economy countries comply with specific free emigration criteria as a prerequisite for receiving economic benefits in trade relations with the United States. These benefits included Most Favored Nation (MFN) status—now known as Normal Trade Relations—and access to U.S. government financial facilities.
(Original surname Agatstein; 1903–1983), poet and essayist. Mieczysław Jastrun studied German and Polish philology and subsequently worked as a high-school teacher, publishing poetry in literary journals. After World War II, which he survived on the so-called Aryan side in Warsaw, Jastrun joined the Communist Party and edited the government-sponsored journal Kuźnica (1945–1949). After breaking with the party in 1957, he belonged to the group of writers actively defending freedom of speech.
(1881–1943), engineer, researcher, translator, and educator. Józef Jaszuński was born in Grodno to a wealthy family that provided him with both a traditional Jewish and a general education. Jaszuński studied physics and mathematics at Saint Petersburg University and at the Berlin Polytechnikum. Politically, he sympathized early on with the Zionist movement, but later identified with the Bund.
Established in 1999, the Jewish Confederation of Ukraine (Evreiskaia konfederatsiia Ukrainy; EKU) is an association of national, regional, and local organizations with a focus on “philanthropy, the reconstruction of the Jewish national way of life, and the support of humanitarian values.” It was set up by four umbrella organizations: the Union of Jewish Religious Organizations of Ukraine (Ob”edinenie Iudeiskikh Religioznykh Organizatsii Ukrainy; OIROU), the Society for Jewish Culture / Jewish Council of Ukraine (Obshchestvo Evreiskoi Kultury / Evreiskii Sovet Ukrainy; ESU), the Association of Jewish Organizations and Communities-VAAD of Ukraine (Assotsiatsiia Evreiskikh Organizatsii i Obshchin–VAAD Ukrainy; VAAD-AEOOU), and the Kiev City Jewish Community.
(d. 1506), customhouse leaseholder. Josko (Josef) of Hrubieszów (the son of Lea and Shakhnah of Hrubieszów; husband of Golda; brother of Szania, Mordusz, and Iczchan (Yitsḥak?); father of Pesaḥ and Shakhnah) was the most important customhouse leaseholder of Red Russia during the reigns of Casimir IV, Jan Olbracht, and Aleksander; he also served the royal court as financier and supplier.
(1886–1935), journalist. Ber Karlinski was born in the provincial town of Kolno, in the Białystok district. He also used the first name Boaz, as well as the aliases B. Karlinius, B. K-I, and B. Karliner. The son of a wealthy and learned family, Karlinski received a traditional Jewish education. Subsequently, he acquired a general education independently, in Warsaw as of 1904.
(1884–1949), Hebrew poet. Yehudah Karni was born in Pinsk and received a Hebrew and general education. At the age of 13 he published his first poem, “Gemul ha-meshorer” (The Poet’s Recompense; 1897) in Ha-Tsefirah and continued to write poetry in Hebrew and Yiddish for the organs of the Zionist socialist Po‘ale Tsiyon movement. His true “arrival” as a poet came when his piece “Yesh na‘arah temimah” (There Is an Innocent Young Girl) was published by Ḥayim Naḥman Bialik in Ha-Shiloaḥ in 1909.
(1856–1937), rabbi and editor. Born in the Hungarian town of Nagybörsöny, David Katzburg studied at several yeshivas and was a favored disciple of Simḥah Bunim Sofer, the head of the Pressburg (Bratislava) yeshiva. After Katzburg married, he worked in the business world, though without success. Between 1884 and 1891, he served as a rabbi in two small towns. Katzburg then moved to Waitzen (Hun., Vác), a centrally located town with an active Jewish community that was, in his mind, sufficiently removed from the rush of larger cities. Soon after his arrival, he began to publish Tel Talpiyot, modeled on the first Orthodox periodical Shomer Tsiyon ha-ne‘eman (the latter had appeared between 1846 and 1856). The first issue was produced in the winter of 1891.
(1796–1868), rabbi, teacher, commentator, public figure. Born in Vilna, Tsevi Hirsh Katzenellenbogen received a traditional Jewish education and even as a youth was recognized as a talented Torah scholar. His early teachers were the rabbis Sha’ul Katzenellenbogen (who gave his surname to Tsevi Hirsh as a marriage present) and Abele Posvoler.
(1846–1917), Russian and Hebrew writer. Born in Chernigov, Russia, Yehudah Leib-Binyamin Katzenelson, who adopted the pseudonym Buki ben Yogli (the name of the head of the biblical tribe of Dan), grew up in Gomel. In 1861, he began his yeshiva education in Bobruisk, and while there he grew interested in the Haskalah.
(1918–2000), Yiddish poet, lyricist, and literary editor. Yoysef Kerler was born in Haysyn (Rus., Gaisin), southern Ukraine. He was named after his grandfather, who was a tailor and a badkhn (wedding jester and rhymester). In 1930, his family moved to Mayfeld, a Jewish kolkhoz (collective farm) in northern Crimea, where Kerler worked and continued his secondary education. In 1934, he attended a Yiddish machine-building technical school in Odessa, and also studied Yiddish literature and creative writing with Irme Druker (1906–1982). Kerler’s first poems appeared in the newspaper Odeser arbeter in 1935.
(1917–1997), Soviet photojournalist. Among a small number of photographers whose images have become iconic representations of key moments in Soviet history, Khaldei remains less well-known than his works. His photograph of Russian soldiers raising the Soviet flag above a burning Reichstag has been reproduced countless times, though for many years his name was not attached to it. His photographs of the Nuremberg Trials, of Churchill, Truman, and Stalin at Potsdam, and of the progress of the war from Murmansk to the south of Russia and throughout Eastern Europe were widely reproduced. Khaldei’s photographs are remarkable for their aching beauty (a cityscape of Nuremberg, destroyed; a lone reindeer against a night sky filled with warplanes) and their appreciation of human endurance. While Khaldei also photographed Jews in Budapest during World War II, Soviet censorship prevented their exhibition until recently.
(1904–1996), physicist; one of the creators of the Soviet atom bomb and scientific director of the hydrogen bomb project. Iulii Khariton was born into a middle-class Jewish family. Both of his parents left Russia before he completed his education. His mother lived in Berlin from 1910 and moved to Tel Aviv in 1933. His father, a journalist who was expelled from Soviet Russia in 1922 with many Russian intellectuals, lived in Riga and perished during World War II.
(1715/16–1781), rabbinical scholar. Born in Zamość, Poland, to wealthy parents from well-known families, Shelomoh ben Mosheh was regarded as a prodigy, and showed interest in secular knowledge in addition to his religious studies; he studied mathematics, logic, and a number of foreign languages. In 1742, before he had turned 25, he was elected to the position of rabbi of Chełm (Yid., Khelm or Khelem) and its nine satellite communities. From then on, he was known as Rabbi Shelomoh Khelm.
(1908–1984), physicist; one of the creators of the Soviet atomic bomb. Isaak Konstantinovich (patronymic originally Kushelevich) Kikoin was born into the family of a teacher. His father had both an excellent traditional Jewish education and secular training in languages and mathematics. At the beginning of World War I, the family was evacuated from the Pale of Jewish Settlement to Pskov. After graduating from high school in 1923, Kikoin studied at a specialized land surveying school and then entered the Leningrad Polytechnic Institute (1925). He soon joined Abram Ioffe’s famous team in the neighboring Physical-Technical Institute.
(1889–1985), lawyer and historian. Guido Kisch (son of Rabbi Alexander Kisch and an older brother to noted medical scholar Bruno Kisch) was born in Prague; he studied law at the German university there and received his habilitation from the University of Halle in 1915. Kisch became professor of the history of German law in Königsberg in 1920; he returned to Prague in 1921; and from 1922 he taught at the University of Halle. He was forcibly retired in November 1933 by the Hitler regime and worked thereafter as a professor at the Jewish Theological Seminary in Breslau. In 1935, Kisch moved to the United States, where he taught Jewish history at the Jewish Institute of Religion in New York. He moved to Basel in 1962.
(1909–1972), Zionist leader and publicist. Moyshe Kleinbaum (Sneh) was born in Radzyn Podlaski, Poland, to a traditional Zionist family. In 1935, he graduated as a physician from the University of Warsaw. During his college years he had chaired the Warsaw Zionist youth organization Jardenia, while at the same time starting his career in journalism and public affairs. In 1931, he was appointed editor of Nowe Słowo, a Zionist daily, which was issued as a weekly under the title Opinia after 1933.
A branch of Lithuanian Hasidism founded by Shelomoh Ḥayim Perlov (1797–1862) after the death in 1832 of his uncle, Noaḥ Jaffe of Lakhovits. Koidanov has, for most of its history, been the smallest of the three Lithuanian Hasidic dynasties (the others being Slonim and Karlin-Stolin). Before the Holocaust, its centers of influence were in the regions of Koidanov and Minsk in Belorussia.
(1892–1945), architect and Zionist leader. Ottó Komoly was born as Ottó (Nathan) Kohn into a middle-class family in Budapest. His father participated in the First Zionist World Congress in Basel in 1897, and Ottó followed his example by becoming a Zionist. Komoly served in the Austro-Hungarian army during World War I. Because he earned medals for bravery and was a reserve captain, he was exempted from discriminatory anti-Jewish laws. Komoly became deputy chairman of the Hungarian Zionist Association in 1940, and in 1941 was chairman of the organization. He wrote two books on Zionism: A zsidó nép jövője (The Future of the Jewish People; 1919), and Cionista életszemlélet (Zionist View of Life; 1942).
City in central Poland about two-thirds of the way on the east–west route from Warsaw to Poznań. The Jews of Konin probably arrived from Poznań and Kalisz (about 50 km due south of Konin) and are first mentioned in a Polish court record of 1397. The community gained full autonomy from Kalisz in 1810. It is likely that a Jewish burial ground existed at the beginning of the sixteenth century, though the town’s “old” cemetery was first used in the eighteenth century. The Jewish population had reached 180 in the fifteenth century, but destruction by the Swedes (in 1656 and 1707) and plague (especially during the cholera epidemics of 1628–1631 and 1662) kept the numbers of inhabitants lower. It was estimated that 168 Jews lived in Konin in 1764–1765 (making up 24% of the town’s population); by 1827, the numbers had grown to 872 (24.4%) and in 1897 to 2,482 (31.7%). In 1939, it was approximately 3,000 (23%).
(1889–1942), dramatist, expressionist writer and theorist, and stage director. Born and raised in Prague in the generation of Franz Kafka, Paul Kornfeld moved to Germany and made an important contribution to German expressionism on the stage. While he must be considered an assimilated Jew, as was the case with many of his German-speaking Jewish counterparts in the so-called Prague Circle, he and his friends made much of his descent from Orthodox rabbis, including a prominent great-grandfather. Jewish themes and biblical language were central instruments of his universalist, expressionist vision. While he left Prague for Frankfurt at the age of 25 and much of his contribution was made during a career in Germany proper, his background as a Jew from Prague is deeply relevant to that contribution.
(1905–1969), army general. Iakov Kreizer was born in Voronezh, the son of a petty trader. He completed a road construction course and for a while worked as a foreman. In 1921, Kreizer joined the Soviet army and fought against antigovernment military insurgents. After completing his studies at the Voronezh Infantry School, he was appointed platoon commander of a unit in the Moscow garrison. Kreizer joined the Communist Party in 1925. Over a period of slightly more than 13 prewar years, he followed a steady course that led him from platoon commander to commander of the Moscow Proletarian Division.
(ca. 1818–1879), journalist, politician, and poet. Born in Prague, David Kuh studied medicine and law there and in Vienna. From 1842 to 1844 he was a private tutor, first in Vienna and then briefly in Moravia. Kuh spent some time traveling with a group of itinerant actors. He subsequently founded German-language newspapers in Budapest and Pécs (Fünfkirchen). His agitation against the Slavs led to a two-year jail sentence (1848–1850).
Line of rabbinic leaders that emphasized the centrality of music and melody. Its founder, Yeḥezkel ben Tsevi Hirsh Taub (1772–1856), was born in Płońsk. He was a disciple of Ya‘akov Yitsḥak Horowitz (the Seer of Lublin), and Simḥah Bunem of Pshiskhe (Przysucha), and became a rebbe in Kuzmir (Kazimierz) in 1827. Taub grew famous for his musical talents and composed many Hasidic melodies. His teachings are collected in Neḥmad mi-zahav (1909).
Bankers and industrialists in Bohemia. Simon von Lämmel (1766–1845) was a financier and supplier of the Austrian army. His son Leopold (1790–1867) continued Lämmel’s financial activities and helped to organize a credit institution. In the first half of the nineteenth century, the Lämmel (also Lämel) family played a significant role in developing industries in the Czech lands.
(1861–1929), poet, literary critic, and translator. Born into an assimilated, patriotic Polish family in Warsaw, Antoni Lange first studied sciences in Warsaw, then spent 1886–1890 in Paris, studying oriental languages, philosophy, and literature. There he met members of the French literary elite, including Stéphane Mallarmé. Back in Warsaw, he wrote literary criticism, popular essays on history, philosophy, and aesthetics, as well as poetry, literary translations, and plays.
The planning of Yiddish, insofar as both formulation and implementation are concerned, has primarily come from nongovernmental sources (as is also the case with English, German, Italian, and many other languages), except as will be briefly noted in this article with respect to the Soviet Union. Thus, any discussion of language planning for Yiddish is necessarily restricted to corpus planning (i.e., to changes within the language per se, for example, in reviews of older terms, selections among alternatives and synonyms, development of neologisms, and revisions of orthography), rather than extended to status-planning efforts that deal with societal forces (schools, publishers, theaters, government agencies, etc.) outside of language per se.
Planning and Standardization of Yiddish (Language)
(1909–1966), poet, satirist. and aphorist. Stanisław Lec, whose surname means jester in Hebrew (lets), was born in Lwów into a family of wealthy landowners and bankers. With an aristocratic title and socialist views, and his education at the best academic institutions in his home city and Vienna, Lec represented a unique combination of now-extinct Austro-Hungarian, Jewish, and Polish cultures.
The Breadth and Scope of Judicial Autonomy
(1814–1884), painter, sketch artist, illustrator, art critic, and amateur researcher of antiquities. Lesser holds a place in the chronicles of Polish art as an outstanding representative of his country’s historical school. He was also one of the first artists to paint scenes from the modern history of Polish Jews.
Throughout East European Jewish history, the letter was an important vehicle of written communication about everyday concerns. Letters were written to serve many practical purposes: to communicate about Jewish law; to report on communal affairs; to engage in commerce; and to discuss personal matters, among others. Naturally, letters could be written with more than one purpose in mind. Singly and in constellations, they also served as a literary form.
(1900–1969), Yiddish poet. Born in Ekaterinoslav (mod. Ukr., Dnipropetrovs’k) to the family of an undertaker, Khane Levin was educated at a school for poor children. She worked as a seamstress and a sales assistant. Initially, Levin wrote poems in Russian, but under the influence of Leyb Naydus, who lived in Ekaterinoslav in 1915, she switched to Yiddish. While living in Kharkov, she made her literary debut in the almanac Kunst-ring (Art Circle) in 1917. The following year, her poems appeared in the Petrograd weekly Folksblat (People’s Paper), edited by Nokhem Shtif.
(1894–1971), rabbi. Born in Nikopol’, Ekaterinoslav province, Yehudah Leib Levin studied at the Slobodka yeshiva and then in a Jewish teachers’ seminary in Ekaterinoslav (mod. Dnipropetrovs’k). He taught Jewish studies in Ekaterinoslav until 1923, when he was invited to take up the post of rabbi in Grishino (Krasnoarmeiskoe). He remained in that city until the German invasion of the Soviet Union, subsequently evacuating to Uzbekistan and then returning to Krasnoarmeiskoe in late 1944.
(1881–1942), Jewish scholar, founder of the Jewish Museum in Prague. Salomon Lieben was born in Prague, studied in Germany and at the German University in Prague, and taught Jewish religion at various secondary schools in Prague. He was actively involved with that city’s Jewish community and in its ḥevrah kadisha’, the burial society.
(1870–1941), lawyer and socialist politician. Born in Drohobycz, Galicia, into an assimilated family, Hermann Lieberman became active in Polish patriotic activities while still a high school student. He studied in Paris and at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków; then practiced law in Przemyśl, where he frequently defended political activists. He became active in the Polish Socialist Party (PPS) of Galicia and Silesia and in 1905 opposed the establishment of a separate Jewish Social Democratic Party, modeled on the Bund in the tsarist empire.
(1917–1982), theoretical physicist. Il’ia Lifshits was a distinguished physicist, teacher, and loyal friend—a very dangerous combination in the Soviet Union, especially for a Jew who was not a Communist Party member. Not by chance, all his Soviet honors came much later than deserved, and only once—just six years before his death—was he allowed to travel beyond the Iron Curtain.
(1911–2003), poet, translator, and fiction writer. Semen Lipkin was born and raised in Odessa, where his first poetic experiments attracted the attention of Eduard Bagritskii, the major romantic revolutionary poet who also lived in that city. Lipkin’s childhood recollections appear in his vibrant autobiographical sketches, Zapiski zhiltsa (Notes of an Inhabitant; 1992). By 1932, Lipkin’s poetry was no longer publishable and he became a translator, having mastered Farsi on his own. He served at the front during World War II, an experience he recounts in his narrative poem “Tekhnik-intendant” (Quartermaster; 1963, published in 1981).
The Musar Method: The First Stage (1845–1849)
The first Hebrew literary journals appeared in Galicia just when a literary center in that language began to flourish there in the early nineteenth century. The earliest examples were annuals or single publications of limited scope, such as Yosef Perl’s Tsir ne’eman (Tarnopol; 1813–1815) or Me’ir Letteris’s Ha-Tsefirah (Żółkiew; 1823). At the same time, maskilim in Galicia read periodicals that were issued in Vienna or Prague; among these were Shalom ben Ya‘akov ha-Kohen’s Bikure ha-‘itim (1820–1831), and Shelomoh Yehudah Rapoport and Shneur Sachs’s Kerem ḥemed (1833–1843, 1854, 1856). As forums for the expression of ideas and scholarship, polemics and exegesis, the journals devoted limited space to belles lettres; that which was printed was mainly satiric, either translated (from ancient writers such as Lucian) or original (Yitsḥak Erter, Yosef Perl). Maskilim of Galicia also produced the yearbook He-Ḥaluts (Lwów, 1852–1865; then in Frankfurt, Prague, and Vienna until 1889), published by Yehoshu‘a Heshel Schorr, which expressed a radical maskilic line in the battle against rabbinical Judaism. It also influenced the antirabbinic and anti-Talmudic ideas that developed in Russia in the 1860s and 1870s.
Hebrew Literary Journals (Literary Journals)
(1789–1821), Hebrew poet, linguist, and historian. Salomon Löwisohn was born in Mór, Hungary, a small community led by his relatives, the prominent Rosenthal and Saphir families, who played key roles in the Hungarian Haskalah. As a child, he received a traditional education. When he was 12, he studied German and arithmetic at a Capuchin monastery. By the time he celebrated his bar mitzvah in 1802, Löwisohn was well versed in the Bible and began writing poems in Hebrew.
(1885–1971), Marxist philosopher and literary critic. György (Georg) Lukács was one of the foremost cultural theorists of the twentieth century; his Hegelian Marxism laid the groundwork for contemporary critical theory. Born György Bernát Lőwinger, in Budapest, Georg Lukács came from a wealthy Hungarian Jewish family that had been granted noble status and was equally fluent in German and Hungarian. József Lukács, his father, was a self-made man who had risen from an impoverished rural background to become director of the Hungarian General Credit Bank in 1906. Although Lukács had a troubled relationship with his father, the elder Lukács remained a warm and generous supporter of his son’s academic ambitions, which he saw as an extension of his own social mobility.
(1716–1760), prominent eighteenth-century Karaite scholar and spiritual leader; also known as the Karaite Rashi and ‘Olam Tsa‘ir (meaning microcosm; from an acronym based on the gimatriyah, or mystical substitution of numerical values for the Hebrew letters of his name). Simḥah Yitsḥak Luzki (Lutski) lived in Łuck (Lutsk) until 1754, when the wealthy patron Mordekhai ben Berakhah, one of the leaders of the local community in Chufut-Kale, invited him to become head of that community’s study house, and Luzki taught there for the rest of his life.
(1884–1975), Soviet diplomat. Born in Kirillov, Novgorod Province, to the family of an assimilated army doctor and village school teacher, Ivan Liakhovetskii (Maiskii [Maisky] was a pseudonym he later adopted) became involved in revolutionary activities that led to his expulsion from Saint Petersburg University and exile to Siberia in 1902. In Siberia, he gravitated toward the Menshevik faction of the Russian Social Democratic Party (RSDWP). In 1908, he immigrated to Switzerland, and later obtained a degree in economics at Munich University. Proceeding to London in 1912, he adopted Lenin’s militant internationalist position and forged close relations with future Commissars for Foreign Affairs Georgii Chicherin and Maksim Litvinov. Maiskii returned to Russia in February 1917, shortly after the tsar was overthrown, but it was only in 1919 that he renounced his association with the Mensheviks and joined the Bolshevik Party. His command of foreign languages and familiarity with the international scene, clearly bolstered by his friendship with Litvinov, secured his meteoric rise in the Soviet diplomatic service.
(1558–1616), rabbinical scholar and authority. Me’ir ben Gedalyah of Lublin, known as Maharam (an acronym for “Our teacher, the Rabbi Me’ir”) or Maharam of Lublin, was a major figure in the Golden Era of Torah study in Poland during the second half of the sixteenth century. He was born in Lublin and was a student of Shalom Shakhnah; he also studied with Yitsḥak ha-Kohen Shapira of Kraków, whose daughter Esther he married. In 1582, he founded a yeshiva in Lublin, and five years later was a rabbi and head of the yeshiva in Kraków. In 1595, he moved to Lwów, where he served as a dayan (rabbinic judge) and head of the yeshiva.
(1872–ca. 1942), politican and community leader. Maurycy Meisel completed secondary school in Warsaw, where he worked in a large trading house as a manager. Beginning in 1897, he was a board member of the Association of Trade Workers. In 1905, he took part in the fight for the Polish character of schools, and during World War I he was active on a committee assisting refugees. Elected in 1919 to the city council of Warsaw from the lists of the Orthodox and merchant organizations, he was particularly active in the public health commission. From 1927 to 1934 he again served on the council, this time as a representative of the Jewish National Bloc.
(1860–1927), community leader, philanthropist, editor, and writer. Ferenc Mezey’s father, Albert Mezey (originally Grünfeld), was a merchant; Ferenc’s mother, Rózsa Fábián, was born into a small landholder’s family. His parents had planned a rabbinic career for him, but Mezey instead went into commerce and later worked as a bank clerk. Dissatisfied, he attended Pázmány Péter University in Budapest, receiving a degree in law. As a law student, he wrote for newspapers and law journals under a pseudonym.
(1882–1942), rabbi, scholar, and Polish army chaplain. The elder brother of author and scholar Matthias Mieses, Józef Mieses was born in Przemyśl and lived there until he completed his high school education in 1900. Sent to Vienna to study in the rabbinical seminary and university, he was ordained as a rabbi and received his doctorate in 1907. Since very few posts for modern rabbis existed in Galicia at that time, Mieses accepted a position as instructor in Jewish religion in the first Polish gymnasium established in his hometown.
(1902–1938), Communist Party activist. Mikhail Mikhailov (Katsenelenbogen), son of a bookkeeper, was born in Vitebsk (Bel., Vitsyebsk) and subsequently moved with his family, first to Pokrov and later to Moscow. Mikhailov attended gymnasium in all three cities but never graduated. He began working as a photographer at the age of 15 while at the same time continuing his self-education. Mikhailov joined the Komsomol (Communist youth organization) in 1918 and the Communist Party in 1919. While in the Red Army from 1919 to 1921, he served as a political instructor and deputy head of the political division of the western front.
(1901–1987), philosopher and Communist Party activist. The son of a laborer from Zhitomir, Mark Mitin joined the Communist Party in 1919. In 1929, he completed his studies in the philosophy department at the Institut Krasnoi Professury (Institute of Red Professors; IKP).
(d. 1729), Sabbatian preacher. Mordekhai of Eisenstadt was born in Alsace (according to sources in Prague) around 1650. He was a pupil of Natan of Gaza and Avraham Cardozo. In the 1670s, he came to Nikolsburg, the center of Sabbatianism in Moravia. Thereafter he led an itinerant life, traveling through Bohemia, Moravia, Hungary, Germany, and Poland. Between 1678 and 1680, he was active as one of the first Sabbatian propagandists in Poland–Lithania. During his wanderings, he acquired the nickname Mokhiaḥ (“Rebuker”) and became famous for his talents as a preacher and for his ascetic conduct.
(Johan Kemper; d. 1716), Sabbatian kabbalist; after his conversion to Christianity, lector in Hebrew at the University of Uppsala. Little is known about Mosheh ben Aharon’s early activity. It is certain that he was active in one of the groups linked to Yehudah Ḥasid, which around 1695 began to prepare to immigrate to Palestine in order to await Shabetai Tsevi’s second coming in Jerusalem.
(Mugur Legrel; 1934–1991), journalist, editor, and writer. The son of a journalist with democratic anticommunist political leanings, Florin Mugur worked as a journalist and radio editor at the beginning of his career. While his father faced difficult times when the Communist regime came to power in Romania after World War II, Mugur made his literary debut at 19, sincerely believing in the potential of the new political regime and its leftist ideology (he had already started publishing poems at the age of 14). Under the impact of the 1956 anticommunist revolution in Hungary, he protested the Romanian regime; as a result, with other young writers, he was prevented from publishing until the mid-1960s.
(1830–1907), Hebrew author. Me’ir (Adolf) Munk’s autobiography, Sipure korot ḥayai (My Life’s Histories), completed in 1899, is a unique document in the history of Hungarian Jewry. Few book-length autobiographies or memoirs written by Jews in nineteenth-century Hungary have come down to us, and Munk’s composition is additionally the only extant example of the genre to have been written in Hebrew.
(1860–1937), Hungarian linguist, ethnographer, and pedagogue. Born in Oradea (Rom., Nagyvárad; Ger., Grosswardein), then located in Hungary, Bernát Munkácsi was the son of Me’ir Avraham Munk, a Hebrew writer. Munkácsi began his education in a traditional heder but later was sent to the local gymnasium. He started his university training in medicine but switched his concentration to Hungarian and German language and literature.
The history of Jewish exhibitions, both of ceremonial objects and memorabilia (generally known as Judaica) and of Jewish painting and sculpture, begins in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Essentially a postemancipation phenomenon, the founding of Jewish museums housing permanent collections, as well as the periodic display of Jewish exhibits, started in Western Europe. A portion of Isaac Strauss’s collection of Judaica was displayed at the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1878 and, 10 years later, at the Anglo-Jewish Historical Exhibition, opened at Royal Albert Hall as well as at three other London venues. Praised by the Russian art critic V. V. Stasov in a review published in the literary journal Evreiskaia biblioteka (The Jewish Library), these forays into what the historian Richard Cohen has called “self-exposure” came to have special significance for East European Jewish culture, associated even by Western Jews with the institutionalization of memory that Jewish museums came to exemplify. Although the phenomenon of Jewish museums and exhibitions remained limited prior to World War II, it expanded considerably in the West after 1945 and moved eastward after 1989; in the twenty-first century nearly every East European capital and regional center will have its own Jewish museum.
(1862–1887), Russia’s most popular poet in the three decades preceding the 1917 Revolutions. Nadson was the first Russian poet of Jewish origin to achieve national fame and to reach a large, popular audience. Following the collapse of the revolutionary movement in the 1870s, his writing captivated younger readers during the reign of Alexander III. Oscillating between the poetry of pure art and social reflection (the former exemplified by Afanasii Fet and Aleksei Apukhtin), Nadson bridged the styles that marked the civic poetry of Nikolai Nekrasov and early Russian Symbolism. Emotionally evocative, his verses showcase a disillusioned poet’s quest for a liberal ideal of humanity. His first collection, Stikhotvoreniia (Poems; 1885), was reprinted 29 times before 1917 and sold more than 200,000 copies.
(1909–1978), Soviet mathematician. Born in Odessa into the family of an artist, Mark Naimark graduated from the Odessa Physics and Chemistry Institute in 1933 and became a graduate student at Odessa University. He began his scientific work under the guidance of Mark Krein. After completing graduate studies in 1936, Naimark was awarded the degree of candidate in physics and mathematical sciences. He worked at Odessa University from 1933 to 1938, and from 1938 to 1950 at the USSR Academy of Sciences.
(1819–1894), writer. Born in Lomnice (Lomnitz), Moravia, to a family of rabbis, Fanny Schmiedl Neuda was the daughter of Juda Schmiedl (d. 1855), a rabbi. Her brother, Adolph Schmiedl (1821–1913), was a rabbi in Prostějov (Prossnitz) and Vienna. Fanny was married to Abraham Neuda (1812–1854), a rabbi in Loštice (Loschitz).
Jewish Print Media in Other National Languages
(1868–1942), rabbi and Zionist leader. Born in Bobruisk, Belorussia, Yitsḥak Nissenbaum studied at various yeshivas, including in Volozhin and Vilna. In 1889, he settled in Minsk and was among the founders of the Safah Berurah association for the dissemination of the Hebrew language. When the Volozhin yeshiva closed in 1892, the clandestine national religious association Netsaḥ Yisra’el moved to Minsk, and Nissenbaum was appointed as one of its directors. In 1894, he moved to Białystok, where he served as the secretary of Ha-Merkaz ha-Ruḥani (an Orthodox organization that disseminated the ideas of Ḥibat Tsiyon [Love of Zion]) and as assistant to Rabbi Shemu’el Mohilewer. After Mohilewer’s death in 1898, Nissenbaum began to act as an itinerant preacher for Ḥoveve Tsiyon (Lovers of Zion, as the followers of Ḥibat Tsiyon were known), a position he filled for 11 years. In 1900, he moved to Warsaw and preached regularly in synagogues there.
(ca. 1895–1943), Yiddish writer and journalist. Born in Lutomiersk (near Łódź) into a poor Hasidic family and orphaned at a young age, Perets Opotshinski (name also rendered Peretz Opoczinski) received only a traditional Jewish education in heder and at various yeshivas. In Kalisz, where he joined a circle of breakaway former yeshiva students, Opotshinski came under the spell of the Yiddish poet and enlisted soldier Osher Shvartsman, who convinced him to switch from Hebrew to Yiddish.
(1930–2001), literary historian and editor. Zigu Ornea (Orenstein) was born in Frumuşica, a village near Botoşani in northern Moldavia. In 1941, when racial laws enforced by Antonescu’s regime forcefully transferred Jewish inhabitants from their villages to the administrative center of each county, Ornea’s family moved to Botoşani, where he attended a Jewish high school. He studied philosophy at Bucharest University between 1951 and 1955, graduating after writing a dissertation on Romanian thought in the mid-nineteenth century.
(1908–1994), Yiddish poet. Hirsh Osherovitsh was born in Ponevezh (Panevėžys, Lith.). Together with thousands of other Jews who lived in the Russian border region, his family was exiled at the outbreak of World War I to the Donbass in eastern Ukraine. In 1921, the family returned to Ponevezh, and in 1928 Osherovitsh graduated from the local Hebrew high school. He studied law at Kaunas (Kovno) University, graduating in 1933. Osherovitsh began to write poetry at a very young age, and began publishing in 1934, when he worked for various newspapers, in particular Kaunas’s Di yidishe shtime.
The Genealogy of Jewish Art in Eastern Europe
(1913–2002), poet. Sesto Pals (Simion Şestopali) was born in Odessa. His family fled to Galați, Romania, after the Russian Revolution. Having obtained the status of Italian subject, his father changed the family name from Sestopali and moved in 1920 to Bucharest, where Pals completed high school. During this period he became friends with Gherasim Luca, Geo Bogza, and Paul Păun, future prominent avant-garde poets. With Aurel Baranga and the painter Jules Perahim, Pals edited the avant-garde literary review Alge (1930; 1933). From that point on, he adopted Sesto Pals as his pen name.
Social, Religious, and Geographical Divisions
Town in the Romanian region of Moldavia (known in Yiddish as Peshkan). In 1845, there were 17 Jewish families living in Paşcani. Numbering 85 persons, they were among the founders of the town and were involved in timber, cereal, and the cattle business. Many Jews from neighboring towns attended fairs in Paşcani; and the extension of roads and the building of railways contributed to its economic development. Jews built a synagogue and a ritual bathhouse, as well as a cemetery.
State-funded theater established in November 1949 as a result of the merger and nationalization of two Yiddish theater companies based in Wrocław and Łódź. Headed by celebrated actress and stage director Ida Kamińska (Kaminski; 1899–1980), the theater toured between both cities. In 1955 it moved to Warsaw, where it has performed since 1970 in its own building on Plac Grzybowski. It is currently called Teatr Żydowski im. E. R. Kaminskiej (Ester-Rokhl Kaminski Yiddish Theater).
After World War I, the two countries with the largest numbers of Jews were Poland (2.8 million in 1921) and the Soviet Union (2.7 million in 1926). (See Table 1: Jewish Population by Country, 1920s-1930s) For this period numerical data are based mostly on religious affiliation as recorded in national censuses, except for the Baltic States and the Soviet Union, where they are based on ethnicity data from the censuses. Conceptually, these numbers correspond to what has been defined in Jewish demography as the “core” Jewish population. The “core” Jewish population is the aggregate of all those who, when asked, identify themselves as Jews or, in the case of children, are identified as such by their parents; it does not include persons of Jewish origin who report another ethnicity and/or religion in the census.
Population since World War I (Population and Migration)
Legendary Jewish merchant (the name signifies a gunpowder merchant) who supposedly was declared king of Poland. The story is set in the ninth century, when the legendary king, Piast, ascended to the Polish throne (ca. 860), thus establishing a medieval dynasty.
At the beginning of the nineteenth century, shortly after the focal point of maskilic literature had shifted from Central to Eastern Europe, modern Hebrew fiction was invented in Galicia. This unprecedented event sprang from a literary void: creative fiction writing—unknown in Hebrew literature for generations—had been replaced by the folk story in all its various incarnations. During the course of the eighteenth century, Germany’s producers of maskilic Hebrew literature focused energy on cultivating the poem, the biblical epic, the allegory, and the lyrical drama, using models from traditional Hebrew and modern European literature as sources of inspiration. These writers resisted the urge to try their hands at belles lettres, however, even though they were intimately familiar with outstanding examples of contemporary European short stories and novels. They justified their resistance on two grounds: Hebrew literature was not meant to give concrete prosaic expression to present realities; and the linguistic tools then available were inadequate for this task. Indeed, the history of 120 years of Hebrew fiction in Eastern Europe may be described as a continuing struggle over the capacity of Hebrew—a language that was not used in daily conversation—to be able to depict landscapes, society, characters, spoken dialogue, and internal monologues, and to be able to create imaginary worlds representing reality in a satisfactory and credible manner.
(1820–1902), historian and musician. Iacob Psantir (originally surnamed Zelig) was born in Botoşani, Romania, where his father, Asher, worked as an interpreter for the nobleman Scarlat Calimachi, and then for the French consulate in Iaşi. An orphan at the age of 11, Psantir finished his education at the Israelite Confessional Elementary School in Iaşi, where he learned to pray in Hebrew; the rest of his education was in Yiddish.
(1876–1941), politician and public figure. Naḥman Rachmilewitz (Nachmanas Rachmilevičius) was born in Volkovysk, close to Hrodna (now in Belarus). In 1896, he graduated from classical secondary school in Bensheim, south of Hessen, Germany, and from 1896 to 1900 studied humanities and sciences at universities in Königsberg and Heidelberg, receiving his doctorate. After graduation he settled in Vilna, where he was active in Jewish public life.
(1885–1939), international revolutionary activist and publicist. Born in Lwów, Karl Radek (originally surnamed Sobel’son) grew up in Tarnów, in his mother’s family, where the German culture was dominant. In gymnasium he was attracted by the ideas of Polish nationalism, which influenced his choice of pseudonym. The surname Radek was adopted after the name of the hero of a novel about Polish students’ revolutionary struggle. Later Radek became acquainted with German social-democratic literature and launched social-democratic propaganda in his gymnasium, which led to his expulsion from school in 1901.
(1911–1988), Soviet comic and variety actor. Born in Riga, Raikin grew up in an assimilated family, the son of a businessman, although his paternal grandfather tried to send him to heder. After World War I and the revolution, Raikin’s family moved to Leningrad. Raikin took part in the young people’s drama circle headed by the actor and director Iurii Iurskii. In 1930 Raikin entered the Leningrad Institute of Stage Arts; his teacher, director Vladimir Solov’ev, had studied with Meyerhold but also valued Stanislavskii’s Method. Raikin absorbed the Russian theatrical culture of the early twentieth century, with its interest in farce and commedia dell’arte.
(1865–1955), educator, Zionist, and feminist. Puah Rakovsky was born in Białystok, the oldest of 15 children, into a traditional Jewish family. Although most Jewish girls of her time received little Jewish education, her prosperous parents enrolled her in a heder and subsequently hired a tutor for her in Hebrew and Yiddish texts, as well as for secular subjects. Her studying came to an end when she was married off, much against her will, at the age of 16 to a yeshiva student, even though she had lost her faith. By the time she was 20, she had a son and a daughter. Persuading her parents and husband to allow her to study as an extern for a teaching license with the claim that she could then support the family, she finally succeeded in becoming a teacher. She then secured a divorce from her first husband. She subsequently married twice more for love and gave birth to another daughter in 1903.
Although the Hungarian parliament emancipated Jews as individuals in 1867 (Act Seventeen), it was only later legislation, Act Forty-Two of 1895, that made Judaism equal to other received religions (religiones receptae). The Law of Reception was deemed necessary because in the nineteenth century the legal standing of various religions was defined by their position in the hierarchical structure as either received, recognized, or tolerated. Received religions benefited from protection of the state.
(1838–1929), rabbi and Orthodox leader. Born to a well-known rabbinic family, Koppel Reich grew up in Vérbo (now Vrbové, Slovakia) and studied at the Pressburg yeshiva under his relative Avraham Shemu’el Binyamin Sofer (Ketav Sofer). In 1880, Reich returned to Vérbo as chief rabbi. He was an outstanding orator and a skillful and energetic organizer. These qualities, along with his longevity, elevated him to the pinnacle of Hungarian Jewish leadership during his extended tenure as rabbi of the independent Orthodox community in Budapest (1890–1929).
(also known as Jakob Backofen or Back; ca. 1670–1733), rabbi, halakhic authority, and author. Probably born in Prague to a rabbinical family, Reischer studied under Rabbi Aharon Shim‘on Spira (presiding judge of the rabbinical court of Prague; 1610–1680) and Spira’s son Binyamin Volf Spira (d. 1715), the chief rabbi of Bohemia. Reischer married the latter’s daughter.
(also Reizeles; Raices; and Ickowicz), rabbis and martyrs. Ḥayim ben Yitsḥak Reizes (1687–1728), a wealthy and educated man who knew Latin, served as a rabbi in Kamionka and a rabbinic judge in Lwów, and was a delegate to the Ruthenian Jewish council. His brother Yehoshu‘a ben Yitsḥak (1697–1728) was head of a yeshiva in Lwów.
Title bestowed by Yad Vashem (the Israeli Holocaust remembrance authority) on certain gentiles who rescued Jews in opposition to Nazi efforts to annihilate them. The distinction is granted according to stringent criteria requiring conclusive evidence. Depending on the nature and extent of help, special kinds of recognition are bestowed upon Christians who saved Jews. To qualify for any one of the distinctions, Christian actions had to involve “extending help in saving a life; endangering one’s own life; absence of reward, monetary and otherwise; and similar considerations which make the rescuers’ deeds stand out above and beyond what can be termed ordinary help.” In part ambiguous, the criteria leave no doubt that those who saved Jews primarily because of payment do not fit the definition of righteous Christians.
Political Antisemitism in Greater Romania
Jewish Romanian Writing after World War I
The Image of Jews in Romanian Literature
(1901–1971), film director, scriptwriter, and educator. In 1925, Mikhail Romm graduated from the Moscow Higher Art–Technical Institute and worked as a sculptor and translator. From 1928 to 1930, he held a fellowship at the Institute for Methods of Extracurricular Work, where he did research on issues relevant to cinema. Starting in 1929, he wrote screenplays, completing the texts for Revansh (Revenge; 1930), Riadom s nami (Next to Us; 1931), and Konveier smerti (The Conveyor of Death; 1933). He served as an assistant at the Mosfilm Cinema Studio in 1931 and became a director two years later. From 1938, he taught at the Actors and Directors Workshop of the All-Union State Institute of Cinematography and in 1948 became its director.
(1890–1941), Yiddish poet and short-story writer. Born in Shumiachi, Belorussia, into the family of a village trader and coachman, Shmuel Rosin received a traditional Talmudic education, but around 1905 was influenced by socialist ideas and became involved in the Bundist movement. He settled in Ekaterinoslav (mod. Dnipropetrovs’k) and worked as a painter and tinsmith. Subsequently, in the second decade of the 1900s, he spent time in Odessa, Kharkov, Penza, and Jewish agricultural colonies in southern Russia.
(1880–1944), Yiddish prose writer. Born in Tshartorisk (mod. Staryi Chartoriisk), Ukraine, Yona Rozenfeld received a traditional Jewish education that was interrupted when his parents both died of cholera in 1893. Shortly thereafter, under arrangements made by his older brother, 13-year-old Yona began an apprenticeship with a turner in Odessa—an experience vividly depicted in his autobiographical novel Eyner aleyn (All Alone; 1940). Rozenfeld showed his early writings to Y. L. Peretz when the latter visited Odessa in 1902. As a result, Rozenfeld’s first (autobiographical) story, “Dos lernyingl” (The Apprentice), was published in Der fraynd in 1904.
(1882–1961), chess grand master, often called the greatest player not to have become a world champion. The youngest of 12 children born to an Orthodox Jewish family in Stawiski, Russian Poland, Rubinstein learned chess moves relatively late, at about age 16. Most notable players learn to play at a significantly earlier age, and Rubinstein’s delayed start was blamed for the number of major blunders he occasionally made.
Attitudes toward Jews in Nineteenth-Century Russian Literature
Dissidence, Renewal, and Emigration in Late Soviet Jewish Writing
Russian Jewish Writing from the Late Nineteenth to the Early Twentieth Century
Writers with Roots in the Early Twentieth Century
(1911–1998), novelist and screenwriter. Anatolii Rybakov was born into an educated family Chernigov (Ukr., Chernihiv); the family moved to Moscow when he was eight years old. He attended the local high school and, in his last two years, an experimental “commune-school” staffed by outstanding teachers, many of them Civil War veterans. After working as a loader and driver for a chemical plant, he enrolled in the Moscow Transportation Economic Institute in 1930. Arrested for “subversion” in 1933, he spent three years in Siberian exile before working as a transport engineer in places that did not require citizens to have an internal passport (having been exiled, he was not entitled to one). After serving in the army in World War II, he turned to literature, first writing the novella Kortik (The Dagger; 1948) for children, followed by a novel based on his work experience, Voditeli (The Drivers; 1950).
(1860–1936), liberal politician and economist. Pál Sándor studied in Budapest at the Commercial Academy, the alma mater of many Hungarian Jewish youngsters at that time. He supplemented his education with studies in Dresden and a later trip to Antwerp. After continuing his father’s commercial enterprise in corn trading, he became a manager at a number of Budapest-based firms, serving most significantly as chief executive of the city’s communal electric street railway company (Budapesti Közúti Villamosvasút Rt.). He was a member of the Budapest Chamber of Commerce and Industry, the City Council, and the Stock Exchange Council, and was chairman of the Civil Club of the City of Budapest (Lipótvárosi Polgári Kör). As a participant in the national commercial congresses of the early 1900s, in 1906 Sándor founded the National Hungarian Commercial Union (Országos Magyar Kereskedelmi Egyesülés), which he then led for several decades. Within the Jewish community, he was notably the chairman of the Országos Magyar Izraelita Közművelődési Egyesület (National Hungarian Israelite Cultural Society).
(1928–2003), film director and writer. Born in Paris of a Jewish mother and Romanian father, both Romanian immigrants, Săucan spent his early childhood among Jewish immigrants in France. The family moved to Prague, where his father studied at the Polytechnical University, and then, in 1934, returned to Romania, settling in the town of Carei in northern Transylvania. In 1940, when this region of Romania was transferred to Hungary, they fled to Sibiu and Sighişoara. From 1948 to 1952, Săucan studied in Moscow at the USSR Institute of Cinematography (VGIK); among his teachers were Sergei Eisenstein, Mark Donskoi, and Sergei Gerasimov.
(1744–1808), rabbinic scholar of mathematics and natural sciences, popularly known as Reb Barukh of Shklov. Schick was the son of the rabbi of Shklov and the nephew of Aryeh Leib Gintsburg of Minsk (author of the Sha’agat Aryeh), one of the foremost rabbinic authorities in eighteenth-century Poland–Lithuania. Schick moved to Minsk in 1760, received rabbinic ordination, and served as a dayan (rabbinic judge) and parnas (leader) of the Minsk kahal. In his youth, he pursued the study of science and Latin as well as Talmudic studies and Kabbalah.
(1823–1904), cantor and composer. Barukh Schorr was born in Lemberg. As a boy he reportedly traveled to Odessa with the famed cantor Betsal’el Shulsinger (Tsalel Odesser; d. ca. 1873) to become part of his choir, eventually joining the choir of Cantor Yeruḥam Blindman (Yeruḥam ha-Katon). Upon his return to Lemberg for his bar mitzvah, Schorr was sufficiently skilled to be able to lead services in the central synagogue. He then joined the synagogue choir in Jassy (Iaşi), Romania, where he met his wife.
(1837–1904), Hebrew short-story writer, journalist, and Yiddish researcher. El‘azar Schulman was born in the district town of Kretinge, in the Kovno province of Lithuania. In 1867, he published a two-part novel, Ha-‘Ovdim veha-nidaḥim (The Lost and the Lonesome), in imitation of Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables. When the book received negative reviews, Schulman destroyed most of the printed copies.
(1896–1979), jurist. Arnold Schwefelberg grew up in Brăila, Romania, where his father, Isac, was a teacher and headmaster of the Romanian-Israelite school, which Arnold and his four brothers attended. Schwefelberg’s paternal grandfather, Iancu Pecetaru Schwefelberg, originally from Galicia, was a well-known engraver (seal maker) in Iaşi. Arnold’s maternal grandfather, Velvl Stein, had been a melamed (teacher) in Galați.
(1884–1949), writer and poet. Born in Białystok, where his father was an unsuccessful merchant and the family frequently suffered deprivation, Zusman Segalovitsh received his education in heder and from private tutors. Between 1903 and 1905, he was a member of Bundist underground circles, an affiliation that led to his imprisonment. Following a pogrom in Białystok in 1906, Segalovitsh’s family moved to Łódź.
(1908–1943), Yiddish poet. Born in Tykocin, Khayim Semyatitski was raised in a rabbinic family, and was educated at a heder and several yeshivas, among them the Yeshiva of Mir. He was ordained as a rabbi but chose not to assume an official position. In 1929, he settled in Warsaw and worked at intermittent jobs. He apparently began to write poetry a number of years before his first pieces were published in the daily Haynt in 1932. Thereafter and until the outbreak of World War II, he published poems, stories, and critical reviews in daily newspapers and literary journals in Warsaw, Vilna, Białystok, and New York.
(1905–1981), Yiddish writer. Born in Trisk (Turiysk), Ukraine, Dovid Sfard spent his childhood in Ozeryany, where his father was a rabbi. Having received a traditional Jewish education, Sfard studied in Kovel’ at secondary schools that taught Hebrew and Polish; he then attended school in Luts’k from 1919 to 1926. After publishing some Hebrew poems in a periodical produced by young Hebraists in the latter city, he decided to devote himself to literature.
(1879–1943) Hebrew writer. Ḥavah Shapira was born in Slavuta, Ukraine, to a scholarly and affluent family of Hasidic ancestry. Despite being raised in a traditional environment, she received a rich Jewish and secular education and even enjoyed the support of her family while pursuing her literary goals. From 1899, she received the encouragement and patronage of the writer Re’uven Brainin. Though their relationship intensified after she separated from her husband in 1903, it ended painfully. In 1900, Shapira had moved to Warsaw to begin her literary career, and in December 1901 her first story, “Ha-Shoshanah” (The Rose), was published in David Frishman’s weekly Ha-Dor. From 1903 she studied in Vienna and in 1906 moved to Bern, where four years later she received her Ph.D.
(1895–1943), historian of Hebrew literature, author, and translator. Ḥayim Naḥman Shapira was born in Minsk. His father was the chief rabbi of Kovno (Lith., Kaunas) and his mother came from a distinguished family of rabbis. Shapira received his education at a heder and at several yeshivas. In 1921 he began to study Semitic philology in Vienna, earning his doctoral degree in 1925. That year, he began lecturing in that field at the University of Kaunas, and was promoted to professorial rank in 1931. He was also involved in Lithuanian Zionist activities and served on the boards of numerous cultural and literary societies. In 1935, he was a delegate to the Zionist Congress.
(1894–1971), Hasidic writer and memoirist. Born Reyzl Malke Hapstein in Kozienice (Kozhenits), Poland, Malkah Shapiro was the daughter of Yeraḥmi’el Mosheh Hapstein (1860–1909), a descendant of the Magid of Kozhenits (ca. 1737–1814), one of the founders of Polish Hasidism. Her mother was Brakha Tsipora Gitl Twersky (1861–1930), a descendant of Menaḥem Naḥum of Chernobil (1730?–1797). In 1908, Shapiro married her first cousin Avraham Elimelekh Shapiro of Grodzisk.
(1896–1977), Yiddish journalist and cultural activist. Born in Tomaszów Mazowiecki, Borekh Shefner moved to Łódź with his family while he was still an infant. After receiving a traditional education, he traveled to Vilna in 1913 to study, but returned to Łódź a year later. There he became an active member of the Bund.
(1908–1996), Yiddish writer. Born in Voskovichi in Ukrainian Polesye, Eli Shekhtman began writing in Yiddish at the age of 12, before entering a yeshiva in Zhitomir in 1921. His first publication—two poems—appeared in 1928 in the Kharkov literary monthly Di royte velt. Shekhtman studied at the literary department of the Yiddish Teachers Institute in Odessa from 1929 to 1933. He spent the following three years in Kharkov, later moving to Kiev.
(d. ca. 1817), Hebrew printer of kabbalistic, Hasidic, halakhic, and ethical works. Shemu’el ben Yisakhar Ber Segal was a major Hebrew-language printer in Poland–Russia at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth centuries. In the third and final volume of his edition of the Mishneh Torah of Maimonides (Berdichev, 1817), which appeared shortly before Segal’s death, prominent rabbis testified that he had trained generations of printers and was “the father of all printing craftsmen.” He carried out his career in six cities, sometimes in several at the same time.
(1913–2005), Yiddish writer. Born in the Bessarabian town of Vad-Rashkev, Yekhiel Shraybman was educated in a heder, at a Romanian primary school, by private teachers, and in the Czernowitz Hebrew Teachers Seminary. In the 1930s he lived in Bucharest, working as a prompter at a Yiddish theater. Affiliated with illegal socialist circles, he took part in Komsomol underground work. Shraybman was also fascinated by Soviet Yiddish cultural life: as he recalled in 1990, even the reformed Soviet spelling “stirred up the flight of my fancy.”
(1878–1968), biologist and physiologist. Born in Russian-controlled Courland, which later became part of Latvia, Lina Shtern studied at Geneva University, where she also later worked, becoming a full professor—the university’s first female professor—in 1917. She settled in the Soviet Union in 1925 and held leading academic positions. In her first post (1925–1948) she served as head of the physiology department at the Second Moscow University (after a reorganization of 1930, the department was part of the Second Moscow Medical Institute). Simultaneously, Shtern was director of the Physiology Institute of the Academy of Medical Sciences from 1929 to 1948 and became the first female member of the USSR Academy of Sciences in 1939. She joined the USSR Academy of Medical Sciences in 1944.
The Transformation of the Shtetl: Poland and the Soviet Union
(1854–1936), Hebrew and Yiddish writer. David Yesha‘yahu Silberbusch was born in Zaleszczyki, in eastern Galicia, and was raised in a Hasidic environment. At the age of 20 while still living in his father-in-law’s well-appointed home in the village, he was given the opportunity to study German. He thus became acquainted with modern European literature and eventually also with the literature of the Hebrew Haskalah. Among those who encouraged him to pursue this path was the playwright Avrom Goldfadn. After becoming a widower in 1876, Silberbusch married his second wife and settled in Kolomea (Pol., Kołomyja).
(1857–1930), halakhist and Orthodox leader. Born in the southern Hungarian town of Zenta, Yesha‘yahu Silberstein was two years old when his family moved to Jerusalem. There he received his initial formal education within the framework of the traditionalist Yishuv system. He returned to Hungary as an 11-year-old, when his father was appointed rabbi of Bodrogkeresztúr. Throughout his early adulthood he continued to study under his father’s tutelage and to assist him in his rabbinical positions and in his yeshiva. Upon his father’s death in 1884, Silberstein succeeded him as chief rabbinical judge of the Orthodox community in Vác (Waitzen), not far from Budapest.
(1874–1943), cantor, concert singer, and recording celebrity. Gershon Sirota was born in 1874 in Podolia; little is known about his early years. His first appointment as a cantor was in Odessa, and he also served in Vilna. In 1908, he became cantor of the Tłomackie Street Synagogue in Warsaw, a position that he left in 1927 to devote himself to a concert career. He toured the United States several times and in 1935 became the cantor at Warsaw’s Nożyk Synagogue. He died with his family in the Warsaw ghetto in 1943.
(1902–1941), military pilot and air force lieutenant general. Iakov Smushkevich (Vol’fovich) was born in Rokishkes, Lithuania, the son of an itinerant tailor. As a child, he studied in a heder. In 1915, together with other World War I refugees, Smushkevich and his family were evacuated to Russia. There he joined the Red Army and the Communist Party in 1918, and participated in fighting on the western front. He became commissar of a battalion and then of a regiment. In 1922, Smushkevich joined the air force and in 1931 was appointed commander and commissar of an air force brigade.
(1888–1926), poet, essayist, and short-story writer. Born into an impoverished Jewish family in Saratov, Andrei Sobol’ (Iulii Mikhailovich [Izrail’ Moiseevich]; early pseudonym Andrei Nezhdanov) left for Vilna in 1904. He was arrested for participating in an illegal Zionist group, and consequently spent four years in Siberia in forced labor. His first poem was published in 1904, followed by the short stories “Broshenny” (Rejected; 1905) and “Machekha Rudi” (The Stepmother Rudi; 1906).
East European Jewish civilization generated constantly evolving concepts of social conduct formed in relation to class, regional character, ideology, gender, and Jews’ relationships to non-Jews and non-Jewish culture. There was a continual tension between behavior that might be considered dictated by Jewish law and conduct beyond the strict scope of the law, and between that which was regarded as ethics and what was merely etiquette.
(Sarah bat Tovim; 18th century), author of women’s prayers (Yid., tkhines; from Heb., teḥinot). Sore, daughter of Mordekhai (though various editions list her as the daughter of Yitsḥak or Ya‘akov), of Satanów in Podolia, Ukraine, was a great-granddaughter of Rabbi Mordekhai of Brisk (on this, all editions agree). She became the emblematic tkhine author, and one of her works, Shloyshe sheorim (Three Gates), was perhaps the most beloved of all tkhines. Unusual for this genre, her works contain a strong autobiographical voice. She refers to herself as “I, the renowned woman Sore bas Toyvim, of distinguished ancestry,” and tells the story of her fall from a wealthy youth to an old age of poverty and wandering, attributing her fate to the sin of talking in synagogue.
(1857–1942), historian, medievalist, and editor. Born in Güssing (Burgenland), Austria, to the family of an estate agent, Samuel Steinherz spent his childhood in Vienna and Graz. At the latter city’s university, he studied German literature and history, and his first job was at the Institute for Austrian History in Vienna. He later returned to Graz, where he studied law.
(1873–1941), revolutionary, Soviet historian, and publicist. Born Ovsii Moiseevich Nakhamkis, and subsequently known by the pseudonym Nevzorov, Iurii Steklov was the son of a Jewish merchant from Odessa. In 1893 he joined the Social Democratic movement and spread propaganda to workers’ circles. Arrested the following year, he was sentenced to 10 years in Siberia. He spent his first five years of exile in Iakutsk and fled abroad in 1899, living in Paris from 1900 to 1905.
(1905–1996), writer, playwright, and translator. Born Pesaḥ Stark to an Orthodox family in the town of Stryj, Julian Stryjkowski studied Polish literature in Lwów, earning a doctorate in 1932. He later worked as a teacher in Płock and as a canvasser in Warsaw. Initially associated with the Zionist youth movement Ha-Shomer ha-Tsa‘ir, he joined the Communist Party in 1934 and was briefly jailed for political activism in 1935–1936.
(1882–1952), Soviet diplomat. Born in Dvinsk (Lat., Daugavpils), Iakov Surits became involved in revolutionary activities as early as 1899. A Bundist in 1902 and 1903, he was a Menshevik from 1903 to 1914 and an Internationalist from 1914 to 1917. Repeatedly arrested, he spent 1907 to 1910 in Siberian exile. He then emigrated abroad and studied philosophy at Berlin University. A member of the Bolshevik Party from 1917, in 1918 and 1919 he was a deputy plenipotentiary of the Bolshevik regime in Denmark and, for a short time, a member of the State Control Collegium, a body that controlled the activities of the Soviet state apparatus.
(1901–1945), novelist, critic, and literary historian. Like a number of modern Hungarian literary artists of Jewish origin, Antal Szerb saw himself as a Hungarian writer only, with no significant ties to Jewish culture and religion. Indeed, his only connection to the Jewish people was that he was killed as a Jew. Some of his close writer friends and contemporaries (e.g., György Sárközi, Gábor Halász, László Fenyő), however, were also assimilated Jews, or converts to Christianity, who became victims of the Holocaust.
(1936–1992), eighth world chess champion. Born in Riga, Mikhail Tal’ learned to play chess from his father, a physician, at the age of seven. A meeting with chess master Aleksandr Koblents (1916–1993) played a decisive role in his life. His brilliant career started when he was 21, when he won the first of his six USSR chess champion titles. Tal’ became the youngest world champion in chess history after winning the title from Mikhail Botvinnik in 1960; however, he lost the return match against Botvinnik the next year. Nevertheless, his legendary skill in creating elaborate strategic combinations granted Tal’ a unique place in the chess pantheon.
Among the social dialects of Yiddish are the argots or slangs of various professions. Unlike regional dialects, which may differ from the standard language in pronunciation, grammar, and lexicon, argots are distinctive primarily in their vocabulary. The best documented Yiddish argots are those of musicians (klezmer-loshn) and of the underworld (ganovim-loshn [thieves’ language] or hentshke-loshn [lit., glove-language]), but in the linguistic literature on Yiddish there are accounts of, or at least references to, the slang of wagon drivers and coachmen (balagole-loshn), actors, cantors, typesetters, tailors, shoemakers, merchants, butchers, jewelers, barbers, and soldiers.
As psycho-ostensive expressions that are highly characteristic formulaic utterances in Yiddish, blessings and curses are typically inserted parenthetically into longer statements and purport to reflect the speaker’s emotional attitude to the topic of conversation. Yiddish psycho-ostensives, like those in other languages (e.g., Greek, Turkish, Arabic, Irish) fall into several categories according to the psychic stance of the speaker toward the good or evil that may befall either the person talking or others. The passive acceptance of good or evil may be called recognitive; the active attitude of seeking or desiring is petitive; while that of shunning or fearing is fugitive. This terminology, along with the Greek roots for “self” and “others” (auto- and allo-), and the Latin roots for “good” and “evil” (bono- and malo-), allows us to classify all the speech acts expressed by Yiddish psycho-ostensives.
Blessings, Curses, and Other Expressions (Talk)
Small town in the Moldavian region of Romania, near Iaşi. A Jewish-owned inn stood in the village that preceded Târgu Frumos as early as 1755, and in 1763, when the Moldavian prince decided to develop the town, Jewish inhabitants were exempted from taxes. In 1774, there were 15 Jewish families; the total fluctuated from 70 in 1803 to 60 in 1830, and to 225 in 1845 (representing 17.7% of the population). The number of Jews grew in the second half of the nineteenth century to 1,258 in 1859, peaking at 2,123 in 1899. Later, the population diminished as a result of railway construction, a factor that reduced the need for local merchants and craftsmen. Hence, there were 2,106 Jews in 1910 and just 1,608 in 1930.
Town in the Moldavian region of Romania, at the foot of the Carpathian Mountains. Jewish settlement in Târgu Neamț (also Tîrgu Neamț) dates from the second half of the seventeenth century: Jews were first mentioned in a document from 1685, and the oldest tombstones in the Jewish cemetery are dated 1677 and 1689. A synagogue was built in 1737.
Appellation for individuals and groups who attributed messianic significance to the Hebrew year 5600 (1840), which is represented in abbreviated form by the Hebrew letters tav, resh, and can be pronounced tar. The “Tarniks” expected that the redemption of the Jews would take place in that year—or, at least, that the process of redemption would begin, continue, and materialize sometime during the seventh century of the sixth millennium of creation.
(1885–1945), Hasidic rabbi. Born in Nagyhalász in northeastern Hungary and educated in Hasidic yeshivas in Poland and Hungary, Yisakhar Shelomoh Teichthal studied in several Hasidic kloyzn (small study and prayer houses) in Poland during his teen years, most notably in the kloyz of the Sandz Hasidim in Tarnów, before returning to Hungary. There he became a close disciple of Mosheh Grünwald (1853–1910) at the renowned yeshiva of Chust, the second largest Orthodox yeshiva in the country.
(d. 1687), physician and surgeon. The inscription on Yisakhar Ber Teller’s tombstone in the Old Jewish Cemetery in Prague gives his father’s name as Leib Berouns (derived from the Bohemian town of Beroun), although the introduction to his work refers to his father more formally as Yehudah. The name Teller, undoubtedly acquired from the emblem of the Barber-Surgeons Guild—a plate—does not appear on his tombstone but is in the epitaph of his son, Yehudah Leib Teller, who followed him in both the medical profession and the service of the Prague burial society.
Hebrew theatrical activity in Eastern Europe began as part of the larger project of transforming Hebrew into a national language. By the end of the nineteenth century, sporadic attempts had been made in Łódź and Riga to put on performances in Hebrew. With the establishment of the Agudat Ḥoveve Sefat ‘Ever (Society of Lovers of the Hebrew Language) in Saint Petersburg in 1909, such initiatives received organizational support. The society encouraged Hebrew theatrical performances in order to spread the knowledge of the language and to raise funds for the society. Most performances were staged in the context of banquets that marked holidays and anniversaries of various sorts. Such performances were a significant tool in the modernization of the Jewish educational system. Organized and staged by teachers and students at the new Hebrew-language secular schools, they spread the new culture to the children’s families and communities. Indeed, the first Hebrew theater activists in Eastern Europe were schoolteachers who were both devoted to the revival of spoken Hebrew and had artistic ambitions.
Part of the Polish landscape—both real and imagined—for centuries, the figure of the Jew is also rooted in the history of Polish theater. The żydek (little Jew), a figure typically associated with laughter and entertainment, appears throughout Polish folk theater. With grotesque physiognomy, dressed in an exaggerated version of traditional Jewish attire, often with a hump, the żydek gesticulates, shouts, wails over the wrongs done to him, and dances and sings. In the theatrical interludes, monologues, farces, and sketches of the Polish gentry as early as the sixteenth century, the żydek is also common. This stage tradition flowered in the nineteenth century when many celebrated Polish comic actors were skilled purveyors of the żydek. The tradition also developed specialists, foremost among them Aleksander Ładnowski (1815–1891), whose Berek Kugelman was called “the personification of persecuted innocence” (Prokopówna, 1998, p. 133). By the end of the century, the żydek, singing couplets in a mixture of broken Polish and stylized Yiddish (a combination known as żydłaczenie) and performing a Jewish dance known as majufes, was a fixture of the popular Polish stage, recognizable even when transformed, in the plays of Feliks Schober (Szober, 1846–1879), into the figure of Józio Grojseszyk, an urban dandy privy to all the good-time secrets of the modern city.
Despite early governmental prohibitions against Jewish participation in the theater, the period of the late nineteenth to early twentieth century saw strong and even leading Jewish contributions to all aspects of theatrical production, as performers, writers, and directors. This degree of involvement, as well as the changing depiction of Jews on stage over time, in many ways mirrors the history of relations between Russians and Jews and, later, of the Soviet government stance toward Jews.
(Mosheh Ya‘akov ben Avraham Mandl; 1732–1799), principal lay leader of eighteenth-century Hungarian Jewry. Koppel Theben’s family, alternately called Mandl or Theben (Devény) after a small Hungarian village on the Danube near the Austrian border, played a central role in the leadership of Pressburg (Bratislava, Pozsony), the most important eighteenth-century Hungarian Jewish community. Theben’s father, Avraham (d. 1768) served not only as head of the Pressburg community, but also as nationwide leader and shtadlan (lobbyist or intercessor); he was the sole importer of textile from the imperial Linz factory. The Thebens were related to leading families in Hungary and the nearby Bohemian lands; indeed, the family’s reputation and prestige extended far beyond Hungary. One of Avraham’s daughters married a son of the world-renowned Yonatan Eybeschütz, Mordekhai, whose suspected Sabbatian sympathies embroiled the Thebens in an extended communal conflict.
(1888–1958), writer, translator, and teacher. Friedrich Thieberger was born in Golčův Jeníkov (Goltsch-Jenikau), Bohemia, to a rabbinical family. He studied philosophy and philology in Prague, where he also taught modern languages and philosophy in German secondary schools. He was dismissed from his job in 1939 and moved to Palestine. There, he worked first as writer and later as a librarian at the B’nai B’rith Lodge in Jerusalem, the city in which he died.
Financiers and supporters of the Haskalah in Warsaw. Teodor Toeplitz (1793–1838), advocate of the work of Moses Mendelssohn, was the grandson of Juda Leopold Toeplitz (who had emigrated from the Czech lands to Leszno) and the son of Samuel (Szymon) Toeplitz (1766–1838), a wealthy merchant from Warsaw. Teodor’s son Henryk Toeplitz (1822–1891) was an industrialist, politician, and patron of Jewish education.
(1861–1941), Polish painter and illustrator. Maurycy (Mojżesz) Trębacz was among the first generation of Jewish painters in Poland who followed in the artistic tradition of Maurycy Gottlieb. Along with Samuel (Szmul) Hirszenberg, Jakub Weinles (1870–1938), and Leopold Pilichowski (1869–1934), Trębacz chose subjects from religion, as well as from Jewish history and Jewish daily life.
(1888–1943), merchant; leader of the Warsaw kehilah and Agudas Yisroel; and member of the Polish Sejm and senate. Born in Warsaw to an affluent Hasidic family whose members were followers of the Gerer rebbe, Ya‘akov Trokenheim received a traditional education while also learning Russian and Polish. Following his marriage, he became involved in the textile trade and managed his family’s considerable real estate holdings, located in the center of Warsaw’s Jewish district.
The tsimbl (Eng., cimbalom) is an instrument of the dulcimer family, a trapezoidal box with strings in courses of two to six, some of which are divided into fifths by a partitioning bridge. The cimbaloms played by Jews generally had a range of two and a half octaves and were tuned chromatically; the metal (mainly brass) strings were struck with wooden hammers. Jewish association with the instrument was continuous from the early seventeenth until the early twentieth century in much of Eastern Europe. In Belorussia and Galicia, it was an essential component of the klezmer band until the Holocaust; in Ukraine and in large cities in Russian Poland and Lithuania it had been replaced by brass instruments by the last third of the nineteenth century. (See image at right, top.)
(1926–1982), writer and physician. Leonid Tsypkin’s grandmother and other relatives were murdered in the Minsk ghetto during World War II, a fate he and his parents narrowly avoided when they managed to escape at the last moment on foot. After the war, he returned to Minsk where, in 1947, he graduated from medical school, in keeping with family tradition. For the rest of his life Tsypkin worked as a physician and medical researcher. In the course of his medical career he published nearly 100 articles in Soviet and international professional journals.
(1910–1976), mathematician. As was the case with many of his contemporary mathematicians, Pál Turán (until 1919, Rosenfeld) entered a problem-solving contest sponsored by the Hungarian monthly journal Középiskolai Matematikai Lapok (Mathematical and Physical Journal for Secondary Schools). By the point at which the finest problem solvers entered the universities, they were already familiar with each other’s mathematical interests and strengths. At Pázmány Péter University, Turán was the student of Lipót Fejér, who came from a similar background. Turán received his Ph.D. in 1935.
(New Life), published in Budapest, is the official journal of the Hungarian Jewish organized community. Appearing first on 18 November 1945, it was a weekly until 1957 and has been a biweekly ever since. Until 1984, no editor’s name was listed on the masthead. From 1984 until 1991, Rabbi István Domán edited the journal, succeeded by Rabbi Péter Kardos.
(1757–1826), Hasidic leader. Uri ben Pinḥas lived in eastern Galicia during the period when Hasidism expanded significantly. He was probably born in the town of Janów or nearby, the son of a poor artisan. His main teacher of Hasidism was Shelomoh of Karlin, who lived in Ludmir at the time. After Shelomoh was killed by Russian soldiers in 1792, Uri ben Pinḥas became the leader of a group of Hasidim in Lwów. Later he moved to Strelisk, where he continued as a Hasidic leader, although apparently without establishing a formal court. Among those who traveled to study with him and identified themselves as his students, Shalom Rokeaḥ, founder of the Belz dynasty, stood out.
(1883–1956), philosopher and psychologist. Emil Utitz was born in Prague, studied philosophy at the universities of Prague, Munich, and Leipzig, and started his career in Rostock, Germany, where he became a professor of philosophy and aesthetics in 1916. Beginning in 1925, he lectured at the university in Halle. In September 1933 he was forcibly retired and he moved back to Prague. Thanks to the intercession of Josef Schneider, professor of German studies at the German University in Prague, Utitz was entrusted to catalog the unpublished works of Franz Brentano.
(1877–1971), Yiddish writer. Born in Slutsk, Belorussia, into a family of a ritual slaughterer, Zalmen Vendrof (commonly rendered Zalman Wendroff) received a traditional Talmudic education and studied with private teachers, but ultimately failed his secondary school examinations. From the age of 16, he lived in Łódź, where he worked at a factory. From the early 1900s, Vendrof traveled the world, trying different jobs such as peddling, teaching, and typesetting. His peripatetic youth included a stint in England (1901–1905), a brief spell in Moscow as an English teacher (1905), and another period as a Yiddish journalist in America. In London, he became a friend of anarchist leader Rudolf Rocker and wrote for anarchist Yiddish periodicals.
(1896–1954), documentary film director and film theoretician. The most radical of Soviet montage theorists and father of cinéma verité was born Dovid (later Denis) Kaufman, the son of a Białystok bookseller and a rabbi’s daughter. A precocious poet and aspiring avant-garde composer who renamed himself Dziga Vertov (a Polish-Ukranian hybrid that suggests “perpetual motion”), he studied medicine first in Moscow and then Saint Petersburg, while continuing to write music. After the October Revolution, Vertov left school to edit a weekly newsreel; during the civil war, he served as a battlefield cameraman.
(1890–1929), Yiddish linguist and dialectologist; creator of the first atlas of Yiddish-speaking regions. Born in Poltava, Ukraine, Mordkhe Veynger moved as a boy to Warsaw, where he went on to study Germanic philology in the faculty of philology at Warsaw University. In 1912 and 1913 he published studies on Yiddish syntax and on the role of Hebrew sounds in Yiddish, and also proposed spelling reforms for Yiddish. His work was included in Shmuel Niger’s Vilna Pinkes (Record Book) of 1913.
(1894–1985), Yiddish linguist. Born in Horodok, Belorussia, into a poor family, Leyzer Vilenkin worked in Kharkov from 1912. In 1917 he moved to Petrograd, where he studied pedagogy, literature, and linguistics at several institutions, including Leningrad (previously Petrograd) University from 1921 to 1925. Simultaneously between 1923 and 1927, he taught at an orphanage and a secondary school. Vilenkin was a research student at the Leningrad Institute for Literature and Languages of the East and West from 1926 to 1929. Subsequently, from 1929 to 1931 he worked at the Yiddish Institute of the Belorussian Academy of Sciences.
(1897–1990), photographer and biologist. Roman Vishniac’s photographs of East European Jewish life, which he took in the mid- to late 1930s, are today among the most widely familiar images of this “vanished world.” Though these photographs were but a small part of Vishniac’s lifework, they remain his best-known accomplishment as a photographer.
(1907–1969), Yiddish poet and essayist. Elkhonen Vogler (born Rozhanski) was a symbolist poet and a leading member of the interwar Yiddish literary group Yung-Vilne. His three volumes of Yiddish verse, A bletl in vint (A Leaf in the Wind; 1935), Tsvey beriozes afn trakt (Two Birch Trees by the Highway; 1939), and Friling afn trakt (Springtime by the Highway; 1954) are hymns to the Lithuanian and Belorussian countryside.
(Pseudonym of Ḥayim Leibovich Flekser, 1861–1926), literary critic, historian, editor, and art theoretician (especially of ballet). Born in Zhitomir, Akim Volynskii was the son of a bookseller. He studied in a Russian high school in Zhitomir, but was expelled because of a conflict with a teacher, so that he did his matriculation exams as an extern. His first publication was a letter to the Jewish Russian newspaper Razsvet about an orphanage in Saint Petersburg (published in 1880). During the 1880s, he wrote articles on Jewish themes for the Jewish Russian periodicals Razsvet, Russkie evrei, and Voskhod. In 1884, he served as an editor of the Russian-language anthology Palestina, in which he published a review of Lev Pinsker’s Autoemancipation. In 1885, Volynskii published his essay “Teologo-politicheskoe uchenie Spinozy” (Spinoza’s Theological-Political Teaching) in Voskhod, and also wrote articles on the poet Shimen Frug and on the Bible in Russian poetry.
Jews in Warsaw during the Kingdom of Poland
(d. after 1819), Polish Jewish memoirist. Born in the mid-eighteenth century in Skoki, near Poznań, the son of a textile and clothing merchant, Mosheh Wassercug seems to have died in Płock. His parents saw to it that he received a broad Jewish education, and he remained traditionally observant all his life. After his father’s death, he tried to continue in his footsteps but was unsuccessful and lost his inheritance.
(Ajzyk Wagman; 1905–1982), poet, prose and essay writer, and translator. The brother of Saul Wagman, a poet and publicist associated with the Zionist journal Nasz Przegląd, and Leon Trystam, an actor, film critic, and screenwriter, Adam Ważyk became one of the leading poets of the Polish avant-garde movement. During World War II, Ważyk was in the USSR, where he joined the Polish Army. After the war, he returned to Poland, where he actively participated in Communist-sponsored literary life as a theorist of socialist realism, laureate of state awards, contributor to Kuźnica (1946–1949), and editor in chief of Twórczość (1950–1954). In 1955, he dramatically settled scores with Stalinism in “Poemat dla dorosłych” (Poem for Adults), which marked a literary and ideological turning point in the political thaw of 1956. In 1957, he quit the party and distanced himself from politics.
(1900–1959), Czech novelist and short-story writer. Jiří Weil was born in the village of Praskolesy, near Prague; after World War I, when his father’s frame shop failed, the family moved to Prague, where Weil went to high school and university. Weil soon became involved in the political and cultural left; in 1922 he visited the Soviet Union, and on his return he took a job in the press department of the Soviet mission in Prague. In the 1920s he translated extensively from Russian literature, joined the avant-garde grouping Devětsil, and completed a Ph.D. in Slavic philology, with a dissertation on Gogol and the eighteenth-century English novel.
(1751–1817), early maskil and pioneering religious reformer in Hungary. Marcus Nissa Weiss received a strong Talmudic education, and although he was a businessman, would preach on occasion in his community, Ungvár. In an 1808 autobiography, he recorded his sudden transformation wrought by the establishment of the Josephinian school system. Painstakingly, he learned German and discovered Moses Mendelssohn and the Haskalah. He became a lessee on the royal cameral estates of Ungvár and prospered at least until the mid-1780s, when he was embroiled in a debilitating and costly lawsuit that in the decade to come was to drain him financially.
(1801–1870), jurist, publicist, and scholar. Born in Třebíč (Trebitsch), Moravia, to the family of a local leaseholder, Wolfgang (Binyamin Ze’ev) Wessely studied at yeshivas in his hometown, Polná, and Prague. He then studied philosophy and law at Prague’s Charles University and in 1829 was the first Jew to be awarded a doctorate in philosophy from that institution. Four years later, he earned a doctorate in civil law and also applied for one in canon law but was rejected because he was Jewish. After graduating, Wessely was hired as a private tutor for the family of the Viennese merchant Ernst Wertheimer. In 1831 he was appointed teacher of Jewish religion at a secondary school, and from 1837 he taught at the Jewish Normalschule of Prague.
(1930–1994), prose writer, publicist, and critic. Bohdan (originally Dawid) Wojdowski was the founder, in 1991, of the Masada Cultural Foundation for Jewish culture and editor of its journal, Masada (its only issue appeared in 1991). A member of the editorial boards of Przegląd Kulturalny and Współczesność, he also wrote for Teatr. After studying Polish literature in postwar Warsaw, Wojdowski made his literary debut in the 1950s. A Warsaw ghetto survivor, he committed suicide in 1994.
(1812–1868), historian, teacher, translator, and government-appointed rabbi. Born in Mitau, Courland guberniia (now Jelgava, Lat.), and educated in a traditional heder, Re’uven Yosef Wunderbar adopted a Haskalah (Enlightenment) worldview in spiritual and cultural matters. Self-taught, he acquired a broad general education in addition to a knowledge of German and Russian. In 1835, he passed the official examinations to acquire a teaching certificate for government-sponsored schools, and in 1840 moved to Riga to teach at the Haskalah school under the direction of Max Lilienthal.
(ca. 1560–1624), son-in-law of Yehudah Leib ben Betsal’el (Maharal of Prague); scholar of midrash. Yitsḥak ben Shimshon ha-Kohen was born and died in Prague. According to family tradition, he served as rabbi in Nikolsburg and Vienna and was also a member of Prague’s rabbinic court. He was one of the circle of scholars in Prague who were colleagues and disciples of his father-in-law, Maharal of Prague. The group shared wide-ranging intellectual interests: halakhah and agadah, Kabbalah and Jewish philosophy, Bible and Hebrew poetry.
(1859–1917), ophthalmologist, linguist, and inventor of Esperanto. Ludwik Zamenhof was born in the Polish border city of Białystok. Both his father, Markus, and his grandfather worked as foreign-language instructors. Zamenhof completed heder at 13 and from 1869 on attended a public secondary school. In 1873, his parents moved to Warsaw, where he began studying at a private secondary school that specialized in languages. From his youth Zamenhof occupied himself with poetry and drama; he wrote, among other pieces, a five-act tragedy based on the myth of the Tower of Babel.
(1880–1965), Bundist activist and Soviet publicist. Born in Kiev, David Zaslavskii became interested in Russian Jewish literature and Jewish history while still in his youth. In 1899, he took part in a Jewish student organization established by Zionists and socialists at Kiev University and was expelled from the university in 1901 for participating in student riots. He began his activities at the Bund in 1903, simultaneously writing for the Russian-language press. In 1905 and 1906, he worked for the Bund Central Committee, publishing in their press in both Yiddish (Di tsayt) and Russian (Evreiskie vesti). From 1907 to 1917, he also published widely in the general liberal Russian press in Kiev and Saint Petersburg.
Town 70 kilometers west of Poznań, on the Polish–German border of 1919–1939; population (1938) 5,400, including 360 Germans and 52 Jews. From November 1938 to August 1939 Zbąszyń housed a transit camp for Jews expelled from Germany during the so-called Polenaktion (27–29 October 1938).
(1841–1901), Czech poet, dramatist, and novelist. Julius Zeyer’s father was a wealthy lumber merchant descended from Alsatian aristocracy; his mother came from a Jewish family in Prague, although she raised her children as Catholics. Zeyer would become one of the most prolific Czech writers of his day—his collected works run to some 30 volumes, including his verse epics drawing on Czech legends (Vyšehrad; 1880)—but his embrace of Czech culture was not automatic. Like other writers from the Czech lands, he grew up speaking German; nevertheless, he published his first stories in Czech, in his early thirties. Still, he was a fierce, if ambivalent, patriot: he loved Czech culture and yearned for independence from Vienna, and yet excoriated Czechs for their provincialism and docile obedience to Habsburg rule. He felt like a literary outsider in Prague, which he called both “queen” and “whore,” and in 1887 moved to the small town of Vodňany, where he spent the next 12 years, except for his frequent trips abroad. Although Zeyer’s relations with established Czech literary life could be prickly, he was widely admired and honored, and in 1901 became the first person to be buried in Slavín, the tomb of great Czechs in the national Vyšehrad cemetery.
From the First Zionist Congress to World War I
Zionism in the Age of Empires, 1880–1897
(1895–1943), labor and political leader. Born near Chełm, Shmuel (Artur) Zygielbojm spent his childhood in Krasnystaw. To help support his family, he left heder at age 10 and went to work at a factory. After the outbreak of World War I, he became active in the Bund and before long was assigned a prominent role in the party.
(1894–1972), Yiddish theater historian and lexicographer. Zalmen Zylbercweig (Zilbertsvayg) was born in Ozorków, a small town near Łódź, to a religiously observant but reform-minded father who was a Yiddish and Hebrew writer. Zylbercweig was educated in both a progressive yeshiva and a commercial school. Attracted to the theater at an early age, he first performed with amateur Yiddish and Hebrew groups, then acted in professional companies, directed a troupe that performed in and around Łódź, produced Yiddish translations of European plays, and edited and contributed to numerous Yiddish publications.
(1836–1916), writer, journalist, editor, and humorist. Adolf Ágai established his literary reputation in Budapest during the 1870s and 1880s, where he was the pioneer of a new kind of popular urban culture implicitly associated with the city’s assimilated Jewish lower-middle classes. Ágai was born in the west Hungarian town of Jánoshalma into a Polish Jewish family whose language remained Yiddish, even though his father had changed the family name from Rosenzweig to the more Hungarian-sounding Ágai in 1848.
(1850–1927), philosopher, aesthetician, literary scholar, and educator. Bernát Alexander completed his high school studies at the Royal Catholic Gymnasium in Pest, Hungary, where he befriended József Bánóczi, with whom he later collaborated on scholarly projects. Alexander’s parents wanted him to become a physician; he himself briefly considered a rabbinical career before choosing to become an educator.
(d. 1542), rabbi. The inscription on Avraham ben Avigdor’s tombstone in the Old Jewish Cemetery in Prague states that he was a chief rabbi and head of Prague’s yeshiva for more than 20 years. Avraham ben Avigdor is also mentioned in the memorial book of the Altneuschul (fol. 20a) and in David Gans’s chronicle Tsemaḥ David (1592). In the Prague municipal register, Avraham is cited as the author of a legal verdict in a dispute between two parties and as a witness involving the purchase of realty. His name, and the fact that he wrote a liturgical poem, has led to the unsupported view that he was a descendant of Avigdor Kara.
Town in northwestern Romania, on the Săsar River at the foot of the Gutâi Mountains. Baia Mare, a mining town, was known in German as Frauenbach and Neustadt, in Latin as Rivulus Dominarum, and in Hungarian as Asszonypatak and Nagybánya. After several sporadic reports of a Jewish presence there in the second half of the seventeenth century, and after the establishment of Austrian rule, in 1693–1700 Jewish people’s access to mining towns and neighboring areas was forbidden. These restrictions were in place until 1850; in 1855 the presence of Rabbi Tsevi Yehudah Horovitz in Baia Mare is documented.
(1866–1924), Russian artist. Of the many artists of the Russian Silver Age, Léon Bakst (Lev Samoilovich Rozenberg) deserves the highest acclaim for his achievements in studio painting and the applied arts. He was especially successful in portraiture, interior decoration, book illustration, haute couture, and, above all, stage design.
Romanian Sephardic bankers from the Ottoman Empire; descendants included scholars, educators, and writers. Celebi Mentes Bally, a banker from Constantinople, supported the Greek aristocrat Neculai Mavrocordat in becoming the ruler of Walachia. Mavrocordat then brought Bally with him to Bucharest and, in 1715, granted him the title of grand vizier. From 1730, Bally was the founder and leader of the first Sephardic Jewish community in Walachia. His descendants also held privileged positions as bankers and advisers to the Phanariot princes who took the throne of Walachia.
(1860–1932), architect and designer of synagogues. Lipót (Leopold) Baumhorn was born in Kisbér (near Győr, Hungary), and graduated from the Technische Hochschule in Vienna in 1883. Working in the office of the architect Ödön Lechner in Budapest between 1884 and 1894, Baumhorn adopted Lechner’s characteristic combination of plain plastered surfaces and red or yellow wavy brick string courses, string pilasters, gables, and battlements. Baumhorn, however, broke with Lechner’s folkloric style and followed more standard architectural conventions, using patterns that were welcomed by a range of Jewish communities from the more traditional to the ostentatious. Baumhorn opened his own office in 1894, where he worked with his son-in-law György Somogyi. Baumhorn built 25 synagogues and restored numerous others in Austria-Hungary from the 1880s until his death.
(More fully, Jakub Becal, son of Natan; Heb., Ya‘akov Betsal’el ben Natan), factor of Polish King Jan III Sobieski (1629–1696). Probably hailing from Ruthenia, Jakub Becal is said to have lost his father in the Khmel’nyt’skyi uprising, though in court files from 1676 Becal’s home is given as Dybów near Toruń.
(1817–1879), poet and promoter of German-language culture. Karl Beck was born in Baja, a large Jewish community in southern Hungary; his father was a businessman. Beck was a medical student in Vienna until illness forced him to return home. After a brief interlude in the business world, he studied philosophy in Leipzig. There he associated with young radical Austrian writers, including Moritz Hartmann, Ignaz Kuranda, and Alfred Meissner (all of whom went into exile to avoid the severe censorship practiced under Metternich’s government), and made literary contacts within the libertarian Young Germany movement. Beck ultimately opposed nationalism, advocated the dominance of German-language culture throughout the Habsburg Empire, and venerated Bismarck, Germany’s “Iron Chancellor.”
(1920–2003), Yiddish poet, journalist, and literary historian. The son of an artisan, Khayim (Efim in Russian publications) Beider was born in the shtetl of Kupel, near Proskurov (mod. Khmel’nyts’kyi), Ukraine. After finishing the local seven-year Yiddish school, Beider studied at the Odessa Yiddish Teachers’ Training College and a rabfak (workers’ faculty) in Zhitomir, and from 1936 to 1940 at the Yiddish department of the Odessa Teachers’ Training Institute. After graduating in 1940, he worked as a teacher in the Stalindorf Jewish National District, one of three such Jewish districts in pre–World War II Ukraine.
(pseudonym of Avrom Rozin; 1878–1942), socialist leader. A leading figure first in the Jewish Socialist Workers Party (known as SERP, the party’s initials in Russian, or the Sejmists in Yiddish usage), later in the United Jewish Socialist Workers Party (Fareynikte), and ultimately in the territorialist grouping known as the Freeland League (Frayland-lige), Rozin was born in Krucha (Mohilev province; now in Belarus), in the Russian Empire, and received a traditional education. He affiliated with illegal socialist circles in Minsk in the mid-1890s and studied in Paris at the beginning of the twentieth century.
(1921–1988), Yiddish poet, playwright, translator, literary historian, and journalist. Israil Bercovici (Yid., Yisroel Berkovitsh) was born in Botoşani to a poor family and had to earn his own living as a teenager. He was self-taught and studied foreign languages on his own, becoming fluent in Yiddish, Hebrew, and Romanian. He also acquired a thorough literary and humanistic cultural foundation independently.
A town now in western Ukraine, better known by its traditional Polish name, Brzeżany (also Yid., Berezhan). Brzeżany was originally a village, but it was granted the status of town by the Polish king Sigismund the Old in the sixteenth century. It became part of the Habsburg Empire in 1772.
(1906–1978), psychologist; left-wing Zionist activist, and a leader of the Warsaw ghetto underground. Adolf Berman (who used the code names Adam, Borowski, and Ludwik) studied psychology and philosophy at Warsaw University, receiving his doctorate in 1931. As one of the pioneers of professional counseling in Poland, he headed the Warsaw organization of Jewish counseling clinics, affiliated with Centrala Opieki nad Sierotami (Federation of Associations for the Care of Orphans; CENTOS). He also taught in high schools and published articles on social and educational psychology. While a student, Berman joined the Jewish socialist group Yugnt (Youth). In 1925, he became a member of the Left Po‘ale Tsiyon and was involved in publication of the party’s Polish- and Yiddish-language press organs.
(1896–1969), Yiddish writer, critic, and journalist. Born in the shtetl of Ustechko, in Austrian eastern Galicia (now Ukraine), Shloyme Bikl (alternately, Bickel), received a traditional Jewish education and then attended high school in Kołomyja (mod. Ukr., Kolomyia). Between 1915 and 1918, Bikl was an officer in the Austrian army, and from 1919 to 1922 he studied law at Chernivtsi University. From 1922 until 1939 Bikl lived in Bucharest, combining his law practice with journalism, publicistics, and literary activity. In 1939, he immigrated to the United States, and died in New York City 30 years later.
Illustrated humorous weekly published in Warsaw from March through August 1906. Di bin (The Bee) represented the first attempt by Shmuel Yankev Yatskan (1874–1936) to publish a popular Yiddish newspaper, two months before he launched his successful daily Idishes tageblat. Di bin’s copublisher and editor was Eleazar David Finkel (1862–1918), a talented journalist and translator.
(1865–1922), cantor, composer, and pedagogue. Avrom Ber Birnboym was born in the city of Pułtusk, north of Warsaw. He reportedly learned music from his Hasidic father, and also studied violin in Łódź with Ḥayim Janowski, the founder of the Hazomir Choral Society. Birnboym’s first position was as a cantor and kosher butcher in Hethar, Hungary, where he studied music theory and German. He then took a cantorial position in Prosnitz (Prostějov), Moravia. Birnboym eventually became the chief cantor for the Choir Synagogue in the Polish community of Częstochowa.
(Née Hani Fischer; 1827–1898), philanthropic activist and head of a women’s association. Johanna Bischitz’s father was Moritz (Mór) Fischer (1799–1880), director and owner of the world-famous porcelain factory of Herend and a prominent Orthodox lay leader of Hungarian Jewry (he was the grandfather of Rabbi Stephen Wise). Little is known about her mother, Mária Salzer (1799–1886). Moritz Fischer was ennobled in 1867 and added the Hungarian name Farkasházi to his family name. During the Hungarian Revolution of 1848–1849, his daughter cared for wounded Hungarian soldiers, whom he had accommodated in his house. In October 1852, Johanna married the widower David Bischitz (1811–1897), a merchant and landowner from Sárbogárd (Fejér county), and moved to Pest. She became the stepmother of her husband’s three children and gave birth to another four.
(1848–1929), banker. Maurice Blank was born in Piteşti, Romania, into the family of a Jewish tradesman and entrepreneur, Mauriciu Blanco. Blank studied economics in Vienna and Leipzig, and upon his return to Romania became Iacob Marmorosch’s partner in running the largest bank in Romania, which in 1874 was renamed the Marmorosch-Blank Bank.
(1911–1995), sixth world chess champion, a title he held from 1948 to 1963. Mikhail Botvinnik became a master in 1927 and a grandmaster in 1935. He was a seven-time USSR champion, and won the special title of absolute champion of that country in 1941. Among his most remarkable victories were Moscow 1935, where he shared first and second places with Salomon Flohr and ranked higher than Emanuel Lasker and José Raúl Capablanca; Nottingham 1936, where he shared first and second places with Capablanca and ranked higher than three world champions; Groningen 1946, where he won first place; and finally the Hague–Moscow 1948, where he became world champion.
Important Soviet cultural figures. Liliia (1891–1978) was active in poetic and artistic circles, while Osip (1888–1945) was a literary theorist and playwright.
Brik, Liliia Iur’evna and Osip Maksimovich
(ca. 1650–1717), rabbi and Talmudist. Born in Prague, Avraham ben Sha’ul Broda studied in Poland with Yitsḥak ben Ze’ev Ḥarif, later chief rabbi of Kraków. Returning to Bohemia, Broda lived in Bunzlau (Mladá Boleslav). He served as a rabbi in Lichtenstadt (Hroznětín) before 1692, and in Raudnitz (Roudnice) from 1692 to 1693.
(ca. 1817–1868), early composer and performer of Yiddish popular songs. Born in Podkamen, three miles from Brody in Austrian Galicia, Berl Broder (also Broder-Margulies) began his public career as a folksinger in 1857, when he gave up his job in the pig bristle business and took up entertaining at inns, with two former synagogue choirboys as members of his troupe. The original repertory was sad, the melodies too, and consisted of the individual monologues of a poor shepherd, night watchman, shingler, drayman, moneylender, wanderer, cantor, matchmaker, Hebrew-school teacher, preacher, or water carrier. Once the routine caught on, each monologue-in-song was performed in appropriate costume, followed by a little dance. “I, poor so-and-so” became the universally popular signature of the Broder Singers, semiprofessional entertainers who wandered through Eastern Europe over the following decades.
(1883 [1884 according to the Gregorian calendar]–1939), painter, graphic artist, art critic, and educator. Born in Sofievka (Taurida guberniia), Isaak Brodskii studied at the Odessa School of Art from 1896 to 1902. He then attended the Academy of Arts in Saint Petersburg until 1908, receiving a grant from this institute to travel in Western Europe between 1909 and 1911.
(1940–1996), Russian-born poet and Nobel Prize Laureate in literature in 1987. Joseph Brodsky (as he is known in the West; in Russian, Iosif Aleksandrovich Brodskii) was born in Leningrad. He was the only child of Aleksandr Ivanovich Brodskii, a photojournalist who served for a time in the Soviet Navy, and Mariia Moiseevna Volpert, both assimilated Jews. Because of his Jewish background and growing interest in philosophical and literary questions, Brodsky experienced increasing alienation at an early age.
(1885–1963), rabbi and Zionist leader. Born in Łódź, Shemu’el Yom Tov ha-Levi Brodt studied at a Hasidic yeshiva, and was elected in 1907 to be the rabbi of Brisk Dekuyave (Pol., Brześć Kujawski). Prior to World War I, Brodt was the rabbi of Lipno. He joined the ranks of Mizraḥi at the end of the war, and called on it to strengthen its role in Polish political life as well as to organize immigration to Palestine.
(1863–1924), novelist, dramatist, and short-story writer. Born into a provincial Hungarian Jewish merchant family, Sándor Bródy grew up in the town of Eger. His father was typical of his generation in that he was imbued with Hungarian patriotism while remaining faithful to traditional Judaism. In the 1870s, the elder Bródy’s various business ventures failed, and he moved his family to Budapest. After a rather carefree childhood, Sándor Bródy got to know the seamier side of city life. As a young writer he was among the first in Hungarian literature to focus attention on the urban proletariat, and the first to introduce the coarse and pungent vernacular of the big city into literary works.
(1884–1968), Russian playwright, memoirist, and teacher. Aleksandra Brushtein was born in Vilna, where her father, Iakov Vygodskii (Wygodzki; 1857–1941), was a physician and a leading figure in the Jewish community. She graduated from the History–Philosophy Department of the Higher Women’s Courses in Saint Petersburg. After the revolution, Brushtein concentrated on educational work and writing, organizing 173 literacy schools for adults and writing extensively for children and adolescents.
(1898–1966), poet, satirist, and children’s book author. Jan Brzechwa (Jan Wiktor Lesman), a cousin of the poet Bolesław Leśmian, was born into a family of assimilated Jews; his father converted to Protestantism. Brzechwa fought on the Polish side in the Polish–Soviet War of 1920. After studying law in Warsaw from 1920 to 1924, Brzechwa worked as a lawyer, copyright expert, and legal author. He was a member of the literary circle around the poetry group Skamander and the journal Wiadomości Literackie, and also wrote for cabarets and composed song lyrics. Brzechwa cofounded the Union of Stage Artists and Composers. After World War II, he worked for UNESCO.
(1897–1945), Yiddish novelist and short-story writer. Born in Błonie (Yid., Bloyne) near Warsaw, Mikhoel Burshtin moved to Warsaw in 1912, where he attended high school and studied to be a teacher of history and literature. He first published in Yiddish around 1930, and his earliest book, Iber di khurves fun Ployne (Over the Ruins of Ployne; 1931), received positive reviews from Yiddish literary critics. He contributed to the Warsaw Yiddish dailies Haynt and Moment, as well as the New York newspaper Forverts, the monthly Di tsukunft, and other publications.
Humorous illustrations or cartoons, as a critical visual element of the popular press, appeared in East European Jewish journals relatively late as compared to non-Jewish coterritorial language publications. The small number of Yiddish periodicals that were permitted in the Russian Empire from the mid-nineteenth century to the turn of the twentieth century generally contained few, if any, illustrations.
The earliest examples of Ashkenazic Judaica (art used in the service of Jewish ceremony in the home or synagogue) date only to the High Middle Ages. Although texts confirm the existence of some types in prior centuries, there are no extant examples before the fourteenth century when the first kiddush cups, Hanukkah lamps (menorahs), and wedding rings were found at various sites in the German lands. Two new types were added in the sixteenth century: the tower-form spice container (used for the Havdalah service) and the Torah shield.
(1880–1942), participant in the Russian Jewish revolutionary movement and Soviet Communist official. Born in Bar, Ukraine, Aleksandr Chemeriskii settled in Minsk in the mid-1890s and worked as a photographer. In 1898, he joined the Bund. The following year, he was arrested and sent to Moscow where Sergei Zubatov, head of the secret police, persuaded him to help found a legal Jewish workers’ party. The party would defend professional interests and seek to expand Jewish civil rights, but would not fight against the autocracy.
Along with a value system that encouraged reproduction, various social and demographic factors prevailing in the East European Jewish community led to an extremely high rate of childbirth (until the nineteenth century). The marriage rate in Jewish society was much higher than that of the surrounding Christian population, as was the rate of remarriage among the widowed and divorced. In addition, the marriage age was relatively low, as was the woman’s age at first birth—most Jewish women had their first child before the age of 20. Books of charms from the period, such as the popular Sefer zekhirah (Book of Remembrance) by Zekharyah ben Ya‘akov Simner, mention a few formulas for avoiding pregnancy. It would appear, however, that even these were reserved for cases in which a woman’s health was at risk and were not intended to limit the birthrate.
Children’s literature produced by Polish-Jewish writers targeted two distinct audiences: a Polish readership and a Polish Jewish readership. Texts intended for the Polish audience generally lacked special references to Jewish life and culture, while texts intended for Polish-speaking Jews mostly featured Jewish themes and motifs. Janusz Korczak (1878/79–1942) wrote for both audiences: his Król Maciuś Pierwszy (King Maciuś the First; 1923) and Kajtuś czarodziej (Kajtuś the Wizard; 1935) were aimed at Poles, whereas stories such as Ludzie są dobrzy (People Are Good; 1938) and Trzy wyprawy Herszka (Herszek’s Three Expeditions; 1939)—which appeared in the book series Biblioteka Palestyńska dla Dzieci (Palestinian Library for Children)—were intended for Polish Jews.
Polish Literature (Children’s Literature)
The period in which modern children’s literature in Yiddish flourished began in the early twentieth century. This era also saw the growth of educational institutions in which Yiddish was the language of instruction. In the Soviet Union as well as in Poland, Yiddish educational textbooks, readers (anthologies), as well as series of booklets for children were published, containing original Yiddish literary writings and translations into that language. A substantial part of children’s literature in Yiddish was first disseminated by means of children’s periodicals, which were edited by educators and writers. In these books and journals, one finds literary selections for different age groups in a variety of genres: nursery rhymes for toddlers; stories about animals, friends, and events for elementary school children; and folklore and travelogues for adolescents.
Yiddish Literature (Children’s Literature)
Clandestine Jewish religious organization in the Soviet Union, 1922–1930. The Committee of Rabbis was founded by the Lubavitcher rebbe, Yosef Yitsḥak Shneerson (1880–1950), who was its chairman until his departure from the USSR in October 1927. The Committee was subsequently led by Rabbi Ya‘akov Klemes of Moscow (1880–1953) and the organization’s secretary, Rabbi Shelomoh Yosef Zevin (1890–1978).
Port city on the Black Sea, in the Dobruja (Dobrogea) region of Romania. Named for a small Genovese local port from the twelfth century, Constanța (Gk., Tomis; Tk., Küstenje) was annexed to Romania in 1878. Archaeological evidence indicates the presence of a small Jewish settlement in the third century. Ashkenazic Jewish traders who accompanied the Russian army as suppliers during the Russian–Turkish war then reestablished Jewish settlement in 1828. In the 1830s, Sephardic Jews from Anatolia settled in the area, set up a community of their own, obtained a plot of land for a cemetery in 1853, and leased land to construct a synagogue in 1867. That same year, Ashkenazic Jews organized as a distinct community.
(1921–2000), critic, literary historian, and writer. Ovid S. Crohmălniceanu (originally Moise Cahn) was born in Galați, attended high school in the same town, and began his studies at the Polytechnical University of Bucharest. He was compelled to suspend his education because of the antisemitic legislation in force in Romania between 1940 and 1944, but he ultimately graduated in 1947 with an engineering degree. He began publishing literary criticism in newspapers and reviews in 1944.
(1801–1867), publicist, politician, writer, and philosopher. Born in Warsaw into a Christian family of Frankist descent, Jan Czyński became the first recognizably Jewish writer—his family’s origins were well known—to enter the ranks of Polish literature. A veteran of the November uprising of 1830, he joined the exodus of Polish patriots to France after its defeat. There he engaged in politics to champion “universal emancipation.” History, according to this “Polish fourrierist,” was a movement toward the emancipation of all disadvantaged groups.
(1860–1930), socialist, editor, publisher, and parliamentarian. Born in Lwów to a middle-class Jewish family, Herman Diamand attended a modern Jewish primary school. After completing Realschule (a modern German secondary school system adopted in several countries) in Lwów, he studied law and political science at the university there and in Vienna, earning a doctorate in 1894.
(1851–1939), mathematician, pedagogue, and historian of science. One of the leading intellectuals in Congress Poland, Samuel Dickstein was born in Warsaw and was an activist in the assimilationist movement. From 1884 to 1918 he served on the executive committee of the Warsaw Jewish Community, responsible mainly for issues related to Jewish schools.
(1891–1956), writer and translator. The son of a teacher of German, Emil Dorian (originally Lustig) received his early education at Jewish schools in Bucharest. After graduating from medical school in that city, he was sent to the front as a physician during World War I, even though, as a Jew, he was not yet a Romanian citizen. After a two-year medical specialization in France, he returned to Romania and worked as a physician until the end of his life, publishing numerous books on popular medicine. After World War II, he became involved in Jewish community life in Bucharest as a secretary general and afterward as director of the documentary library and archives of the Federation of Jewish Communities of Romania.
(1843–1912), rabbi and teacher. Born in Csusz, Hungary, Nathan Ehrenfeld studied at the most prestigious rabbinical schools of that country: Pressburg (Hun., Pozsony; mod. Bratislava) and Eisenstadt. At the latter—and, then, at the rabbinical seminary in Berlin—he was the pupil of the Orthodox rabbi and scholar Esriel Hildesheimer (1820–1899). Ehrenfeld completed his university studies in Vienna and earned a doctorate in Kiel with a dissertation on Yosef Albo’s Sefer ha-‘ikarim (The Doctrine of Joseph Albo on the Principles and Criteria of Religion). Later he was active as a rabbi in the Prussian towns of Brandenburg an der Havel and Prenzlau, and, from 1878, in Gniezno, Poland.
(1817–1889), rabbi, public activist, and early leader of religious Zionism. Mordekhai Eliasberg studied in the Volozhin yeshiva and served as rabbi in Bauska, Latvia, from 1862 until his death. Fluent in German and well versed in contemporary literature, Eliasberg firmly believed that there was no contradiction between faith and the Haskalah (Enlightenment). Nonetheless, he expressed concern about what was at the time called “false enlightenment” (i.e., enlightenment that serves social purposes such as secularizing society), which he felt posed a great danger to faith. He also believed in the importance of improving the economic situation of Russian Jews.
(fl. 16th century), itinerant Hebrew printer. Eli‘ezer ben Yitsḥak learned the craft of printing in Prague, and went from there to Lublin upon the request of the Shaḥor family, who had moved from Prague to Lublin and established the city’s first Hebrew printing house there in 1547. After Yitsḥak ben Ḥayim Shaḥor and his brother-in-law Yosef ben Yakar had worked for 10 years in the trade, they both died of the plague, and their orphaned sons were too young and inexperienced to take on the business. Eli‘ezer thus became their manager in 1557. In 1559 the surviving children, Ḥayim ben Yitsḥak Shaḥor and Ḥanah bat Yosef ben Yakar, received a privilege from King Sigismund II Augustus to print and trade Hebrew books. In addition, they received the sole right to import Hebrew books produced outside of Poland. To defend their right as importers, the privilege stated that anyone found importing Hebrew books from abroad would be fined 20 marks.
(1909–1978), author, poet, and critic. Born in Ostrów Mazowiecka, Yisroel Emyot (originally Goldwasser; Emyot is a combination of the Polish names of his father’s initials: Meylekh Yanowski, “em” and “yot”) descended from two prominent Hasidic families. After his father’s immigration to the United States, Emyot was raised and educated in the home of his maternal grandparents; as an adolescent, he studied at a yeshiva in Warsaw. Emyot’s first poem—signed Y. Yanover—was published in 1926 in the periodical Inzer hofenung (Our Hope), edited by Itshe Meyer Vaysenberg. Emyot’s literary ability was also recognized by Nakhmen Mayzel, editor of Literarishe bleter (Literary Pages), which published his poems, as did other literary journals.
(1860–1936), essayist and Zionist activist. Zalman Epstein was born in Lubań, in the Minsk district of Russia. During his adolescence he studied at the Volozhin yeshiva. At age 16, he moved with his family to Odessa, where he acquired a secular education but was not admitted to the university. Though he enjoyed a very fruitful literary career, he drew his main source of income from his lifelong work as a bookkeeper and merchant.
Preindustrial European societies were typically divided into hereditary estates, consisting of social groups distinguished by occupation, legal status, and customs. Nobility, clergy, and peasantry are classic examples from the early modern period. Subgroups existed within these categories (including nobles related by blood to the ruling dynasty; monastic clergy; and peasants who worked on lands owned by the monarch) and there were additional estates outside them (town dwellers, merchants, serfs, and so on).
Prominent rabbinic family. The Ettinger family originated in the city of Öttingen, Bavaria. One branch was related by marriage to a number of other prominent families, including the Orensteins, Natansons, and Rapoports. Several members of the family distinguished themselves as rabbinic leaders in Poland and Galicia during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Sixteenth-century Jewish financiers living in Poland. Three Ezofowicz (or Józefowicz) brothers—Jan Abraham (d. 1519), Michal (d. 1529?), and Ajzyk (Isaac; dates unknown)—were among a number of prominent Jews in medieval and early modern Poland who managed the finances of Polish monarchs.
Town in central Romania, in the Făgăraş Depression on the Olt River, and northwest of Braşov. The first documented reference to Făgăraş (Ger., Fogarasch; Hun., Fogaras) dates to 1291; in the second half of the seventeenth century it was the seat of the Transylvanian legislative assembly. At the end of the same century (1694–1700), the first factory in Transylvania was established near Făgăraş (the glassworks in Porumbacul de Sus), and was leased to the Jews Iacob Fincz, Abraham Veider, Abraham Naphtali, and Solomon.
(1878–1939), Hebrew scholar and writer. Born in eastern Galicia, Re’uven Fahn received a maskilic as well as a traditional education, which motivated him to embark on a lifelong quest to combine nationalism with a religious spirit. He married at 19 and moved to the town of Halicz, in the Stanislau district, where he lived until World War I. There his acquaintance with the Karaite community prompted him to research and compile facts, stories, and details about their folklore.
(1870–1948), Zionist leader. Born in Warsaw, Yehoshu‘a Heshel Farbstein was an active member of the Ḥibat Tsiyon movement and a delegate to the First World Zionist Congress in 1897. Earlier, Farbstein had been involved in ill-fated attempts to gain a commitment from Theodor Herzl that Zionism would not be contrary to Jewish religious law. After the founding of Mizraḥi in 1902, Farbstein participated in its activities and struggled against members of the organization who supported withdrawal from the Zionist Federation.
(1875–1970), Czech rabbi. Richard Feder was born in Václavice (near Benešov, south of Prague). He studied philosophy in Vienna and also attended the rabbinical seminary in that city; he then served as a rabbi in Kojetín, Louny, and Roudnice nad Labem. From 1917 until 1942, Feder held a rabbinic position in Kolín. Each of these communities was located in the Czech regions of Bohemia and Moravia; sermons were delivered in Czech before World War I.
Known as the Va‘ad (council) of the USSR, the Federation of Jewish Communities and Organizations was founded in late 1989 with the development of an overt Jewish movement under perestroika and glasnost. Unlike the majority of national movements or “fronts” that emerged rapidly between 1988 and 1991, the Jewish movement did not link its aspirations for a national revival with any particular territory in the USSR. It was characterized by two conflicting approaches. One argued that the struggle for aliyah (emigration to Israel) should be its exclusive focus; the other, while insisting on the right to aliyah, also sought a Jewish national and cultural revival in the USSR. After most refuseniks were allowed to depart and mass emigration began, the second position predominated. “Informal” (i.e., unregistered) Jewish clubs and cultural societies arose, like similar groups among other nationalities. By the end of 1989, the number of Jewish organizations exceeded 200. Among these were Evreiskaia Kul’turnaia Assotsiatsiia (Jewish Cultural Association), established in 1988; Soiuz Prepodavatelei Ivrita/Igud Morim (Association of Hebrew Teachers); Evreiskoe Istoricheskoe Obshchestvo (Jewish Historical Society); Obshchestvo Druzhby i Kul’turnykh Sviazei c Izrailem (Association for Friendship and Cultural Ties with Israel); and Irgun Tsiyoni (Zionist Organization), founded in August 1989.
Federation of Jewish Communities and Organizations of the USSR
Federation of Jewish Organizations and Communities of the USSR
(Federatsiia Evreiskikh Obshchin Rossii; FEOR), the umbrella organization of various associations established by the Ḥabad (Lubavitch) movement in 1998–1999. Officially, these associations and their unifying body surfaced later than the other large umbrella organizations—the Federation of Jewish Communities and Organizations of the USSR (Va‘ad), the Russian Jewish Congress (REK), and the Congress of Jewish Religious Communities and Organizations in Russia (KEROOR). In fact, the Ḥabad associations were preceded by a lengthy period during which the movement developed its organizations first in Mikhail Gorbachev’s Soviet Union and then in the Soviet successor states (FSU).
Federation of Jewish Communities in Russia
Federation of Jewish Communities of Russia
(1880–1959), mathematician. Lipót Fejér was born in Pécs, Hungary. Though he had difficulty with mathematics in elementary school, Fejér excelled at this subject in high school. In particular, he mastered problems presented in the monthly journal Középiskolai Matematikai Lapok (Mathematical Journal for Secondary Schools), established in 1893 by Dániel Arany to advance the teaching of mathematics in general and to nurture talented high school students. This journal, thought to be the first of its kind in the world, had a major impact on Hungary’s contributions to mathematics.
(1895–1950), journalist, publicist, and Yiddish activist involved in socialism. Leo Finkelshteyn (Finkelstein) was born in Radom, where he received a general education and later studied philosophy at Jagiellonian University in Kraków. In 1923, he moved to Warsaw and became a member of the Folkist Party, serving as its representative on the executive committee of the Warsaw Jewish community from 1927 to 1937.
(1897–1944), physician, graphic artist, and writer. Karel Fleischmann was born in Klatovy, Bohemia, and he finished secondary school in České Budějovice, a southern Bohemian town with a small Jewish population, before studying at the faculty of medicine in Prague. In 1925, Fleischmann returned to České Budějovice, where he practiced dermatology and pursued literary and artistic interests. His father, a graphic artist and calligrapher, had long encouraged his son’s talents.
(1897–1943), activist, publicist, and official of Agudas Yisroel in Poland. Born in Sochaczew to a Hasidic family, Frydman received a traditional education. In 1914, his family fled to Warsaw. It was there that the young Frydman came under the influence of Emanuel Carlebach, a representative of Frankfurt Orthodoxy who was instrumental in the founding of the Polish branch of Agudas Yisroel in 1916.
(1892–1941), journalist, essayist, and translator. Alfred Fuchs first was a Zionist, then a member of the Czech Jewish academic community, and later an active Roman Catholic. In secondary school, he took a keen interest in Jewish mysticism and wanted to become a rabbi. At Prague University he studied philosophy, law, and theology, and earned his doctorate in 1915. He was also an active member of Spolek Českých Akademiků Židů (Association of Czech Academic Jews).
(1890–1942), poet, playwright, essayist, translator, and promoter of Czech culture. After graduating from secondary school, Rudolf Fuchs completed a series of courses at the German Commercial Academy in Prague. From 1909 to 1911, he worked as a clerk in an export firm first in Berlin and then in Prague. He was conscripted in 1917; upon returning from the front, he continued in his job until his emigration to Britain in 1939.
Yiddish term for a Jew who lived in Galicia, a territory that existed from 1772 to 1918, as one of the crown lands of the Austrian Empire. In addition to the adjective that defines geographical origin, Galitsianer became a cultural identifier bearing, for the most part, negative connotations. Among the stereotypes attributed to the Galitsianer were the following: a troublemaker, a shrewd operator, a money grubber, a religious fanatic, a spineless compromiser, a speaker of popular, vulgar Yiddish, and someone ashamed of his or her origins who liked to pose as an Austrian. Jokes about Galitsianer men and women became very popular; some of these continue to exist despite the fact that Galicia itself disappeared long ago.
Every part of the goose was used by East European Jews, for whom rendered goose fat was a staple and feathers an essential component of bedding. In some regions, Jewish women were responsible for most aspects of the raising, fattening, and selling of geese; women also rendered and sold fat and traded in goose feathers.
(1869–1925), historian, literary critic, and anti-Zionist. Born in 1869 in Kishinev, Gershenzon attended a local gymnasium. Unable to gain entrance into a Russian university where there were quotas for Jews, he was sent to study engineering in Berlin. There he audited courses on history, especially those taught by Theodore Mommsen and Heinrich von Treitschke. Returning home, he gained entrance to Moscow University, ironically arriving at the same time that thousands of Jews were forced to evacuate the city.
Officially called the Jewish Organization for the Maintenance of Public Order (Ger., Jüdischer Ordungsdienst; Pol., Żydowska Służba Porządkowa), Jewish police units were established under Nazi occupation in most East European ghettos. The establishment of a police force usually was connected with the creation of the ghettos, which excluded the Jewish population from general police jurisdiction and thus created a need for an alternative system of ensuring that the Jewish population complied with German occupiers’ orders. The absence of a general German order regarding the establishment of the Jewish police indicates that in all probability, it was the various local occupying forces—and not the Central Reich Government—that took the initiative to set up this force. Indeed, the composition of the Jewish police in different ghettos, their jurisdictional powers, and their status within the Jewish community varied from ghetto to ghetto, according to local conditions. A small ghetto could muster only a handful of individuals to join its police force, whereas the Warsaw ghetto police comprised more than 2,000 members.
(Sometimes spelled Gintsburg; 1907–1972), Soviet cinematographer and cinema director. Born into a traditional Jewish family, Aleksandr Ginzburg took up photography, and then cinematography, at an early age. After moving to Leningrad, he began at the age of 18 to film popular science movies. In 1927 he graduated from the Camera Department of the Leningrad Technical School of Cinematography, becoming a cameraman at the Sovkino (later, Lenfil’m) Movie Studio. In 1934 he received a bachelor’s degree from the Leningrad Electrotechnical Institute.
(1836–1915), Hebrew poet and playwright. Born in Lwów, Meshulam Goldbaum was inspired to write poetry by the revolutions of 1848 (his initial pieces have not survived). His earliest remaining poem is “Be-hakifi pe’ot roshi” (When My Sidelocks Surround Me), written when he was 15; the work protests against external marks that set Jews apart from gentiles.
(1867–1943?), political leader and Bundist theorist. Shmul Gozhansky (sometimes spelled Gozshansky; also known by his pseudonyms Lonu or Der Lerer [the teacher]) was born in Grodno to a middle-class family and graduated from the Vilna Teachers’ Institute in 1888. He then taught in Kovno, Białystok, and Vilna. Gozhansky participated in revolutionary activities as a young man and in 1889 helped to organize the tailors’ strike in Vilna. In the 1890s, he was a Russified intellectual who led the revolutionary circles of Jewish workers that gave rise to the Jewish Labor Bund.
(1900–1972), rabbi, historian, and philosopher. Meyer Abraham Halevy was born in Piatra Neamț, Romania, into a religious family; his father was a rabbi and his mother also came from a rabbinic family. After completing his heder education, Halevy studied at the Beit Israel yeshiva in Buhuşi.
(1835–1919), historian, public activist, and librarian. Avraham (Albert Iakovlevich) Harkavy was born into a wealthy and prominent family in Novogrudok, Minsk guberniia, where he received a typical religious education. As an adolescent he studied briefly at the Volozhin yeshiva before transferring in 1858 to the state-sponsored Vilna Rabbinical Seminary. In 1863, he enrolled at Saint Petersburg University, where he received a master’s degree in oriental studies in 1868. He then went to Berlin and Paris to study Egyptology and Assyriology. He returned to Saint Petersburg and was awarded a doctorate in 1872. After teaching briefly at the university, Harkavy was appointed to a position at the Russian Imperial Public Library and became the librarian of the Oriental and Semitic Department in 1877.
(1883–1953), Zionist, attorney, and Polish parliament deputy. Born in Biała Podlaska, Apolinary Hartglas came from an assimilated Jewish family. From 1892 to 1900, he attended a Russian high school and subsequently studied law at the Russian University in Warsaw, graduating in 1904. While a student he joined the rapidly growing Zionist movement in the Polish Kingdom, editing, with Yitsḥak Grünbaum, the first Zionist journals there: Głos Żydowski (Jewish Voice) and Życie Żydowskie (Jewish Life).
From the beginning of Hasidism, teachers associated with the movement considered dance, along with music, an avenue of worship. In Hasidic thought and literature, dancing is both an expression and a stimulator of joy, and as such has a therapeutic effect. It purifies the soul and produces spiritual uplift, unites the community, and enhances social relationships; the tsadik’s dance may even encourage repentance.
Yiddish social and political newspaper published in Romania from 12 June 1874 until 5 January 1913. In 1882, its editors concluded an agreement with the Bucharest representatives of the Central Committee for the Colonization of the Land of Israel; in effect, Hayoets (The Counselor) became an organ of the emerging Zionist movement and the chronicler of Romanian Jewish immigration to Palestine.
(1876–1942), journalist, poet, translator, and political leader. Born into an affluent family in Slonim, Grodno province, Samuel (Shmuel) Hirschhorn moved to Warsaw when he was 13, where he completed commercial studies in addition to receiving a religious education. He began a career in journalism with the progressive Polish press, to which he contributed articles and poems, both original and translated from French and Russian.
(fl. 18th century), factor of the Polish king Stanisław August Poniatowski (1732–1798), and author of a project aimed at reforming Jewish lifestyles. He was probably the same person as Abraham Hirszewicz, a goldsmith and factor who was granted the status of servitor regis by Poniatowski on 19 January 1775.
(1889–1939), Yiddish author and novelist. Shimen Horontshik (Pol., Szymon Horonczyk) was born in Wieluń, in the Kalisz district of Poland. When Horontshik was 8 years old, his father died, and until he was 11, he lived with his grandfather, a Kotsk Hasid. Following the death of his grandfather, he returned to his mother’s home and received a traditional Jewish education. At 17, he worked as a production laborer at a lacework factory in Kalisz, where he lived until the town was captured by Germany in early August 1914. Horontshik then escaped to Łódź.
(1908–1973), novelist. The youngest of eight children, Egon Hostovský was born in Hronov, a northeast Bohemian town of about 30,000 people, into a family that owned a small factory. He left university in 1930 to work as a journalist and editor at various publishing houses; he was also one of the editors of the Kalendář českožidovský (Czech Jewish Almanac) from 1931 to 1937. By his mid-twenties, he had already established himself as a major writer, and his Žhář (The Arsonist) won the state prize for literature in 1935.
(1891–1938), Soviet official. Genrikh Grigor’evich Iagoda (first known as Genokh Gershevich; last name also rendered Yagoda), was born in Iaroslavl’ province to the family of a Jewish artisan who made his living engraving and repairing jewels and watches. In his hometown, Iagoda completed only the four-grade elementary educational program, but later passed the examination of the gymnasium in Nizhnii Novgorod, the city in which in 1904 and 1905 he worked as a typesetter at an underground printing house.
(1896–1937), military figure. Iona Iakir (also rendered Yona Yakir) was born in Kishinev to the family of a pharmacist. In 1913, he graduated from a Kishinev professional school and continued his studies at the University of Basel in Switzerland. During World War I, he returned to Russia and studied at the Kharkov Institute of Technology. In 1915, he was sent as a conscript to Odessa, where he worked as a lathe operator in a military factory.
(1912–1972), Russian-language writer. Boris Iampol’skii was born and raised on the Jewish outskirts of the provincial Ukrainian town of Belaia Tserkov’, where his father worked at a mill and his mother owned a small dry goods store. Although Iampol’skii left home in 1927, the impressions of his Jewish childhood informed his work for the rest of his life.
Tenth-century traveler who journeyed from Tortosa (Spain) through Central and Eastern Europe. Some of the written impressions of Ibrāhīm ibn Ya‘qūb (more fully, Ibrāhīm ibn Ya‘qūb al-Isrā’ilī al-Turtushi) survive through later Arabic sources. The original work was probably a report drafted for the Umayyad caliph of Spain, al-Ḥakam II (r. 961–976), following a visit to Germany as head of a delegation to Emperor Otto I. The depth of knowledge and proficiency that ibn Ya‘qūb displays in his discussions of medical matters suggest that he may have been a physician.
(1742–1801), rabbi and halakhist. Born into a distinguished rabbinic family from Buczacz (Galicia), by age nine Meshulam ben Shimshon Igra had already presented a complex halakhic discourse in the study hall of the famous community of Brody. By age 17 he was appointed rabbi of Tysmenitsa (now Ukr., Tysmenytsya). There he attracted as students such future rabbinical leaders as Mordekhai Banet of Nikolsburg, Ya‘akov of Lissa, and Mosheh Münz of Óbuda.
(1897–1937), Russian writer. With Evgenii Petrov, Il’ia Il’f (originally surnamed Fainzil’berg) wrote some of Soviet Russia’s most exuberant satires. Their two novels, Dvenadtsat’ stul’ev (The Twelve Chairs; 1928) and Zolotoi telenok (The Little Golden Calf; 1931), slipped past censorship to become the texts through which generations of knowing readers mocked Soviet reality. Innocent enough to be reading material for adolescents, the novels were actually cynical works that adults memorized in part or in full. Quotations from the books, as comments on post-Soviet society, continue to turn up in the Russian-language press on three continents.
(1881–1958), painter and graphic artist. Born in Bucharest, Iosif Iser moved with his family to Ploieşti, where he completed his secondary education and showed early artistic promise. Beginning in 1899, he studied painting at the Royal Academy of Arts in Munich, and had his first personal show upon returning to Ploieşti in 1904. He soon moved to Bucharest, where he worked as a cartoonist and caricaturist at the editorial office of the Adevărul newspaper. In 1905, he was part of the Tinerimea Artistică (Young Artists) group exhibit, and in 1906 had his first show in Bucharest.
(1749–1829), German–Polish banker and merchant. Born to a wealthy family in Frankfurt an-der-Oder, Yehudis ha-Levi Jakubowicz had an excellent education. At age 30, she became the third wife of Shmul Zbytkower, a successful army provisioner and merchant in Warsaw. She was an active partner in her husband’s business and, based on her contacts, helped expand its scope. After his death in 1801, she led the company alone, continuing to provide supplies to the Prussian, French, and Russian armies. She achieved a leading position among the purveyors to the court of the Duchy of Warsaw, second only to Berek Shmuel Sonnenberg (Bergson), her stepson and competitor. Her company also acted as a purveyor to the Prussian court. Having received unrestricted rights of residence, trade, and manufacturing from the Prussian king in 1798, Jakubowicz saw this privilege recognized by the Kingdom of Poland in 1815, granting her the right to acquire real estate. Moreover, the privilege was heritable by all her descendants.
(Yedvabneh) is situated in the Mazowsze region of Poland, 20 kilometers northeast of Łomża and 45 kilometers west of Tykocin (Tiktin). Jews first came to Jedwabne from Tykocin and were initially subject to that town’s Jewish communal authority. In 1770, when the wooden synagogue of Jedwabne was built, 387 Jews out of a total population of 450 lived in the community, a place known for its shoemakers.
(ca. 1740–1819), rabbi and author. Born in Kalisz (in what was to become Galicia), Yehudah Kahana was the eldest of four sons of Yosef ha-Kohen, who traced his lineage to the seventeenth-century rabbi Yom Tov Lipmann Heller (hence, some members of the family were called Kahana-Heller). Kahana at first shunned the rabbinate, leasing a village inn near Kalisz. Unsuccessful as an innkeeper, he became a private tutor to advanced students of wealthy families in Lwów, where he befriended a fellow tutor, Yosef Te’omim, later the rabbi of Frankfurt an der Oder and the author of the Peri megadim.
(1912–1986), Soviet mathematician and economist, Nobel Prize laureate. Born into a family of physicians in Saint Petersburg, Kantorovich went right from his nine-year primary school to the Department of Physics and Mathematics of Leningrad State University. Upon graduation, he was asked to stay on in graduate school, which he completed in two years while also teaching at the Institute of Construction. In 1932 he became professor and department head at the Institute of Industrial Transport. That same year he was named assistant professor at Leningrad State University, becoming full professor in 1934.
(1890–1918), failed assassin of Vladimir Lenin. On 30 August 1918, Fannie Kaplan was arrested for having shot and wounded Vladimir Lenin in Moscow. At 4:00 A.M. on 4 September, she was executed in a Kremlin parking lot as truck engines drowned out the pistol shots. A famed Bolshevik poet, Demian Bedny, watched the execution “for revolutionary inspiration.” The order was given that Fannie Kaplan’s remains be destroyed without a trace. In reprisal for the crime—and for the assassination of the head of the Petrograd secret police on the same day as the Lenin shooting—thousands fell victim to the “Red Terror” unleashed on 5 September 1918. The shooting also sparked the beginning of the cult of Lenin. Fannie Kaplan is known only for this one act of attempted assassination and for its fateful aftermath.
(1829–1905), rabbi and historian. Meir Kayserling was born in Hannover, Germany, where he attended high school at Meyer Michel David’s Freischule between 1838 and 1844. He then studied at a yeshiva in Halberstadt and at the Talmudic academy of Samson Raphael Hirsch in Nikolsburg. In 1849, he went to study with Shelomoh Yehudah Rapoport in Prague and later with Seligmann Baer Bamberger in Würzburg.
(1913–1962), Yiddish and Russian writer. Emmanuil Kazakevich was born in the Ukrainian town of Kremenchug. His father, Henekh Kazakevich (1883–1935), was a Jewish political activist and journalist who joined the Bolsheviks and edited Communist Yiddish periodicals, notably the Kharkov literary journal Di royte velt (The Red World). In Kharkov, Emmanuil studied machine building, and was a member of the Yiddish literary group at the Communist newspaper Yunge gvardye (Young Guard), which published his early poems. From 1931 to 1937, Kazakevich lived in Birobidzhan, where his father edited the local Yiddish newspaper, Birobidzhaner shtern (Birobidzhan Star).
(1848–1917), rabbi, educator, and publicist. Alexander Kisch came from an established family in Prague, where his father, Joseph Kisch, was director of the first modern private school in the city’s Jewish quarter. Beginning in 1863, Kisch studied first at the Jewish Theological Seminary in Breslau and later at the local university there. In 1871, he received his doctorate in philosophy from the University of Tübingen. He then lived in Paris, where he attended lectures at the Séminaire Israélite while working as a private tutor to the children of Russian financier and Jewish philanthropist Baron Horace Gintsburg (Günzburg).
(1825–1906), political activist and journalist. Julian Klaczko was born to a wealthy merchant family in Vilna. Influenced by his father’s Haskalah ideology, he was educated in both Hebrew and Polish, and was tutored by Shemu’el Yosef Fuenn, among others. Klaczko published his first poems when he was 13, initially in Polish in the collection Pierwsza ofiara (The First Sacrifice; 1838) and then in Hebrew in the volume Dudaim (1842). Other texts in Hebrew such as the novel The Fisherman remained unpublished. Those works were strongly influenced by the poetry of Adam Mickiewicz.
(1867–1942), writer and journalist. Tamás Kóbor was born in Pozsony (Pressburg; today Bratislava) as Adolf Bermann. His family moved to Budapest when he was three years old. The name Tamás Kóbor, which he adopted as a young artist, is a Hungarian version (translated by János Arany) of Tam o’ Shanter, Robert Burns’s famous character. Kóbor studied law and started his literary career at the journal A Hét, whose editor in chief was his brother-in-law, the poet József Kiss. Kóbor was a principal contributor to numerous other journals and newspapers, including Magyar Hírlap, Pesti Napló, Pesti Hírlap, and Az Újság. His most significant works were short stories and novels.
(1864–1941), revolutionary politician in Poland and the Soviet Union. Feliks Kon (known by many pseudonyms, including Bolesław Janowski, Feliks Bolesławski, and F. C. Stożyński) was born in Warsaw into a wealthy merchant family with strong Polish patriotic traditions. Kon became involved with the socialist movement while still in high school. In 1882, he joined the group Proletariat, the first major socialist movement in the Kingdom of Poland, which called for a struggle of the united working classes against the ruling order and the bourgeoisie in the tsarist empire.
(1867–1941), Bundist leader. Vladimir Kossovskii (pseudonym of Nokhem Mendl Levinson) was born in Dvinsk (now Daugavpils, Latvia) and attended high school in Kovno (Kaunas). As a result of his revolutionary activities, he was expelled in 1885 shortly before he was expected to graduate. In 1894, he moved to Vilna and became involved in the social democratic (Marxist) revolutionary circles of Jewish workers. A major advocate of the idea that Jewish revolutionary circles should be united under one party, Kossovskii was instrumental in creating the Jewish Labor Bund.
(1907–1989), Soviet mathematician. The son of a Kievan lumber merchant, Mark Krein showed an early talent for mathematics, attending research seminars at age 14. While he never obtained an undergraduate degree, he was accepted for doctoral studies at Odessa University in 1926, completing them in 1929. He became the author of more than 300 papers and monographs that opened up new areas of mathematics and greatly enriched the more traditional ones. Krein’s work was characterized by a profound intrinsic unity and a close interlacing of general abstract and geometric ideas with concrete and analytical results and applications.
(1882–1932), Soviet economist, political figure, and publicist. Iurii Larin was born in Simferopol’ as Mikhail Aleksandrovich Luria. His father, Shneur (Shelomoh) Zalman Luria, was an engineer, Hebrew author, Zionist, and, according to some sources, a kazennyi ravvin, or “crown rabbi.”
(1905–1983), educator, journalist, Zionist leader, and historian. Theodor Lavi (originally Theodor Loewenstein) was born in Turnu-Severin, Romania, and attended schools in his native town. He studied educational psychology at the University of Bucharest, and in 1935 defended his Ph.D. with a thesis influenced by Sigmund Freud’s theories. Lavi then served as the principal of the Israelite-Romanian school of Ploieşti.
Line of important second-tier rabbinic leaders originating in Central Poland. Its folksy progenitor, David Biderman of Lelov (Pol., Lelów; 1746–1814), was a highly effective recruiter of scions of prestigious rabbinic families. David himself came from a humble background and was famous for his compassion for transgressors and his love for children and animals. A disciple of Elimelekh of Lizhensk (Leżajsk) and then of Ya‘akov Yitsḥak Horowitz (the “Seer of Lublin”), he remained the latter’s devotee even after obtaining his own following.
(1900 [1910 in some sources]–1942), poet. Born in Mrozy, Warsaw district, to a prominent Hasidic family, Yekhiel Lerer spent his childhood and adolescence in the shtetl of Żelechów, where he received traditional Jewish training and a general education from private tutors. In his adolescence (during the years of World War I), he became acquainted with modern Yiddish and Hebrew writings, and read Polish and German literature. Concurrently, he studied watchmaking and the fur business, but preferred to live in the He-Ḥaluts movement’s agricultural collective. When his hopes of leaving for Palestine fell through, he moved to Warsaw, apparently at the end of the 1920s.
(1879–1918), Hebrew poet. Ya‘akov Lerner was born in the town of Brzeżany in Volhynia to an affluent family of rabbinic pedigree. During his childhood, the family became impoverished and was forced to relocate to a village near the town of Kostopol, settling in Kostopol itself a few years later. Lerner attended heders and became engrossed in Judaic studies. He also studied Russian and French with private teachers. In 1901, he went to Warsaw, hoping to earn a matriculation certificate, and for the next five years he eked out a subsistence living as a teacher.
(1904–1941), Russian writer. Doyvber (Boris Mikhailovich) Levin was born in the shtetl of Liady, Mogilev province. In 1921 he entered Petrograd University, transferring the next year to the theater department of the State Institute for the History of the Arts, from which he graduated in 1928. In the 1930s he lived in Leningrad, where he published eight books, most of them for young people, and wrote the scenario for the children’s film Fed’ka. Levin fought in the Soviet–Finnish War of 1939–1940. He was killed on 17 December 1941, on the Leningrad front.
(1877–1946), Yiddish and Hebrew prose writer. Lipman Levin was born in Mogilev (mod. Mahilyow), Belorussia, to a prosperous family. A precocious boy, he studied religious and secular subjects and later worked as a teacher. In 1900, he arrived in Warsaw, where, following his successful debut as a story writer in the newspaper Der yud (The Jew), he contributed to other Hebrew and Yiddish periodicals, including Di yudishe folks-tsaytung (The Jewish People’s Paper), coedited by his brother-in-law Khayim Dovid Hurvits, a prominent journalist and editor.
(1860–1900), Russian painter. Russia’s outstanding landscape painter of the second half of the nineteenth century, Levitan was born in Kubarty, a town in the Lithuanian province of Suvalki. He was educated at the Moscow School of Painting, Architecture, and Sculpture, studying with the landscape painter Aleksei Savrasov and the prominent Russian realists Vasilii Perov and Vasilii Polenov. Early poverty undermined his health, and he died at the age of 40. He nonetheless left an oeuvre of more than 1,000 paintings, among them iconic depictions of the Russian landscape like Vladimirka (1892), Nad vechnym pokoem (Above “Eternal Rest”; 1894), and Svezhii veter. Volga (Fresh Wind: The Volga; 1891–1895). The Moscow collector Pavel Tret’iakov built up a large holding of Levitan’s works, and the Tret’iakov Gallery holds many of his masterpieces. During his short career, Levitan was elected to the Russian Academy of Art. He likewise associated with significant Russian and Western European artistic movements such as the Peredvizhniki (Society for Traveling Art Exhibitions), the Munich Secession, and Sergei Diaghilev’s journal Mir iskusstva (The World of Art).
(1878–1944), Zionist leader in Poland. Born in Warsaw, Leon Lewite joined Kadimah, the association of Jewish students at the University of Warsaw and at the Technikum (Polytechnic College). As an active Zionist, he devoted himself to acquiring pledges for shares in the Jüdische Kolonialbank (Jewish Colonial Trust).
(Natan Petaḥyah ben Barukh Mosheh Lipa; 1830–1915), physician, writer, and Zionist activist. Karpel Lippe was born in Tyśmienica (near Stanisławów, Galicia) into a traditional family. Influenced by the ideas of the Haskalah, he stopped preparing for the rabbinate and decided to study medicine. Unable to complete his program, in 1860 he moved to Iaşi and worked as a secondary physician at the Israelite Hospital. He finally received his medical degree from the University of Erlangen in Germany, and practiced in Iaşi, where he helped the poor and was the first Romanian physician to give free consultations at designated hours.
Yiddish literary and cultural monthly periodical. Literarishe tribune (Literary Tribune) was officially published in Łódź between April 1930 and March 1933. Issued monthly (biweekly in the last five months of its publication), it produced a total of 43 issues. Each contained between 16 and 24 pages with a print run of 2,000 to 3,000 copies. The actual number of readers was much higher.
(1874–1932), pseudonym of Khayim Yankl Helfand, socialist, Yiddish writer, translator, and editor. Helfand was born in Vilna to a strictly observant Jewish family. He went to heder until the age of 12 and subsequently studied at a yeshiva and taught himself Russian. At the age of 19, he joined an illegal study group in Vilna organized by the Jewish Social Democratic Group in Russia, the organization that later established the Bund in 1897.
(1922–1993), scholar of literature, culture, and semiotics. Iurii Mikhailovich Lotman founded the Tartu school of semiotics and was the author of numerous important works on the semiotics of culture, and the structure of poetic and literary texts.
(1840–1909), economist and banker. A nephew of Hungarian-born German poet Karl Beck, Nándor Beck was born in (Bács-) Madaras to poor parents; his father was a grocer. Beck (Madarassy-Beck from 1906) studied banking in Vienna and upon his return to Hungary in 1862 was employed at the Pest branch of the Credit-Anstalt für Gewerbe und Handel. From 1867, he was a senior clerk at the Anglo-Hungarian Bank.
(Khane-Rokhl Werbermacher; 1806?–1888?), Hasidic religious leader. Little concrete information is known about the pious Hasidic woman popularly known as the Maiden of Ludmir (Yid., Di Ludmirer Moid). Despite or perhaps because of the lack of historical detail, she has inspired a century of writers who have told and retold her story in fiction (including Isaac Bashevis Singer’s novel Shosha), plays, and articles.
(1870–1901), poet, journalist, dramatist, and translator. In his life as well as in his work, Emil Makai was a paradigmatic figure for the first generation of Hungarian Jewish writers. His career exemplifies the path of Jewish intellectuals as they moved from the framework of Jewish life and literature into national Hungarian culture (writer József Kiss followed a similar pattern).
(1901–1943), teacher and historian. Bella Mandelsberg-Schildkraut (or Szyldkraut) was one of the few women among the nearly 70 students who earned masters’ degrees with dissertations on Polish Jewish history at the University of Warsaw between 1919 and 1939. An economic historian who studied with Jan Kochanowski, Mandelsberg wrote her thesis, “The Socio-economic and Public-legal History of Lublin’s Jews in the First Half of the Seventeenth Century, with Emphasis on the Reign of Władysław IV,” between 1926 and 1928; the manuscript remains at the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw.
(1899–1980), memoirist and cultural critic. Nadezhda Mandel’shtam figures as the best-known and most talented “widow of Russia,” a female survivor of the Stalinist era who preserved the politically suppressed work of her husband, the poet Osip Mandel’shtam. As a memoirist and raconteur among friends, she also served as a keenly perceptive, highly opinionated source on Soviet culture and society.
(1856–1940), historian. Born Henrik Morgenstern, Marczali’s father was Mór Morgenstern (1824–1889), the Neolog rabbi of Marcali, Hungary (the family’s name change in 1875 was inspired by the town). Marczali attended Benedictine high schools in Győr and Pápa. He was 14 when he started studies at the University of Budapest, earning his history and geography teacher’s diploma in 1873. Between 1875 and 1877, he attended universities in Vienna, Berlin, Paris, London, and Oxford, and in 1878 earned a doctorate at the University of Budapest. Marczali became the most significant Hungarian historian from the 1880s until the first decade of the twentieth century.
(1743–?), physician and medical writer. Born in Słonim, Moyshe Markuze (or Marcuse) received a thorough Talmudic education. From 1766 to 1768, he studied medicine in Königsberg (now Kaliningrad) and then traveled to Holland and England. Returning to Eastern Europe in 1774, he worked as a physician in the estates of the Lubomirski family in Kapust (Kopyś) near Szkłów (Shklov), an area that had been annexed to Russia two years earlier. By 1782 he had moved to Trisk (Turyjsk) in Volhynia, where he served as a government-licensed physician. It is said that he was physician to Poland’s King Stanisław August Poniatowski and to some members of the commission of the crown treasury.
(1849–1923), journalist, novelist, philosopher, and literary critic. Born into an assimilated, well-to-do Jewish family from Hořitz (Hořice; also Horschitz) in Bohemia, Fritz Mauthner received his primary and secondary education at German schools in Prague. Although he officially studied law, he acquired a broad education at the German university in Prague. In 1876, Mauthner moved to Berlin, where he published articles in or collaborated on several literary journals, earning his living primarily through writing theater reviews. In 1889, he was a founder of the avant-garde theater Freie Bühne (Free Stage). He wrote plays, novels, short stories, and satires.
(1843–1926), rabbi and commentator. One of the outstanding Orthodox thinkers in Lithuania during the first quarter of the twentieth century. Me’ir Simḥah ha-Kohen was a wealthy merchant’s son. He received his religious education first in his hometown of Butrimonys and later in Eishishok, where he studied under Mosheh Denishevsky.
(1760–1827/31?), Hasidic leader. In his youth, Me’ir ha-Levi Rotenberg studied under the rabbis Yitsḥak Avraham Aba ha-Kohen Katz and Aryeh-Yehudah Leib Te’omim, all the while living in poverty. He was nominated in 1809 to serve as a rabbi in Apt (Opatów) and, in 1815, in Stavnits (Stopnica). In 1816, his son Yisra’el was elected to the Stopnica rabbinate, and Me’ir returned to Opatów.
Village on the Stava River (Pripiat’ basin) in Ukraine’s Rivne (Rovno) region. Mezhyrichi, known as Mezhirech in Russian and Międzyrzecz in Polish, was called Mezhirich Gadol by Jews; currently known as Velikie Mezhyrichi (Great Mezhyrichi), it has also been referred to as Mezhyrichi Koretskie. From 1569 it was in the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, and from 1793 in the Korets district of the Russian Empire’s Volhynia province. Between 1921 and 1939 the town belonged to independent Poland.
(1887–1943), manufacturer, head of the Łódź kehilah, Polish parliamentary deputy, and leader of Agudas Yisroel. Born in Radom to a Hasidic family, Leib Mincberg received a traditional education yet also learned several European languages. Upon his marriage into a Gerer Hasidic family, he transferred his allegiance to that dynasty. With the outbreak of World War I, Mincberg moved to Łódź, where he began a successful career in manufacturing.
(1868–1941), lawyer. Born into the family of a businessman in Daugavpils, Latvia, Pauls Mincs (Paul Mintz) graduated from gymnasium in Riga in 1885. He received a law degree from Saint Petersburg University and another from Tartu University in Estonia in 1892. His brother Vladimirs, a lawyer, was also prominent in Latvian public life. From 1918, Mincs taught at Tartu University. He also devoted much of his time to Jewish social issues, having in 1898 been one of the founders and then head of Riga’s chapter of the Society for the Promotion of Culture among the Jews of Russia.
(Mintz; 1872–1945), surgeon. Vladimirs Mincs’s father, Jehil Mikelis Mincs, moved to Riga from Daugavpils. Vladimir and his brother Pauls became prominent figures in Latvia and its Jewish community.
(Pseudonym of N. M. Vilenkin; 1855–1937), poet and essay writer. Born in a village in the Vitebsk region of Belorussia, Nikolai Minskii graduated from a Russian gymnasium with high honors and received a degree in law from Saint Petersburg University. In 1882, he converted to Russian Orthodox Christianity in order to marry.
Town in the Moldavian region of Romania, in the county of Bacău. Located in an area of petroleum exploitation, Moineşti experienced Jewish settlement in the second half of the eighteenth century: one tombstone from the Jewish cemetery dates from 1748, another from 1787. In 1820, Moineşti was home to 42 Jewish taxpayers; by 1831, there were 93 Jews in the town; and in 1899, a total of 2,398 Jews represented 50.6 percent of the population. Later, this number diminished: in 1910, it had fallen to 2,141; in 1930 to 1,761; and in 1941 to 1,325. Jews were employed in crafts, local commerce, and the petroleum industry. Many were Hasidim, followers of Yitsḥak Friedman of Buhuşi or of Hersh Tsevi Landman of Bacău.
(1878–1952), playwright, novelist, short-story writer, and journalist. The son of a hard-working Budapest physician, Ferenc Molnár grew up in a typical assimilated middle-class household. He became an international celebrity at a fairly young age, one of the very few Hungarian writers to have achieved that status in the twentieth century. In phenomenally successful plays such as Az ördög (The Devil; 1907), Liliom (1909), A testőr (The Guardsman; 1910), and Játék a kestélyban (The Play’s the Thing; 1926), he popularized, and in a sense vulgarized, the techniques and assumptions of the naturalist, impressionist, and symbolist theater, and revitalized the conventions of the nineteenth-century French drawing room comedy. Molnár was a consummate craftsman, a master of dialogue, pacing, and plot construction. Though far more than an entertainer, he failed whenever he tried to write “serious,” morally weighty dramas. Molnár scored his greatest successes abroad as a playwright; his many prose works, including brilliant sketches and humorous pieces, are less well-known outside of Hungary, although A Pál utcai fiúk (The Paul Street Boys; 1907) remains a juvenile classic in a number of European countries.
(ca. 1745–1807), Hasidic master in eastern Galicia. Mosheh Leib was born in Brody; his main teacher was Shemu’el Shmelke Horovitz, leader of a Hasidic center in Ryczywol and from 1766 head of the rabbinical court in Sieniawa. After returning from a stay with his master, Mosheh Leib settled in Apt (Opatów) and probably led a small Hasidic community there. During the 1780s, he moved to Sasov (Yid., more properly Sasev).
(fl. late fourteenth–early fifteenth century), eminent rabbinic leader in Bohemia, anti-Christian polemicist, halakhist, philosopher, kabbalist, and commentator. Mülhausen’s activities, coming a generation or two after the devastation of the Black Plague, raised the intellectual, cultural, and religious profile of Bohemian Jewry. Along with contemporaries such as the brothers Avigdor and Menaḥem Kara and Menaḥem Shalem, Mülhausen belonged to a set of rabbinic figures whose intellectual breadth was not usually associated with the Ashkenazic rabbinate of the late medieval period.
Historically, most Jewish musicians in Eastern Europe came from families involved with music, and received their musical education through individual apprenticeships and other informal channels. The traditional Jewish professions of klezmer, badkhn (wedding jester), and ḥazan (cantor) were usually passed from father to son or father to son-in-law, creating dynasties of musicians that persisted into the modern period. Guilds of Jewish musicians with more formal apprenticeships could be found in some towns in the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, but after the partitions of Poland, they were largely restricted to towns within Austrian and Ottoman territories. Cantors also passed on their skills to their assistants and accompanists, either to solo zingers (singers) or to ensembles of meshorerim (choristers). More formal cantorial associations were established in the late nineteenth century under German influence in parts of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and in Poland in the interwar period. Hasidic melodies were also orally transmitted through Hasidic courts.
(1813–1892), rabbi and early Zionist. Yosef Natonek attended yeshiva in Komárom with Pinḥas Leib Frieden, in Nikolsburg with Neḥemyah Naḥum Trebitsch until 1835, and in Ungvár for the year 1836. Although he never studied at the yeshiva of Mosheh Sofer (Ḥatam Sofer) as is often stated, he did apparently obtain ordination in Pressburg. He turned to trade and during the revolution of 1848–1849 supplied livestock to the Austrians and then to the Hungarian forces at the fortress of Komárom, where he settled in 1849. Later, he was issued a certificate of good conduct addressed to the Austrian authorities stating that during the revolution he had not “budged a hairsbreadth” from the path of loyalty.
(d. 1804), merchant, shtadlan (lobbyist for Jewish interests), and Jewish political leader in late eighteenth-century Russia. In the late 1770s and 1780s, Notkin was a contractor for the court of Count Semen Gavriilovich Zorich in Shklov, and for Count Grigorii Potemkin, Russia’s “viceroy of the south.” During this period, Notkin traveled frequently to Prussia, and came into contact with the circle of the Berlin Haskalah. He was a subscriber to the journal Ha-Me’asef, and was apparently responsible for commissioning Naftali Herts Wessely to compose Hebrew poems, with German translation, in honor of the visit by Empress Catherine II to Shklov and Mogilev in 1780.
(Kamil Zeman; 1882–1952), Czech novelist and journalist. Ivan Olbracht’s mother, Kamila Schonfeldová, came from a German-speaking Jewish family in northern Bohemia; his father, the writer Antal Stašek (originally Antonín Zeman), forced her to convert to Catholicism before he would marry her. (“For me,” he wrote to her in a letter, “departure from my church would be an excommunication from Czech society.”) Olbracht studied law in Berlin and Prague, but eventually left his studies to become a full-time journalist for a Czech Social Democratic paper in Vienna, where he worked from 1909 until 1916.
Booksellers and publishers in Warsaw. Samuel Orgelbrand (1810–1868) founded the family’s business, which, from the middle of the nineteenth century until its sale in 1920, maintained a leading position in the Polish and Polish Jewish publishing industries. His brother Maurycy (1826–1904) and sons Hipolit (1843–1920) and Mieczyslaw (1847–1903) were also associated with the business. The publishing house produced texts on Polish literature and history, reference works in different disciplines, and specialist literature in social sciences, economics, law, and medicine.
(1899–1980), writer, playwright, and journalist. Isac Peltz was born in Bucharest, to a family of impoverished craft workers. Beyond attending heder, it is unlikely that he received formal schooling. At age 16, Peltz single-handedly edited a review titled Indrumarea (Guidance). One year later, he published a pamphlet, Menirea literaturii (The Purpose of Literature), pleading for writers’ moral and social commitment. In 1916, he took his first job, at the editorial office of a newspaper.
Industrialists and bankers in Bohemia. The Petschek family, originally based in Kolín in central Bohemia, included captains of industry of Czech lands from the late nineteenth century. Its members reached their pinnacle of success in the period of the first Czechoslovak Republic (1918–1938).
(1869–1933), painter. Born in Piła near Sieradz, Poland, Leopold Pilichowski received his early Jewish education in his native village and then studied art in Łódź. There he spent time in the company of the painter Szmul Hirszenberg (to whom he was related) and the Hebrew writer David Frishman. Pilichowski continued his studies at the Art Academy in Munich and later at the Academy Julian in Paris. In France he painted portraits, Parisian street scenes, and nocturnes, and in 1891 exhibited a painting entitled Pierwsze jesienne liście (First Leaves of Autumn).
(1907–1943), Yiddish folklorist. Born in Sanok, central Galicia, Shmuel Pipe learned the tailoring trade from his father. He was active in the youth organization Ha-Shomer ha-Tsa‘ir, advancing to the position of youth leader and educator. He became an enthusiastic collector for the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in Vilna, submitting Yiddish folktales and songs, children’s games, and other folklore materials.
(1892–1945), Czech journalist and novelist. Poláček was born to a Czech-speaking Jewish family in the small Bohemian town of Rychnov nad Kněžnou. Although he failed at the local gymnasium, he finished his studies in Prague in 1912; after a short period in law school he was drafted and served on the Russian and Serbian fronts. In Serbia he crossed over into “voluntary captivity” and spent the last two months of the war as a prisoner. On his return to Prague, he launched his career as a journalist, specializing in both short, humorous essays (sloupky) and court reports (soudničky); he wrote hundreds of each in his career. He also wrote two plays, a number of film scripts, and several volumes of short stories, establishing himself by the end of the 1920s as one of the republic’s wittiest writers. Poláček directed his sharp satires at extremism on both sides of the political spectrum, as well as at the complacent banality of the middle classes; he was particularly sensitive to clichés, empty phrases, and the abuse of language. His barbed Žurnalistický slovník (Journalistic Dictionary; 1934) mocked the stereotyped thinking of the political press.
At the conclusion of the Third Partition in 1795, the territories of the former Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth were divided among Russia (62% of the area, 45% of the population), Prussia (20% of the land, 23% of the people) and Austria (18% of the land, 32% of the population). Although these borders were not final and would undergo revisions, most notably during the Napoleonic wars and after the Congress of Vienna, Polish independence would not return until 1918. From the time of the partitions onward, the story of Polish Jewry, like the story of Poland itself, became three separate yet often similar stories of adjustment, rejection, and cooperation between the populations of the lands of partitioned Poland and the ruling empires.
To treat the demography of the Jewish population of Eastern Europe—its size, its movement within the region, and migration from it—this entry includes three articles. The principal division is chronological, using World War I, a time of great upheaval that disrupted large numbers of people and an event that led to the end of the empires of Eastern Europe and a redrawing of the area’s political map, as the point of division. The first article covers population and migration before World War I; the second and third articles separately treat these topics after the war. For further discussion, see the entries on specific countries, regions, and cities.
About this Article (Population and Migration)
(pseudonym of Veronica Schwefelberg; 1921–1977), poet, prose writer, and translator. Veronica Porumbacu was the daughter of Arnold Schwefelberg, a renowned Jewish community leader. She was born in Bucharest and died as a victim of the earthquake that ravaged the city on 4 March 1977. She took the name Porumbacu from the name of the Transylvanian village where the nurse who raised her was born.
On 1 October 1869, the Austrian post office produced the first official governmental Correspodenz-Karte (postal card), based on an idea developed by Emanuel Hermann, a Viennese Jewish economics professor. The first picture postcards appeared in the 1870s in several European countries. Germany, with its advanced print technology, became the center for illustrated cards of Jewish interest in the 1880s. The new form of communication spread to Poland and the United States. As early as 1888, a writer for the Warsaw monthly Izraelita criticized the German Jewish practice of sending ornate and ostentatious postcards for Rosh Hashanah, and was disappointed with the sums of money spent on buying and mailing them. Despite such views, the illustrated postcard became a great success, and by the first decades of the twentieth century the variety, richness, and quantity of them that were produced in Poland exceeded that of Germany.
(1864–1921), rabbi, scholar, and bibliographer. Born in Lubraniets (Pol., Lubraniec), Shemu’el Avraham Poznański received a general and Jewish education from private tutors. In 1880, he moved to Warsaw and completed his studies in a realgymnasium (modern high school). In 1890, Poznański began to study at a number of institutions, including Berlin University, the Hochschule für die Wissenschaft des Judentums (a rabbinical seminary and center for the scientific study of Judaism), and the Veitel Heine Institute. Greatly influenced by the bibliographer Moritz Steinschneider (1816–1907), Poznański submitted his doctoral dissertation in philosophy and Semitic philology to the University of Heidelberg in 1894, and two years later was ordained as a rabbi in Berlin.
(also known in Russian as Grigorii Izrailevich; 1900–1969), Hebrew writer. Tsevi Preigerzon was born in Shepetovka, in the Volhynia region; his father was a Zionist maskil, and his mother a member of the well-known Halperin family that traced its roots to Rabbi Dov Ber Karasik. Preigerzon spent his early years in heder, and at the age of 13 was sent by his parents to study at the Herzliya gymnasium in Tel Aviv. World War I erupted while he was spending a summer in Europe, and in its wake all routes to Palestine were blocked. Faced with no other option, Preigerzon completed his secondary education at a Russian gymnasium in Odessa, where he concurrently took violin lessons at the local conservatory and spent his evenings studying at a yeshiva. He gradually became disenchanted with religion and poured his energies into Zionism, which soon had to compete with his devotion to communism. Thus in 1917, following the outbreak of the Russian Revolution, Preigerzon found himself torn between these loyalties. Two years later he traveled to Moscow where he was admitted to the Academy for Mining Engineering.
Printers active in Kraków in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Yitsḥak ben Aharon of Prostitz (Yid., more properly Prostits; d. 1612) was born in Prossnitz (Prostějov) and apparently learned the printing craft in Venice. There he became acquainted with the editor and scholar Shemu’el Böhm (d. 1588), whom Prostitz persuaded to join in establishing a Hebrew printing house in Kraków. Though Böhm’s function was listed on title pages as magihah (proofreader), in the sixteenth century the work of the magihah also included helping to choose, prepare, and print manuscripts. The press bought its types, printing ornaments, and other implements in Venice. In an effort to compete with the great Italian printing houses, Kraków’s rabbis in 1590 encouraged Polish rabbis to use Prostitz rather than Italian printers; alternatively, they ruled that if a Polish rabbi choose to publish in Italy, his sales in Poland would be delayed.
(1874–1948), Hebrew, Yiddish, and German writer. Ya‘akov Rabinowitz was born in Volkovysk, Russia (now Belarus). After receiving a traditional education at heder and a yeshiva, he studied secular topics and taught in Vitebsk. Before he began composing his major literary output in German and Hebrew, he wrote a number of Zionist brochures in Yiddish, the earliest of which (Vu iz undzer oylem? An ernst vort tsum folk [Where Are Our Masses? A Serious Word to the People]) was published in Berdichev in 1899.
(1892–1971), Communist leader; prime minister of Hungary. Son of a retail merchant, Mátyás Rákosi pursued his studies at the Eastern Trade Academy in Budapest. In 1910, he joined the Social Democratic Party. Rákosi acquired practical experience between 1912 and 1914 while working at firms in Hamburg and London; his outstanding linguistic abilities also led him to master a number of languages. In 1914, he enlisted in the army as a volunteer.
(1895–1971), Yiddish-language literary critic, journalist, and translator. Born in Białystok and educated by tutors, Yoshue Rapoport mastered several European languages and gained a broad knowledge of literature. His contributions to Yiddish literature include his translations—among them selections from the works of Maurice Maeterlinck, Romain Rolland, Rabindranath Tagore, Boris Pilnyak, and Upton Sinclair—as well as writings about art, philosophy, the history of Russian revolutions, and Simon Dubnow’s history of the Jews (1938–1940).
(1896–1988), Yiddish writer. Born in the shtetl of Zhager, Mark Razumny grew up in Riga, where, in addition to receiving a traditional Jewish education, he studied art and architecture. As a young boy, he began to write poems in Yiddish, Russian, and Hebrew. In 1917–1918, he affiliated with the Labor Zionists. Mobilized to the Red Army in 1919, Razumny soon moved to Germany and lived in Hamburg, where he published his first story, in German, in the local Israelitisches Familienblatt (Israelite Family Journal). He worked as a clerk at a Hamburg-based bank and studied philosophy, aesthetics, and literature at the university.
The Yiddish term rebetsin was the most prestigious title available to Jewish women. Its simplest definition is the wife of a rabbi, though the term also connotes a pious woman, a woman with good lineage, or a woman learned in religious matters. In Eastern Europe, rebetsins developed reputations for piety, scrupulous observance, religious leadership, and concern for the poor. Just as their rabbi husbands often emerged as community leaders, so too did rabbinic wives serve as important figures in the towns and villages of the region.
(1889–1977), jurist, politician, diplomat, and Holocaust researcher. One of seven brothers, Jacob (Ya‘akov ben David) Robinson was born in Seirijai (Serej) into a family with a rabbinic tradition reaching back to Yom Tov Lipmann Heller (seventeenth century). Although Orthodox, Robinson’s father, David, was an early Zionist.
Town in northeastern Romania at the confluence of the Siret and Moldova Rivers. Oral tradition claims a Jewish presence there from the late fifteenth century, but the first documentary reference dates to 1709, the oldest tomb inscription to 1724, and the record book of the burial society to 1773. Throughout the nineteenth century the Jewish community, integrated in the fields of commerce and crafts, recorded continuous demographic growth: from 288 Jews in 1803, to 1,200 in 1831, to 1,936 in 1838, to 3,290 in 1859, and to 6,432 in 1899 (then representing 39% of the total population). In 1910, there were 322 merchants, 55 shoemakers, 52 tailors, 20 carpenters, 18 blacksmiths, and 305 other craftsmen. As a result of emigration in the early twentieth century, the number of Jews dropped before World War I but eventually rose again during the interwar period: to 4,728 in 1910 and to 5,963 in 1930 (totaling 28%).
(1849–1919), lawyer and Zionist leader. Born in the Hungarian city of Gyulafehérvár (Rom., Alba Iulia), János Rónai completed his legal studies at the University of Budapest. Working first as a vice notary public in Győr, he then started his own legal practices in Fogaras (Rom., Făgăraş) and in Balázsfalva; he also organized branches of the Independence Party of 1848 in several towns in Transylvania. Rónai’s writings include his 1875 doctoral dissertation, “Nacionalizmus és kozmopolitizmus különös tekintettel a zsidóság mai helyzetére” (Cosmopolitanism and Nationalism with special consideration of the Jewish Situation in Our Time).
(1804–1865), Polish banker and communal leader. Mathias Rosen was the son of the German-born Isaak Simon Rosen, who had established himself as a banker in Warsaw during the Prussian occupation of Poland (1796–1806). In addition to Mathias Rosen’s activities as a partner in the family’s bank, which he ran alone after his father’s death in 1840, Rosen’s business activities included railway construction, tax farming, tobacco processing, and international trade, often as the partner of Leopold Kronenberg.
Leading maskilim and shtadlanim (political leaders) of Hungarian Jewry. Naftali Rosenthal (Naftali Mohr; 1727–1798) was, after Koppel Theben, the most important lay national figure of eighteenth-century Hungarian Jewry. Eliyahu Rosenthal (Eliah Komorn; 1758–1833), Naftali’s elder son, was an adviser to the government on issues of Jewish rights. Later members of the family, including Naftali’s younger son Shelomoh Rosenthal (Shelomoh [Solomon] Mohr; 1763–1845), were active in the Haskalah and in Jewish cultural life.
(Yehudah Leib; 1817–1887), business entrepreneur, public figure, and philanthropist. Leon Rosenthal received both a religious and a secular education, and he was particularly drawn to Hebrew literature. His father Mosheh’s house in Vilna was a popular place for maskilim to gather.
(1894–1947), Hasidic Ḥaredi leader. Born in Ungvár, Aharon Roth founded a sect, known today as Reb Arele’s, that numbers in the thousands and serves as the most visible representative of radical Hasidic anti-Zionism in Jerusalem.
(Aron Hirszhorn; 1909–1990), prose writer and essayist. Born into a Hasidic family, Adolf Rudnicki rebelled against his father and the Orthodox community. Settling in Warsaw in the early 1930s, Rudnicki joined a circle of young writers. In 1939, he fought the invading Nazis as a soldier in the Polish army, and after escaping German captivity, he went to Soviet-occupied Lwów, and later, in 1942, to Warsaw, where he lived on the Aryan side and took part in underground literary life and efforts to assist Jews.
(1920–1972), poet, publicist, and translator. Born into an Orthodox family in Tyszowce, near Lublin, Arnold Słucki (originally Aron Kreiner) attended the State Seminary for Teachers of Judaism in Warsaw between 1934 and 1939. A Communist activist, Słucki fled the invading Nazis to the USSR, where he worked as a teacher and Komsomol instructor. In 1942, he joined the Red Army, later transferring to Polish units. After demobilization, he studied philosophy in Warsaw. A member of the Communist Party (1945–1966), he emigrated from Poland following the antisemitic campaign of 1968, eventually settling in West Berlin.
(1866–1929), poet and physician. Born in the exclusively German-speaking town of Böhmisch-Leipa (now Česká-Lípa in the Czech Republic), Salus studied medicine in Prague and stayed on to work as a gynecologist. In the 1890s, however, he dominated the literary scene in Prague, publishing lyric poetry in prominent fin-de-siècle magazines and in popular collections such as Ehefrühling (Springtime of Marriage; 1900), Die Blumenschale (The Flower Vase; 1908), and Glockenklang (The Sound of a Bell; 1911).
(1928–1999), Russian poet, children’s author, screenwriter, fiction writer, and translator. Not permitted to publish any of his original work for adult audiences in the Soviet Union until 1989, Sapgir was a well-known underground poet during the 1970s and 1980s, as well as one of the most beloved authors for children. During perestroika, Sapgir’s “adult” work finally appeared in the USSR, and he spent his last decade regarded as a patriarch of Russian avant-garde letters.
(1807–1879), rabbi, halakhist, and yeshiva head. Known as Maharam Schick (acronym for Morenu ha-Rav Mosheh, “Our Teacher, the Rabbi Mosheh”) after his responsa collection, Mosheh Schick was born in Březové, and from the age of 14 he studied under Mosheh Sofer (Ḥatam Sofer) in Pressburg. Eventually he was acknowledged to be Sofer’s heir as the leading halakhic decisor of Hungarian Orthodoxy. While throughout his career Schick was outspoken in his opposition to religious and educational reform, during the last years of his life he was particularly intransigent in demanding unequivocal loyalty to a narrow Orthodox position.
(Iosef Hechter; 1907–1945), writer, playwright, and essayist. Son of Mendel and Clara (née Weintraub) Hechter, Mihail Sebastian was born in Brăila, where he also attended high school. He studied law in Bucharest from 1927 to 1929 and in Paris from 1930 to 1931, then worked occasionally as a lawyer while mainly focusing on literary and journalistic work.
(1839–1900), Hebrew poet. Konstantin Abba Shapiro was born in Grodno and was raised in a strict and religious home in which his authoritarian father tried to divert him from an interest in secular literature. To discourage Shapiro from following the Haskalah, his parents married him off at the age of 15. Shapiro’s marriage was shortly annulled, and in an effort to free himself from his restrictive family environment, he moved briefly to Białystok and Vienna, eventually settling in Saint Petersburg. The first phase of his life there was marked by financial hardship and illness, but he overcame these difficulties with the help of a gentile Russian family, whose daughter he married. It was under these circumstances that he converted to Christianity—a decision that continually tormented and embarrassed him greatly, even though he never repudiated it in practice. Paradoxically, it was his conversion to Christianity that was responsible for the strengthening of his national Jewish identity. He retained fond recollections of Jewish experiences and traditions, so much so that toward the end of his life he described himself as one of the anusim (forced converts).
The decorative work known as shpanyer arbet has been translated as both “spun work,” derived from the Yiddish word shpinen, and as “Spanish work.” The latter fancifully implies a connection between shpanyer arbet and the craft of lace making incorporating silver and gold threads practiced by Jews of Mallorca, Barcelona, and Toledo in fifteenth-century Spain. Shpanyer arbet is similar to nineteenth-century East European passementerie and bobbin lace, from which it is most likely derived.
(1893–1966), Polish journalist and parliamentary correspondent. Bernard Singer (who reversed the letters of his name to form the pseudonym Regnis) came from a middle-class, Polonized family and graduated in 1910 from the Kronenberg Commercial High School in Warsaw. He then studied Polish literature and history at the Towarzystwo Kursów Naukowych (Society of Academic Courses) and the Wolna Wszechnica Polska (Free Polish University) in Warsaw.
(1919–1986), Russian poet. Boris Slutskii spent his childhood and youth in Kharkov. His serious early interests in literature, art, and history led him to attend the Moscow Institute of Law (1937) and then, on the recommendation of the well-known poet Pavel Antokol’skii (1896–1978), the Gorky Institute of Literature (1938). Slutskii’s studies at both places ended with the Nazi invasion of June 1941, when he volunteered for the front. A recipient of four battlefield medals, he was demobilized in 1946 and spent time in treatment for wounds and shell shock. Because of his talent and civic frankness, he became an unofficial leader of young poets. They looked to him both for advice about their craft and about living ethically in a totalitarian state.
One of the major schools of Hasidism in Poland. Its founder, Avraham Bornstein (1839–1910) was a leading intellectual figure of Polish Hasidism. He married the daughter of Menaḥem Mendel of Kotsk (Kock; 1787–1859), who became his spiritual guide and mentor. Four years after Menaḥem Mendel’s death, Bornstein accepted his first rabbinical position, serving first in several communities until he settled in Sokhachev (Yid., more properly Sokhechev; Pol., Sochaczew) in 1883, where he remained for the rest of his life.
(1883–1957), political figure, Zionist leader, and biblical scholar. Born in Kovno to a distinguished and wealthy family, Menaḥem Solieli (Max Soloveichik) studied at the university in Saint Petersburg and continued his education at various institutions of higher learning in Germany. His particular interest was in the biblical period. In 1904, in Saint Petersburg, he was among the founders of the Russian-language Zionist journal Evreiskaia zhizn (Jewish Life).
Russian intellectual figures, active in literature and politics. Yitskhok Nakhmen Steinberg (1888–1957) was a political activist and public intellectual. His brother Aron (1891–1975) was a Russian and Yiddish writer and essayist. The Steinberg brothers were born in Dvinsk (now Daugavpils, Latvia) into an educated, religious, and wealthy merchant family. Their mother was a sister of the Yiddish critic Isidor Eliashev, also known as Bal-Makhshoves.
Line of Hasidic leaders, active in eastern Galicia from the 1820s until the Holocaust. Some of the dynasty’s offshoots reached Israel, the United States, and Canada. The founder, Yehudah Tsevi Brandwein (ca. 1780–1844), a ritual slaughterer from the village of Stratin, succeeded his teacher, Uri of Strelisk (1757–1826), and was considered to be a leading tsadik of his time. Brandwein’s name appears in a list of prominent tsadikim appended to a report on the Hasidic movement in Galicia, written in 1838 by Lemberg’s chief of police. After Brandwein’s death, most of his Hasidim followed his eldest son, Avraham (ca. 1805–1865), who succeeded him in Stratin; a minority preferred another son, Eli‘ezer (ca. 1810–1865), who established a court at Azipolia.
(1864–1935), physician and public figure. Tsemaḥ (Yid., Tsemakh) Szabad was born in Vilna and educated in the traditional Jewish system and in a Russian secondary school. In 1881, he moved to Moscow, completing his medical studies at Moscow University in 1889. Five years later, Szabad returned to Vilna and worked as a physician at the local hospital. Because of his involvement in the 1905 Revolution, he was forced to leave Vilna for several years. During World War I, he provided care and support to Jews living in the battle zones.
(1884–1953), poet, novelist, playwright, and journalist. In a letter written to fellow writer Gyula Krúdy, the young Ernő Szép lamented: “Why did I have to be poor and Jewish?” The son of a schoolteacher and one of nine children, Szép was born in the multiethnic town of Huszt in the Subcarpathian region, now part of Ukraine, which had a sizable, mostly Orthodox Jewish population. Szép was one of a number of Hungarians of humble Jewish origin who by the early years of the twentieth century had established themselves as poets, journalists, and artists in the burgeoning capital city of Budapest.
(1885–1950), theater director, founder of the Kamernyi Theater in Moscow. Aleksandr Tairov (originally Kornblit) was born into a teacher’s family in the town of Romny, Poltava province. He gained his first theatrical experience as a gymnasium student in Kiev, where he played in amateur productions. In 1905, while studying at the Kiev University Law Faculty, Tairov began acting on the professional stage. Accepted into the Saint Petersburg troupe of Vera Komissarzhevskaia in 1906, he transferred to Saint Petersburg University.
Town in north central Romania, on the Mureş River. A documented reference to Târgu Mureş (also Tîrgu Mureş; Ger., Neumarkt am Miresch, Marktstadt; Lat., Forum Siculorum; Hun., Maros-Vásárhely, Székelyvásárhely) dates to 1300. The first Jew who was granted the right to settle in the town, in 1828, was Iosif Vojtitz, a goldsmith. By 1830, the town had two Jewish families; and in 1833, there were 16 Jews living there. The census of 1838 recorded the presence of five Jewish families, made up of 36 inhabitants.
(1879–1929), journalist and Zionist activist. Shemu’el Tchernowitz was born in Shebez, in the Vitebsk region of Belorussia. While studying at the Kovno yeshiva, he established a close relationship with Shemu’el Ya‘akov Rabinowitz, a rabbi and one of the first religious Zionists. With Rabinowitz’s patronage, Tchernowitz was able to pursue a career as a public activist by serving as secretary of the regional Zionist unions of Vilna and Vitebsk.
Criticism of and scholarship on Jewish theater in Eastern Europe have largely focused on Yiddish theater. Hebrew productions in Eastern Europe, however, nearly exclusively those of the Habimah company, were extensively reviewed in the contemporary Yiddish and Hebrew press, where they fueled a discourse on the issue of Jewish national rebirth. But histories of Habimah tend to focus on its work in Palestine and Israel. Jewish-themed theater in non-Jewish languages was regularly reviewed in the press, but little attention has been devoted to its history, with some recent exceptions. For Polish theater, there are studies by Michael C. Steinlauf, and critical and historical essays have been collected in a volume edited by Eleanora Udalska; for Russian theater, the work of Viktoriia Levitina is also to be noted.
(1533–1594; according to others: 1525–1586), Karaite scholar who was born and lived in the Lithuanian town of Trakai. Yitsḥak ben Avraham wrote several compositions on Karaite ritual law (a collection of responsa on ritual slaughter is attributed to him), composed versed prayers, served as a dayan (judge) for both the Karaite and Rabbinite Jewish communities of Trakai, and served for a year as secretary to the Karaite Council of Lithuania.
(1823–1900), Hasidic master. Born in Kreuzberg, Courland, to a Latvian and Lithuanian family related to the Gaon of Vilna, Tsadok ha-Kohen (Zadok Rabinowicz) showed great promise as a child, and was married early into a wealthy family, facilitating his continued study. After a few years of marriage, however, he sought a divorce because of rumors about his wife. He eventually became a follower of Mordekhai Yosef Leiner of Izhbits. In 1888, following the death of Tsadok ha-Kohen’s friend and colleague Leibele Eger—who was, similarly, a disciple of Mordekhai Yosef and who had been a rebbe in Lublin continuing the traditions of Izhbits Hasidism—Tsadok ha-Kohen inherited his friend’s position.
(1785–1841), Hasidic leader. A scholar and prolific author, Tsevi Elimelekh (Shapira or Spira) of Dinov (Dynów) was among the outstanding leaders of Galician and Hungarian Hasidism and was known for his staunch opposition to all modernizing trends. He is sometimes referred to as the Bene Yisakhar, after the title of one of his most important books. He was named after his mother’s uncle, Elimelekh of Lizhensk, and was the grandson of Shimshon ben Pesaḥ of Ostropolye. Tsevi Hirsh of Zhidachov, Naftali Horowitz of Ropshits, and Tsevi Elimelekh were seen as the successors to, respectively, Ya‘akov Yitsḥak Horowitz (the Seer of Lublin), Menaḥem Mendel of Rimanov, and Yisra’el of Kozhenits. Relations among the three heirs were marked by controversy.
(1869–1931), writer, journalist, and editor. With his multifaceted ties to the religious communities of Pozsony (Bratislava) and Galicia, and his isolated Jewish upbringing, Péter Újvári was fundamentally different from the assimilated Jews whose trials and tribulations are well recorded by Hungarian Jewish and even non-Jewish writers. Újvári was the first Hungarian Jewish writer who wanted to write specifically Jewish prose in Hungarian. While he had few admirers, those who did appreciate his work thought of him as the Hungarian Sholem Aleichem or Sholem Asch, or even as the Jewish equivalent of the great Hungarian writers Kálmán Mikszáth and Mór Jókai.
Jewish Ukrainian literary creativity was uncommon: East European Jews generally sought acculturation into powerful imperial societies that had great literary traditions, such as Russia or Germany. Nonetheless, some Jews chose to identify with the colonial society of Ukraine even though it was routinely represented not only as powerless, stateless, and oppressed, but also as uncivilized and backward. Most of the Jews who established themselves as Ukrainian writers or expressed sympathy for Ukrainian culture made a conscious anti-imperial choice; indeed, a decision by an East European Jew to integrate into Ukrainian culture was particularly striking because Jews for centuries viewed Ukrainians as perpetrators of anti-Jewish massacres, and Ukrainians perceived Jews as sycophantic servants of the Polish gentry, Russian landlords, or, later, the Bolsheviks.
(1890–1944), Yiddish poet. Miryem Ulinover, originally Manya Hirshbeyn, was born in Łódź. Her father, learned in both Jewish and modern secular culture, was a connoisseur of languages. Her parents divorced in 1905. A childhood visit to her maternal grandfather in the shtetl of Krzepice, near Częstochowa, marked Ulinover’s only recorded experience of the shtetl life that later became the central subject of her poetry. As she reported in an interview, her actual grandmother was a “Jewish aristocrat” and nothing at all like the folkloristic, old-fashioned grandmother in her poems.
(Lazar’ Iosifovich Vaisbein; 1895–1982), Soviet actor and singer. While attending commercial school, Utesov acted and played violin. Before completing his studies he joined the circus, performing in cabaret theaters in Kremenchug, Kherson, and Odessa. In 1921 Utesov moved to Moscow, where he appeared at the Theater of Revolutionary Satire, the Hermitage Theater, and the Theater of Musical Comedy. In 1922 he began performing in Leningrad at the Palace Theater, the Free Theater, and the Theater of Satire. He was most at home in cabaret theater, popular musical reviews, sketches, and melodramas. He frequently played in shows with Jewish themes, taking the roles of Ioshka the Musician in Osip Dymov’s Pevets svoei pechali (Singer of Grief) and Mendel’ in Mendel’ Marants, based on David Fridman’s novel; he also performed dramatic readings of Isaac Babel’s stories. In 1925, Utesov debuted in the cinema, playing the lead roles in Boris Svetlov’s films Kar’era Spir’ki Shpandyria (The Career of Spir’ka Shpandyr’) and Chuzhie (Strangers).
(1910–1991), poet, translator, essayist, and memoirist. István Vas’s ancestors were small-town rabbis on his father’s side and well-to-do merchants on his mother’s. His father was an eager first-generation assimilationist who had a checkered career as a businessman and entrepreneur. The young Vas was in some ways a typical second-generation rebel, rejecting his parents’ wholehearted adoption of a conventionally bourgeois lifestyle, their unqualified respect for monetary wealth, their “enlightened” Judaism, and gravitated, politically, to the left and artistically toward the avant-garde movements of the late 1920s.
(Ger., Windau), town in northwestern Latvia on the shore of the Baltic Sea. From 1561, Ventspils belonged to the Duchy of Courland (Kurland) and was under the sovereignty of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth until it was annexed to the Russian Empire in 1795. The first Jews came to Ventspils in the second half of the eighteenth century from neighboring localities as well as from Prussia and Lithuania. A burial society and cemetery, however, were not established until 1831. Later a synagogue and a bet midrash were built.
(1864–1918), physician, writer on ethics and sociology, journalist, translator, and a leading figure in the Czech Jewish Movement. After completing gymnasium, Viktor Vohryzek studied at the faculty of medicine at Prague University, where he was awarded his degree in 1887. In the course of his studies, he was active in Spolek Českých Akademiků Židů (Association of Czech Academic Jews). Following his studies, he moved to Vodňany, where he set up his own medical practice with a specialty in psychology.
(d. early 1600s), merchant; legendary king of Poland for a day. Sha’ul Wahl was the son of Shemu’el Yehudah Katzenellenbogen, rabbi of Padua. Sha’ul’s grandfather, Me’ir, commonly known as Maharam (“our teacher, the rabbi Me’ir”) Padua, was born in Hesse-Nassau in the city of Katzenellenbogen, spent his early years at yeshivas in Poland, and moved to Italy. Sha’ul Wahl lived in Brest-Litovsk (Brisk; Brześć nad Bugiem), where he was a large-scale merchant dealing in lumber, salt, and the collection of tariffs and customs duties. For a period of time, he also leased the revenues of the salt mines at Wieliczka, near Kraków, from the Crown. He is best remembered, however, for his association with the widely known legend according to which he was king of Poland for a day.
Followers of Sabbatianism in Prague. The earliest reference to the Wehle family is on the tombstone of Mordekhai bar Yisra’el Wehle (d. 1614), in the Prague Jewish cemetery. The Wehles were among the richest and most prominent Jewish families in Prague. The brothers Efrayim (ca. 1710–1770) and Hersh (d. 1796) engaged in the silk trade and held many important posts in the community. A series of well-arranged marriages cemented the position of the family. Hersh’s son, Aharon Beer (1750–1825), married Esther, the daughter of the leader of Bohemian Jewry, Shim‘on Frankel-Spira; his brother Yonah Beer (1752–1823) married a daughter of the president of the Prague community, Ofner; their sister Rösel married the rich merchant Shim‘on Eger. By the 1770s, the Wehles were the unquestioned secular leaders of Prague Jewry.
(1910–1944), communal leader. Born in Prague, as a student in secondary school, František Weidmann became a member of Kapper Academic Society, the Czech Jewish student organization. He served as chair of the association from 1930 to 1931 while studying law. In contrast to the leadership of Svaz Čechů-židů (the Union of Czech Jews), which was mostly nationalist and anti-Zionist, Weidmann furthered the cooperation of the Kapper association with Czech-speaking Zionists from the Theodor Herzl Association. Influenced by Jindřich Kohn, the leading philosopher of Czech Jewish integration, Weidmann believed that Jews needed to unite in their fight against antisemitism.
(1804–1873), physician, ethnographer, and writer. Born in 1804 in the Czech city of Přeštice (Prestitz), Leopold Weisel devoted much of his literary career to the recovery of the oral traditions of Bohemian Jews. The son of a traveling cloth merchant, Weisel—whose original name was Joachim Löbl Weisel—spent his youth in Přeštice before moving to Prague to further his education. He lived as a medical student in Prague’s Jewish Town (Cz., Židovské město; Ger., Judenstadt) and supported himself as a private tutor for a number of Jewish families. During the 1830s and 1840s Weisel devoted most of his literary efforts to the collection and dissemination of Jewish folk tales from Prague, a project in which he collaborated with the non-Jewish folklorist Franz Klutschak (1814–1886), publishing some of his earliest efforts alongside those of Klutschak in the journal Panorama des Universums. Weisel was openly conscious of his status as a Jew who was losing contact with the world of traditional Jewish culture and he devoted this part of his career to capturing and preserving the rich folk traditions of the ghetto, which he accomplished by interviewing older residents of the Jewish quarter and recording their stories.
(1857–1922), Hungarian economist. According to family lore, Manfréd Weiss’s grandfather, Barukh Weiss, had been a simple village artisan. Probably originally from Moravia, the family, which settled in Pest, was relatively prosperous by the time Weiss’s father, Adolf B. Weiss (1807–1877), married. Several relatives made their living trading in produce, and in the 1860s and 1870s the family was involved with the emerging mill industry. Weiss was the sixth and youngest child. He studied at a commercial academy and after a short trip abroad, he joined the family business, immediately changing its profile to a more dynamic and versatile enterprise.
(1870–1917), socialist activist and journalist. Max Wexler (Wechsler) was born in Iaşi, Romania. He studied philosophy in Brussels and completed his formal education at the Faculty of Letters and Philosophy of the University of Iaşi, where he then worked as a librarian.
(1876–1935), Czech Social Democratic politician, economist, theorist of socialism and social policy, commentator, and the author of numerous studies on economics and social law. After completing gymnasium, Lev Winter studied law and economics at Prague University. He was briefly active in Spolek Českých Akademiků Židů (Association of Czech Academic Jews) and then was a leading representative to the Kruhu Mladých Socialistických Intelektuálů (Circle of Young Socialist Intellectuals), where he worked with Alfred Meissner. Together the two also founded the socialist review Akademie.
(1896–1976), poet, prose writer, essayist, and translator. After serving in the army during World War I, Józef Wittlin studied philosophy and linguistics in Vienna and in Lwów. A follower of expressionism in 1919–1920, he later joined Skamander, a moderately innovative group of poets headed by Julian Tuwim and Antoni Słonimski, and the circle of writers associated with the weekly Wiadomości Literackie.
Economic and political figures, active in nineteenth-century Hungary. Shemu’el (Sámuel) Wodianer, the first member of the family known to us, migrated from Bohemia to southern Hungary where his son Philip (Shraga Feivish, Feivish Ehprevitz, Oporovec; d. 1820) was born in Veprovác, Bács county (now Kruščić, Serbia) in the second half of the eighteenth century. Feivish Ehprevitz moved to Szeged with several siblings once the city opened its gates to Jews in 1783. In a short time, he was the wealthiest Jewish resident, trading in agricultural produce and also maintaining an apartment and a warehouse in Pest. Active in the Szeged Jewish community, he served as its head in 1808, 1813, and 1815. He donated the land for its synagogue in 1792 and later bequeathed silver ceremonial objects to the burial society. He may have had an advanced traditional education since he was addressed by the honorific ḥaver.
(Pseudonym of Yeshaye Nisn Hakoyen Goldberg; 1858–1927), Yiddish author. Born to a poor family in the village of Stolbovshchine (on the Neman River in Minsk province), Yaknehoz came from a distinguished lineage: his father, Yekusiel Zalmen, was a grandson of the noted Galician rabbi El‘azar ha-Kalir. Yaknehoz received a traditional Jewish education in Kapulie and Minsk, and, having achieved particular expertise in the Bible, began composing Hebrew poetry under its influence. He also developed a reputation as an inspector of Torah scrolls; still a yeshiva student, he traveled throughout the Minsk region, checking and correcting them. During this period he met the writer and critic Shemu’el Leib Zitron, at whose suggestion he began writing feuilletons in Hebrew and Yiddish in 1878 for periodicals such as Ha-Kol and Kol le-‘am.
(1578–1648), halakhist and rabbi. Born in Vilna, Yehoshu‘a Heshel of Kraków served as rabbi in Grodno, Tiktin, Przemyśl, and Lwów between 1634 and 1639. In 1640, he replaced Natan Shapira for 12 months as head of the yeshiva in Kraków; he then served in this role in an honorary capacity. Among his outstanding students were Shabetai ben Me’ir ha-Kohen, Gershon Ulif Ashkenazi, and Menaḥem Mendel Auerbach.
Orthodox daily published in Warsaw from 20 September 1929 until World War II. Dos yudishe togblat (The Jewish Daily) succeeded where previous attempts to publish an Orthodox daily in Poland had failed. One reason for the earlier failures was the unwillingness of a part of the Orthodox population, especially Hasidim, to read newspapers. The situation changed when the Gerer rebbe, Avraham Mordekhai Alter (1866–1948), accepted the concept of an Orthodox paper to counteract the influence of the Jewish secular and non-Jewish press on Jewish readers.
(1889–1942), journalist, wit, and public affairs writer. Born in Warsaw to a Hasidic family, Moyshe Bunem Yustman (known also as Ba‘al Ye’ush [master of despair]) identified with Orthodox Jewry all his life. He began writing at an early age; his first articles were published in Hebrew in David Frishman’s paper Ha-Boker (1906). He also adopted the pen names B. Yeushzon (Son of Despair), Itshele, and Lorente.
(Yid., Zabludove), town on the Meletina River (in the Western Bug basin) in the Białystok district and province of Poland. Zabłudów is first mentioned in archival sources in 1525. From 1569, the town was in the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth; from 1795 it was belonged to East Prussia; from 1807 to 1918 it was in the Russian Empire.
(1914–1987), theoretical physicist, astrophysicist, physical chemist, and member of the USSR Academy of Sciences from 1958. Born in Minsk, Zel’dovich was raised in an educated family: his father was a lawyer and his mother a translator and member of the Writers Union. In May 1931 Zel’dovich was hired as a laboratory assistant at the Institute of Chemical Physics of the USSR Academy of Sciences; he would maintain his ties with this institution for the rest of his life.
(1897–1970), Soviet public figure and wife of Viacheslav Molotov. Born Perl Karpovskaia, Polina Zhemchuzhina was the daughter of a tailor from Ekaterinoslav province. From 1911 until 1917, she worked in a cigarette factory and as a cashier in a pharmacy in Ekaterinoslav.
(1894–1966), immunologist, virologist, and cancer researcher. Lev Aleksandrovich (Abelevich) Zil’ber was born in Novgorod province to the family of a military musician. He spent his childhood and youth in Pskov (northwest Russia). In 1912, he entered the natural science department of Saint Petersburg University, transferring three years later to the medical faculty of Moscow University, from which he graduated in 1919.
Assimilationist student group in Poland. Organized activity of groups of “assimilationist” Jewish students and academicians had taken place in the major cities of Congress Poland and Galicia as far back as the beginning of the twentieth century. The members of these groups called themselves “Polish youth of Jewish origin.” One such group, called Zjednoczenie (Union), operated in Lwów, and a similar group called Żagiew (Torch) operated in Warsaw. Both groups maintained that the patriotism of Polish Jews had been undermined by the rise of Zionism. They explained that they would attempt to resolve the “Jewish problem” by seeking equal political rights for Jews and through economic changes, and voiced their objection to the extensive use of Yiddish as well as to Hebrew.
The United States of America became home to the largest Jewish community of the Diaspora because one-third of the Jews of Europe emigrated there over the course of the nineteenth and the first quarter of the twentieth century. The transformation of a peripheral outpost of Jewish civilization into its major hub outside the boundaries of Israel was a long-term process that was keenly observed as it took shape. Still, the catastrophic finality with which history bestowed that distinction on American Jewry, after the Holocaust, cast new light on its importance and on the participation of European Jewry in its creation—with East European Jewry contributing by far the greatest share. All the while, Old World Jewry had, in turn, been affected by the growing Jewish presence in the New World and by the rise of the United States as a world power. The orbit of Jewish life in Eastern Europe was partly shaped by the magnetic force exerted by America.
Founded as one of many public groups mobilized to further Soviet policy aims, the Anti-Zionist Committee of the Soviet Public (Anti-Sionisticheskii Komitet Sovetskoi Obshchestvennosti; AKSO) was part of a broader program intended to diminish the motivation of Soviet Jews to apply for emigration. In accordance with a decision of 29 March 1983 by the Secretariat of the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party (CC CPSU), the committee’s budget was to be provided by the Soviet Peace Foundation, and the technical staff was to operate within the framework of the joint administration of Soviet social organizations. AKSO activities were supervised jointly by representatives of the Department of Propaganda and by the KGB.
Anti-Zionist Committee of The Soviet Public
Voluntary cooperative associations of craftsmen or peasants in the Soviet Union. Established on the basis of charters, artels obtained raw materials, produced finished or (less commonly) unfinished products, and sold them. Artels began to extend significantly after the October Revolution and reached their zenith in the late 1920s and 1930s. Both artisanal and agricultural cooperatives worked from the same economic principles, raising basic capital through membership fees and realizing profit through communal labor.
(1618–1693), rabbinical scholar and religious authority. Rabbi Gershon (Ulif) Ashkenazi was one of the greatest poskim (religious authorities or legal deciders) of his age. He was born in Ulf, Germany, studied under Rabbi Me’ir Schiff (Maharam Schiff) and subsequently moved to Poland to study with the leading religious scholars of Kraków: Yo’el Sirkes (known as Baḥ), Yehoshu‘a ben Yosef, and probably Yehoshu‘a Heshel as well. He was called “Ashkenazi” (Ashkenaz meaning, in its narrower sense, Germany) because of his place of origin.
Document describing killings of Jews in Auschwitz-Birkenau, prepared in late April 1944 by Oskar Krasniansky of the Slovakian Ústredňa Židov (Jewish Central Organization; UZ, an organization that functioned as a Judenrat) on the basis of testimony from two Jews, Rudolf Vrba (Walter Rosenberg) and Alfred Wetzler, who had escaped from the camp three weeks earlier. An expanded version was composed in June 1944 following receipt of additional information from two other escapees, Czesław Mordowicz and Arnošt Rosin. The protocols detailed the operation of the killing center, offered a (high) estimate of the number of Jews killed to date, and warned of preparations for gassing 800,000 expected Jewish deportees from Hungary. The expanded version told of the killing of Greek Jews and of the deaths of the first Hungarian arrivals.
Hebrew-language newspaper published in Poland between 1932 and 1937. Ba-Derekh (On the Way) represented the last in a series of attempts by the Polish Zionist Organization to establish a daily newspaper in Hebrew. Efforts to do so had started in 1919 with plans for the renewed publication of the long-running Ha-Tsefirah (The Morning/The Dawn), and continued with the founding of Ha-Yom (Today; 1925–1926) and with other failed attempts at once again resuming publication of Ha-Tsefirah (1926–1928; 1931).
(1801–1874), Galician rabbinical scholar. Yosef Babad was born in Tarnopol to a family of rabbinical scholars; from his earliest years he devoted his life to the study of the Torah. As an adult, he was introduced to Hasidism and regarded Naftali of Roptshits (Ropczyce) as his spiritual mentor. Of his four marriages, two were to women from Hasidic dynasties: after his first wife died at an early age, he married the sister of Ḥayim Halberstam of Sandz (Nowy Sacz); his third marriage was to the daughter of Rabbi David Hager of Zabludove (Zabludów). Almost nothing is known about his fourth marriage.
(1885–1934), Russian poet and translator. Bagritskii, whose nom-de-plume was derived from the Russian for crimson, was born Eduard Godelevich Dziubin, to an Odessan family in which Judaic traditions were respected, but the lifestyle was that of secularized petit-bourgeoisie. He began publishing in 1913, contributing to literary publications in Odessa between 1915 and 1917. After the February 1917 Revolution, Bagritskii served briefly in law enforcement within the Provisional Government and joined the Red Army in 1919. In 1920 he married Lidiia Suok and had one son, the poet Vsevolod Bagritskii (1922–1942). In 1925 he moved to Moscow, and by the time of his death in 1934 was widely admired. The publication of his collection Iugo-Zapad (South-West; 1928) was followed by, among other books, Duma pro Opanasa (The Lay of Opanas), Izbrannye stikhi (Selected Poems), Pobediteli (Victors), Posledniaia noch’ (The Last Night), all published in 1932, and other works. In his daily life, Bagritskii never shed the skin of an Odessan Jew from Market Street. He retained a strong bond with Jewish culture, splendidly translating the Yiddish poetry of Itsik Fefer and Perets Markish. At the time of his death, he was hailed second only to Vladimir Mayakovsky and given an official funeral.
(1815–1891), advocate of Magyarization, Protestant theologian, and Hungarian linguist. Born Moritz (Mordekhai) Bloch, Mór Ballagi’s first memories were of his father, a tenant farmer, imprisoned a year for debt, and of his mother searching for wild berries in the forest to feed the family. At an early age, Bloch learned to fend for his livelihood, sleeping in synagogues and living off charity. He studied at yeshivas in Nagyvárad (1829) and Pápa (1831), and only while working as a tutor at Mór and later Surány when he was 20 was he first exposed to Greek and Latin classics. In time, he also taught himself Hungarian, and studied classics, math, and history at the Pápa secondary school.
Second-largest city of the Republic of Moldova. Bălți (Yid., Belts; Rus., Beltsy) was within Romania’s borders from 1918 until 1944; after World War II, the region in which it is located became part of the Moldavian SSR. Famous personalities from Bălți have included the artist Boris Anisfeld; the Hebrew writer Ya‘akov Fichmann; Yiddish authors Zelik Berdichever, Boris Sandler, and Michael Felsenbaum; and Lia van Leer, founder of the Jerusalem Cinematheque.
(1849–1926), philosopher, literary scholar, linguist, educator, and editor. Born in Szentgál, Hungary, József Bánóczi studied at the Piarist Gymnasium in Veszprém and at the Royal Catholic Gymnasium in Pest, where he befriended Bernát Alexander. Abraham Hochmuth, the rabbi of Veszprém, tried to persuade Bánóczi to enter the rabbinate, but he chose a career in education instead. In 1868, he enrolled at the University of Pest, and having received a fellowship with Alexander, went on a six-year-long study trip abroad. They took courses at universities in Vienna, Berlin, Göttingen, Leipzig, and Paris, mostly in philosophy and philology. In 1875, Bánóczi defended his doctoral dissertation at the University of Leipzig, on Kant’s theory of space and time.
City in the central Moldavian region of Romania on the banks of the Bârlad River. Jewish settlement in Bârlad (Bîrlad) is documented from the end of the seventeenth century, and the oldest tombstone in the Jewish cemetery is dated 1728. A Jewish staroste (head of the Jewish guild) was mentioned as early as 1738. Jews in Bârlad were employed in local commerce, grain dealing, and crafts.
(ca. 1756–1811), Hasidic leader in Podolia. Barukh was the younger son of Odl, the Ba‘al Shem Tov’s daughter, and the brother of Mosheh Ḥayim Efrayim of Sudilkov. As a child Barukh knew his famous grandfather, and after the Ba‘al Shem Tov’s death Barukh continued to be raised among the Hasidic leader’s most important disciples, among them Pinḥas of Korets, Ya‘akov Yosef of Polnoye, and Dov Ber, the Magid of Mezritsh.
Translations of books of the Hebrew Bible (most frequently Psalms) and other religious texts into the Old Belarusian language and into a Belarusian version of Old Church Slavonic marked the beginnings of Jewish participation in Belarusian literature. Several of the extant manuscripts of those texts date from the late fifteenth or early sixteenth century (Vilna Codices 52 and 262, containing the Five Scrolls, Daniel, Job, Proverbs, and Psalms) and are considered to be the projects of local Jewish translators who worked directly from Hebrew on behalf of fellow Jews or Judaizers, or were commissioned by a Christian amateur.
(1865–1941), writer, poet, and translator. Leo Belmont (Leopold Blumental) graduated from the University of Warsaw and practiced law in Saint Petersburg and Warsaw. A well-known publicist before World War I, he was harassed by tsarist authorities for his radical views. He wrote for the Polish and Polish Jewish press, cooperated with the assimilationist weekly Izraelita, and edited the democratic weekly Wolne Słowo (Free Word; 1907–1913). He also wrote film reviews and screenplays. Belmont was a founder of the Polish Esperanto Society, and he translated extensively into that language and strove to popularize it.
(d. after 1665), prominent preacher in Kraków. Berekhyah Berakh ben Yitsḥak was a student of the noted kabbalist Natan Spira; Berakh’s wife’s brother was the son-in-law of the celebrated Talmudist and communal leader Yom Tov Lipmann Heller.
Influential Warsaw family of industrialists and financiers. Related to other aristocratic Jewish dynasties, including the Bersohn, Heryng, and Toeplitz families, the Bergson family originated with Shmul Zbytkower, one of whose sons, Ber (1764–1822), was also known as Berek Sonnenberg. Berek’s children subsequently adopted the surname Berekson (later Bergson) from their father’s first name.
(surname also Sonnenberg or Berekson; d. 1830), patron of Polish Hasidism and benefactor of Warsaw Jewry. Little is known about Temerl’s background and early years, although her father, Avraham of Opoczno, is described as “learned and extremely wealthy.” She was briefly married and widowed at a young age to a merchant from Warsaw with whom she had a son. In 1787 she married Berek Sonnenberg, the son of the Warsaw plutocrat Shmul Zbytkower (Berek adopted the surname Sonnenberg under Prussian rule); they had five children. Upon her second husband’s death in 1822, Temerl oversaw his business enterprises, including a salt company and a bank. She won permission to own property outside the ghetto and was only the third Polish Jew to receive such land ownership rights.
(1901–1984), activist in the interwar Communist Party of Poland; brother of psychologist and Warsaw ghetto leader Adolf Abraham Berman (1906–1978). Among the leaders of postwar Stalinist Poland, Berman was responsible for overseeing both cultural policy and the security apparatus.
Section of the urban area of Bielsko-Biała, Silesia, in southern Poland. Bielsko (Ger., Bielitz) was a Bohemian town until about 990, then Polish until 1327, when it was once more under Bohemian rule. Beginning in 1526 it was ruled by the Habsburgs; after World War I (in 1920) it became part of Poland, then fell under Nazi rule from 1939 to 1945, after which it became Polish again. Until 1951 it was an independent town, with municipal rights dating to before 1312. The first mention of Jews in Bielsko comes from 1653; and two complaints about Jewish tax collectors were recorded in 1677. Subsequent legislation hindered Jewish settlement.
(1861–1936), Talmudic scholar, historian, and rector of the Rabbinical Seminary of Budapest. Born in Putnok, Hungary, Lajos (Ludwig) Blau studied at the Pressburg yeshiva and attended the Rabbinical Seminary of Budapest. After his ordination he joined the seminary’s faculty, and when Vilmos Bacher died in 1913, Blau succeeded him as rector until his own retirement in 1932.
(1909–1938), writer. Max Blecher (he signed his works “M. Blecher”) was born in Botoşani, Romania, and spent his childhood and adolescence in Roman, where his family settled, and where there was a large Jewish community. The son of Lazăr Blecher, a businessman who owned a china shop, he attended high school in Roman and was an active member of the Maccabi Zionist association.
(1850–1923), rabbi and political leader. Born in Dukla, east Galicia, the son of a poor baker, Yosef Shemu’el Bloch studied independently and in yeshivas throughout east Galicia but then pursued a secular education in Central Europe, eventually earning his doctorate at the University of Munich. After serving as a rabbi in several small communities, Bloch accepted a post in Floridsdorf, a working-class suburb of Vienna.
Intellectual family, active in Romanian law, the arts, and the military during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The four Brociner brothers were born in Iaşi into a well-to-do maskilic family of Galician origin; they were related to Galician and Moldavian rabbinic families. Joseph B. Brociner (1846–1918) was a legal expert; Marco Brociner (1852–1942) a writer; Mauriciu Brociner (1855–1946) a military leader; and Andre Brociner (1856–1930) a communal activist.
State censorship of Jewish publications in the Russian Empire began 25 years after Jews became Russian subjects in 1772. From then until 1796, books in Jewish languages were published in Russia (and were imported from abroad) without restriction. Catherine the Great’s 1763 decree on censorship of imported works did not apply to such materials. Officials in charge of maintaining public order—who according to the 1783 Decree on Independent Printing Houses were responsible for monitoring the content of domestic publications—were unable to scrutinize books in Hebrew and Yiddish due to their ignorance of those languages. Moses Hezekil and Ezekiel David Levi were the first state censors of Jewish works; they were assigned to the censorship committee of the customs house in Riga and were appointed on 30 December 1797. Nevertheless, the monitoring of Jewish works, both imported and domestic, remained sporadic and ineffective.
Censorship in the Russian Empire (Censorship)
Children’s literature began to take form in Hebrew at the end of the eighteenth century, following the Haskalah (Enlightenment) movement in Western Europe. Books and stories for young readers in that language then became standard in Eastern Europe, where the genre continued to develop. After World War I, Hebrew literature flourished more often in Palestine while becoming less popular in Eastern Europe, though texts were published until World War II.
Hebrew Literature (Children’s Literature)
(1812–1870), author of adages and aphorisms. Froim Moise, known in Romanian literature as Cilibi Moise, was the son of Alexander Sender Schwartz, a native of Galicia. Illiterate in Romanian, Moise would dictate his compositions to printers and sell them in pamphlets in the market towns of Walachia, where he was a traveling merchant. The 14 pamphlets issued as of 1858 included adages and sayings, maxims, thoughts, and moral lessons drawn from the school of life, revealing a picturesque and lively mixture of popular wisdom, Balkan humor, and Jewish folklore.
(Kongress Evreiskikh Religioznykh Obshchin i Organizatsii v Rossii; KEROOR), post-Soviet association of Jewish groups in Russia. Before 1990 in the Soviet Union, Jews were allowed neither to create a chief rabbinate nor to form a central organ uniting the Jewish religious communities. Under perestroika, however, at a conference of community representatives held in January 1990, the All-Union Council of USSR Jewish Religious Communities (Vsesoiuznyi Sovet Evreiskikh Religioznikh Obshchin SSSR; VSERO) was created. Vladimir Fedorovskii, chair of the Moscow community, was elected chair of its executive committee, and Adol’f Shaevich, chief rabbi of the Moscow Choral Synagogue, was chosen as the chief rabbi of VSERO and the USSR. The newly created central organ was intended to facilitate the coordination of activities of emerging as well as of older religious communities.
Congress of Jewish Religious Communities and Organizations in Russia
Congress of Jewish Communities and Organizations of the USSR
In Western tradition, a number of factors combined to create the image of Jews as a group with a special propensity for criminal activity. Theological considerations were paramount in the premodern period when Jews were viewed as committers of deicide and as members of the “synagogue of Satan,” capable of any abomination. They were a threat to Christian souls (by propagating apostasy) and bodies (accused of poisoning wells or of ritual murder).
(1880–1942), Jewish communal leader, president of the Warsaw Judenrat. Born in Warsaw, Adam Czerniaków received engineering degrees from polytechnic institutes in Warsaw and Dresden. In interwar Poland, he helped lead the movement to improve vocational education for Jewish artisans and defended their interests against growing antisemitism. In 1931, he was elected to the Polish senate, but a technicality prevented him from serving.
(Heb., da‘at Torah; Torah view), doctrine attributing authority to rabbis for deciding matters secular and spiritual alike, usually associated with the Agudas Yisroel political movement of Orthodox Jewry. While the term daas Toyre does appear in the Babylonian Talmud (Ḥulin 90b), where it has the meaning of an unequivocal legal opinion that may be taught publicly, it carries none of the ideological significance that latter-day Orthodox thinkers assigned to it.
(1870–1938), Hebrew writer, researcher, editor, and Zionist activist. Alter Druyanow was born in the shtetl of Druja, in the Vilna region, to a rabbinic family. In 1886, he entered the Volozhin yeshiva, where he joined the Ḥibat Tsiyon movement and in 1890 began publishing articles in the Hebrew press. Under the influence of his friend Mikhah Yosef Berdyczewski, Druyanow went to Breslau in 1891, hoping to enroll at the university. Failing to do so, he returned to Druja.
(1889–1956), Lubavitch activist, leader of Agudas Yisroel in Latvia, and politician. A lumber merchant by trade, Mordekhai Dubin began at a young age to devote himself to community service. He gained wide popularity within Latvian Jewry for his work in interceding with the authorities on behalf of individual Jews or Jewish institutions. Starting with the founding National Assembly, Dubin represented Agudas Yisroel in all the legislative bodies of democratic Latvia, from the Constituent Assembly of 1920–1922 to the four Seimas (diets) elected between 1922 and 1934. He also served on the Riga city council, and was one of the founders of the reorganized Riga kehilah, which he chaired. Dubin was recognized as a leader of the world Agudas Yisroel movement, despite the generally limited, often hostile relations between Lubavitch and Aguda.
(1872–1955), Zionist politician and journalist. Mayer Ebner was born in Cernăuți (Czernowitz) to an assimilated bourgeois family, and he studied law there at Franz Joseph University. As early as his teenage years, Ebner supported the concept of developing a new Jewish national movement. He felt that the liberal ideal of Jewish assimilation had failed, and that outbreaks of antisemitism in the last decades of the nineteenth century required change. It was in this spirit that he utilized the model of the Kadimah association (created by Jewish students in Vienna) to set up the student society Hasmonäain Cernăuți in 1891. In this project, he worked with Philipp Menczel, Isak Schmierer, and Josef Bierer.
(1903–1944), Czech Zionist leader, known as the “Elder of the Jews” in Terezín (Theresienstadt). Jakob Edelstein was born in Gorodenka, Galicia. When the town was occupied by the Russian army during World War I, his family escaped to Brno (Brünn) in Moravia. After the war, Edelstein graduated from a business school in Brno and worked as a traveling salesman in Teplice (Teplitz), northern Bohemia.
(1825–1875), rabbi, journalist, political economist, and politician. Ignác Einhorn (who also published work using the initials J. E. or the name Eduard Horn) was one of the most versatile and talented Hungarian Jews of the nineteenth century. His great-grandfather had served as rabbi of Vágújhely, and his father, Gerson (1793–1883), a wool merchant, was for many years a community leader. Einhorn was tutored privately in a traditional but enlightened fashion. At 13, he attended the yeshiva of Yeḥezkel Banet at Nyitra (mod. Nitra, Slovakia). He later studied at Pressburg and for several months in Prague, while also receiving a gymnasium eduation.
or Eliyohu hanovi, was the most popular biblical figure in Jewish folklore in Eastern Europe. The oral traditions of late antiquity established the narrative foundation upon which his image would develop; his name also occurs in proverbs and songs. Elijah is said to make an invisible appearance during the Passover Seder, when a special cup of wine is poured in his honor, and at circumcision ceremonies, when a special chair is reserved for him.
While itinerant entertainers of all kinds were a part of European culture in general, and even though they are poorly documented, a bare outline of this phenomenon among East European Jews can be sketched. Among the earliest of such performers were magidim (preachers), who went from place to place delivering sermons illustrated with parables and stories. The shpilman, a traveling singer of poems and tales, often collaborated with musicians, and gradually gave way to phenomena such as the popular Broder Singers. Klezmorim—instrumental musicians—while based in one location, played for weddings in surrounding towns, as well as for the local aristocracy on their estates.
Heroine of a Polish and Jewish folk legend about a Jewish woman’s relationship with Casimir the Great, King of Poland (r. 1310–1370). According to the chronicle of Jan Długosz (1415–1480), Esterke was Casimir’s mistress who persuaded him to invite Jews to Poland; he also granted them extensive privileges. The story claims that the couple had four children, two boys raised as Christians and two girls raised as Jews. In 1334, Casimir did, in fact, extend privileges that had been first granted by Bolesław of Kalisz.
(1886–1958), graphic artist, painter, set designer, and art teacher. Born in Moscow, Robert Fal’k received a secular Russian education. In 1903 he completed his studies at the Petropavlovsk Real School in Moscow. In 1904–1905 he studied drawing and painting with Konstantin Iuon (1875–1958) and Ivan Dudin (1867–1924), as well as at the private studio of Ilya Mashkov (1881–1944). From 1905–1912, Fal’k was a student at the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture. In 1909, before his marriage, he converted to Christianity and received the name Roman. From 1910–1916 Fal’k was a core member of the Bubnovyi Valet (Knave of Diamonds) Artists Union, and in 1917 he participated in exhibitions put on by the Mir Issukstva (World of Art) movement.
(1898–1979), Yiddish linguist. Elye Falkovitsh was born in Gomel, where he spent the first 19 years of his life. At age 15, he began giving private lessons as a tutor and soon joined the local Tse‘ire Tsiyon organization. He then worked as headmaster of a Jewish school in Sarapul in 1917 and 1918, and directed a children’s club in Kiev in 1918 and 1919. Subsequently, in 1920 and 1921 he served in the Red Army as a cultural worker, stationed in the Moscow region.
(Also spelled Phoebus), printers active in the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries. Their descendants included the Madpis, Rosanes, and Letteris families of printers.
(1908–1980), motion picture director. Born Moyshe Lipshutz in Łódź, Ford went to Warsaw in the late 1920s to study art. He was an early member of the avant-garde cine-club START, making short films—one on the working-class neighborhood where he grew up, another a portrait of Warsaw street vendors—that anticipated Italian neorealism in their use of staged documentary.
(ca. 1460–ca. 1526), adventurer, financial adviser to the royal court, and well-known apostate in Hungary. Imre Fortunatas (also Szerencsés) had the original family name of Seneor (or Sneor; Sneur), a corrupted version of Latin Senior; his personal name was Shelomoh (Zalman) ben Efrayim. Some claim he was of Spanish origin and that he was the brother or nephew of Avraham Seneor, the leader of Spanish Jewry before 1492. Autographs of Hebrew codices in Fortunatus’s library indicate that he must have been a learned man; he wrote his confidential memoranda in cursive Hebrew.
(1847/48–1904), writer, novelist, journalist, and publisher. Karl Emil Franzos was born in Czortków in Podolia (now Chortkiv, Ukr.), the son of a Galician mother and a physician father who was of Sephardic origin. After his father’s death in 1858, the family moved to Bucovina, where Franzos attended secondary school. He then studied law in Vienna and Graz, and during his university years belonged to a German nationalist student organization. From 1874 to 1876 he traveled to the eastern borderlands of the Habsburg monarchy and to Russia and Romania; these travels yielded material for the ethnographic vignettes that Franzos published first in the press and later as a book in a collection of “cultural pictures” titled Aus Halb-Asien (From Half-Asia; 1876). He next issued his first collection of stories, Die Juden von Barnow (The Jews of Barnow; 1877), depicting shtetl life. In 1877 he married Ottilie Benedikt in Vienna.
Founded in London in 1935, the Frayland-lige far Yidisher Teritoryalistisher Kolonizatsye (Freeland League for Jewish Territorial Colonization) united the three main organizations of the territorialist movement (based in Poland, Paris, and London) and other related local groups. Its objective was to procure a sizable tract of land for agricultural and industrial colonization in an underpopulated area of the world where East European Jews could settle. The fraylandistn, as its members were known, aimed to build a secure foundation for the continuity of their socioeconomic life and culture (including the Yiddish language). For them, compact, mass colonization was the only effective means to avoid the pressures of assimilation and dispersion associated with individual immigration—regardless of its scale.
(1901–1960), Polish Jewish historian. Filip Friedman was born in Lwów and studied at the University of Vienna under the direction of Alfred Pribram, and at the Jewish Paedagogium under Salo Baron. Friedman earned his doctorate in 1925 with his dissertation titled Die galizischen Juden im Kampfe um ihre Gleichberechtigung (1848–1868) (The Jews of Galicia and Their Struggle for Legal Equality [1848–1868]), which was published in Frankfurt in 1929.
(1894–1937), Communist Party activist, political worker, and military commissar. Ian Gamarnik was born in Zhitomir to the family of an office worker. He studied at the Saint Petersburg Psycho-Neurological Institute and the Kiev University Law Faculty. In September 1916, he joined the Bolsheviks, and by October 1917 was secretary of the Kiev Committee of the Rossiiskaia Sotsial-Demokraticheskaia Partiia Bol’shevikov (Russian Social Democratic Workers Party of Bolsheviks). Gamarnik was elected to the Central Executive Committee of the Ukrainian Congress of Soviets in March 1918. He was a member of the Organization Bureau (Orgburo) that prepared the First Congress of the Ukrainian Communist Party of Bolsheviks.
(1856–1924), rabbi and a founder of religious Zionism in Hungary. A great-grandson of Mosheh Sofer (author of the Ḥatam Sofer), Mosheh Shemu’el Glasner was the son of Avraham Glasner, who served as the rabbi of Klausenburg (Hun., Kolozsvár; Rom., Cluj) between 1863 and 1877. Following his father’s death, Glasner was chosen to succeed him at the age of 21.
(1895–1974), publisher, editor, and historian. Born in Vienna, Hugo Gold took over the publishing house of his uncle Max Hickl, the Jüdischer Buch- und Kunstverlag, in Brno, Czechoslovakia (from 1932 also in Prague), following Hickl’s death in 1924. For a time, Gold also edited the newspaper Jüdische Volksstimme (Jewish People’s Voice).
(1911–1970), poet, novelist, playwright, and literary scholar. Born in Königsberg (now Kaliningrad), then an important center of the Haskalah movement and Hebrew culture, Leah Goldberg moved in her early childhood to Kovno (now Kaunas), where in 1923 one-quarter of the population was Jewish. During World War I, her family, with many other Jews in Lithuania, was forced by the Russian government to move to the countryside, and they lived for a few years as refugees in Balashov (Saratov province).
(1635–1682), author of commentaries on the Shulḥan ‘arukh (Oraḥ ḥayim) and Yalkut Shim‘oni. He was born in Gombin, Poland (hence his family name), where his father was martyred in 1655, in the aftermath of the Khmel’nyts’kyi massacres of 1648–1649. At a young age Gombiner became a dayan (judge) at the rabbinical court of Yisra’el ben Natan Shapira in Kalisz and directed his own yeshiva. Not yet 30, he began writing his commentary on Oraḥ ḥayim, the first section of the Shulḥan ‘arukh. From the praise this work received, we learn that he lived a difficult life, possibly suffering from illness before dying young. Among his associates were his son-in-law Mosheh Yekuti’el Kaufman (rabbi of Kutno and author of the commentary Leḥem ha-panim on the Yoreh de‘ah section of the Shulḥan ‘arukh) and Eliyahu Shapira of Prague (author of Eliyahu raba and Eliyahu zuta), a friend from the period when both men studied in Kalisz.
Gombiner, Avraham Abele ben Ḥayim ha-Levi
(Shalag; 1865–1933), Hebrew writer, editor, and educator. Shemu’el Leib Gordon was born in Lida (Vilna province; now in Hrodna, Bel.) and received a traditional education. He was self-taught in secular studies and became a Hebrew teacher from a young age.
(1896–1976), advocate, journalist, and political figure. After graduating from the Russian secondary school in Kovno, Leyb Gorfinkel (also known as Leib Garfunkel) studied jurisprudence at Petrograd University. Later he moved to Gomel and became a member of the Russian Tse‘ire Tsiyon (Youths of Zion) Central Committee. From the end of 1918 he lived in Kovno and was one of the initiators of the Union of Ha-Po‘el ha-Tsa‘ir (The Young Worker) and Tse‘ire Tsiyon in Lithuania.
(Grycendler; 1894–1970), editor, publisher, publicist, and literary critic. Mieczysław Grydzewski converted to Protestantism before World War I, studied in Moscow and later in Warsaw (under the direction of Marceli Handelsman), and earned a doctorate in history in 1922. As a student, he wrote for the academic journal Pro arte and studio. Beginning in 1920, he published—and, from 1921 on, edited—a monthly associated with Skamander, a group of poets. In 1924, he began copublishing, with Antoni Borman, Wiadomości Literackie, the most prominent literary and cultural journal in interwar Poland, of which he remained the only editor until the outbreak of World War II.
(1890–1970), Hebrew writer. Avigdor Hame’iri was born in a small village in Hungary, where he received a traditional Jewish education. From 1905 he studied at the high school associated with the (state-run) Budapest Rabbinical Seminary. While still an adolescent, he became actively involved in the Zionist cause, wrote for the Hungarian press, and tried his hand at writing Hebrew literature. His first poem was published in 1909, and his first poetry anthology appeared in Budapest in 1912, arousing much interest. In September 1913, while attending the Eleventh Zionist Congress in Vienna as a journalist, he befriended a number of leading Hebrew writers, including Ḥayim Naḥman Bialik.
Joy and its expression through song and dance have been important values of the Hasidic movement since its beginnings in the second half of the eighteenth century. The idealization of music reflected an innovation in Jewish culture, in contrast to the general attitude of the Ashkenazic rabbinical establishment. Hasidic spiritual leaders since that time devoted increasing attention to music and dance in their writings.
(ca. 1760–1816/17), Hasidic rabbi and kabbalist. Born in Pribiluk, a small village near Buczacz, Galicia, Ḥayim ben Shelomoh Tyrer of Tshernovits (Ger., Czernowitz; Rom., Cernăuți; Ukr., Chernivtsi) was a leading disciple of Yeḥi’el Mikhl of Zlotshev. Tyrer also associated with disciples of Yeḥi’el Mikhl, among them Yisra’el of Kozhenits, Yisakhar Ber of Zlotsev, Meshulam Fayvush Heller of Zbarezh, and Mordekhai of Kremenets. Officiating as a rabbi in Galicia, Bucovina, Czernowitz (where he was district rabbi), Moldavia, and Ukraine, Tyrer ultimately immigrated to the Land of Israel (no later than 1814), settling in Safed, where he is buried. His grave is still a pilgrimage site for many Hasidim.
A halakhic (legal) term, ḥazakah has multiple connotations, though common to them all is the idea of preserving an existing condition, real or presumed. Its origin is in the laws of trespass and encroachment on another’s livelihood found in the Talmud. In the context of Eastern Europe, it often applied to a situation in which a monopoly was granted with the intent of preventing uncontrolled economic competition among Jews, and between Jews and others.
(1745–1813), rabbi and Talmudist. Aryeh Leib ha-Kohen Heller was born in Kałusz, Galicia. Known as the Ketsot ha-Ḥoshen after his famous work, he served as rabbi in Rożniątów and in 1788 was appointed district rabbi in Stryj, where he served until his death. Two of his sons also were rabbis, and his daughter married the Galician maskil Shelomoh Yehudah Rapoport, the rabbi of Tarnopol and Prague. Heller was a fierce opponent of the Hasidic movement.
(1901–1972), poet, satirist, and author of cabaret pieces. Born and educated in Lwów, Marian Hemar (born Jan Marian Hescheles), moved to Warsaw in 1924 after fighting on the Polish side in the Polish–Soviet war. He joined the literary circle around the journal Wiadomości Literackie (Literary News) and wrote for theater and cabaret. He was a master of sentimental song and comedic routine (shmontses, a genre of cabaret popular in Central Europe particularly associated with Jews), and jointly composed political sketches with poets Julian Tuwim and Antoni Słonimski. In 1939, he left for Palestine but settled in England in 1941.
(1887–1940), journalist and Zionist activist. Although known primarily for his political activism, Hugo Herrmann was also an outstanding analyst of German and Italian literature. He was born in Mährisch-Trübau (Moravská Trěbově) and raised in an assimilated German-speaking home. He studied German and Romance philology at universities in Prague and Vienna, and during his student days became interested in Zionism.
(1877–1937), theoretician, Polish socialist activist, writer, and editor. Maksymilian Horwitz, known also by the pseudonym Henryk Walecki, was born in Warsaw to a middle-class Jewish family in which both Polish and Yiddish were spoken. After completing gymnasium in that city, Horwitz studied at the university in Ghent, Belgium, where he was active in the Union of Polish Socialists Abroad and wrote for the Polish Socialist Party (PPS) organs, Robotnik and Przedświt.
Daily Zionist newspaper in Yiddish, published in Kovno (Kaunas) from 21 July 1919 until 1 August 1940. Although formally the organ of the General Zionists, Di idishe shtime (The Jewish Voice) quickly became the main mouthpiece of Lithuanian Jewry and a platform for literary figures and publicists of various political movements during the interwar years. From 1926 to 1933, some of its material was prepared in Riga by correspondents of the newspaper Frimorgn.
(1880–1960), physicist. A graduate of the Saint Petersburg Institute of Technology (1902), Abram Ioffe began his scientific career in Munich, where he worked as a doctoral student in the laboratory of Wilhelm Röntgen, the first Nobel laureate in physics. Ioffe’s collaboration with Röntgen on studies of the elastic and photoelectrical properties of crystals continued until 1914, although most of the results were never published because of Röntgen’s extraordinary experimental exactitude.
(1875–1957), sociologist, political scientist, editor, and politician. Born in the town of Nagykároly (Rom., Carei or Careŭ Mare), Oszkár Jászi came from a family whose original name was Jakubovits. In 1881, the family converted to Calvinism. Jászi was brought up in this spirit and never considered himself a Jew.
(Ger., Mitau), city in Latvia; provincial capital of Courland. Founded in the thirteenth century by the Livonian Order of German (Teutonic) Knights, Jelgava, along with the Duchy of Courland, was taken over by the Russian Empire in 1795. Jews are known to have lived in the town from the seventeenth century. Earlier tombstones, dating from the fourteenth century, mark the graves of Jewish merchants who passed through the region.
(Rus., Evreiskaia Istoriko-Arkheograficheskaia Komissiia), Soviet research institute at the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences, specializing in the collection and study of archival materials dealing with Jewish topics. The Commission was founded in summer 1919 at the initiative of Jewish scholars, who submitted a memorandum to the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences stating, “The Jews have a centuries-long history in Ukraine. The fate of the Jews has been closely linked to the fate of the Ukrainian people. The Jews have played a significant role in the economic and cultural life of Ukraine. Nevertheless, a systematic portrayal of the history of Jews in Ukraine has not yet been written. The lack of such a history has fostered many misunderstandings and mistaken impressions about Jewish activities in Ukraine and relations between the Jewish and Ukrainian peoples.”
Jewish Historical and Archaeographic Commission
Jewish Historic-Ethnographic (or Archaeographic) Society
ewish Historical and Archaeographic Commission
Mining town in western Moravia (near the Bohemian border) in today’s Czech Republic. Jews are first mentioned as residing in Jihlava (Ger., Iglau) in 1249. In 1345, Margrave Charles (later Emperor Charles IV) invited Jews to the town, where they engaged primarily in moneylending. In 1426, Margrave Albrecht V expelled the Jews of Jihlava because of their alleged interactions with the heretical Hussites. Jewish houses were divided up among the Christian populace and in 1511 the synagogue was converted into a church. Jihlava’s Jews then settled nearby, helping to found new Jewish communities in Puklice (Puklitz), Třešt’ (Triesch), Police (Pullitz), and Pirnice (Pirnitz).
Defined as heretics by the Russian Orthodox Church, Judaizers were Christians who adopted various practices such as observing the Sabbath, practicing iconoclasm, and, at times, denying the divinity of Jesus. In the sixteenth century, Russian chronicles and decrees of the Orthodox Church Council made note of a “Judaizing heresy” that had existed in Russia in the area of Novgorod and Moscow at the end of the fifteenth century. There is no consensus, however, on whether the movement had been stimulated by actual Jewish influences. Indeed, Russian nationalist historians have tended to dismiss the idea of a modern Jewish impact on Orthodox Christianity, while Soviet historians saw “humanist and antifeudal foundations” in these movements. Historians writing outside of Russia have found trends related to the Reformation within the faction, while some Jewish historians undeniably have argued for the existence of Jewish inspiration. More recently, scholars have linked the emergence of this heresy to failed eschatological expectations among Eastern Orthodox Christians and to political upheavals in the region.
(1883–1944), Hebrew novelist, critic, and translator. Aharon Avraham Kabak was born in Smorgon in the province of Vilna and died in Jerusalem. His education began at home with his father, who was a rabbi, and continued in a heder and various yeshivas. Kabak lived in several towns, working as a teacher and writing for Hebrew and Yiddish newspapers. Headed for Palestine, he stopped in Constantinople, where he taught and edited. In 1911, he arrived in Palestine and taught at the Herzliya gymnasium in Tel Aviv. In 1914, he returned to Europe, where he studied psychology and philosophy at universities in Berlin, Geneva, and Lausanne. In 1921, he came back to Palestine, settled in Jerusalem, and devoted himself to writing and teaching literature in the Reḥavyah gymnasium. Later in life, during a period of illness, he underwent a spiritual change that is evident in his writing.
(1880–1942), publicist, literary and theater critic, and translator. Born in Buczacz, Galicia, Mojżesz Kanfer received both a religious and a secular education. He studied law in Lwów, earning a doctorate in 1908. After serving in the Austrian army during World War I, Kanfer wrote for the Polish-language Zionist daily press as well as for Polish Jewish and Yiddish literary and scholarly journals. He moved to Kraków in 1923, working for the literary section of Nowy Dziennik (1923–1939). He was also an active member of the Jewish Theater Society and was involved in establishing a permanent Yiddish scene in the city.
(1883–1979), Bundist, educator, and leader of the secular Yiddish school movement. Born in Kherson, Russia, Khayim Shloyme Kazdan received a traditional Jewish education and began his teaching career in 1902 at the professional school for girls in Kherson. In 1907, he wrote for the Yiddish press in Di hofnung, a short-lived legal daily of the Bund.
(1878–1942), singer, critic, photographer, and ethnographer of Yiddish song. Born in Uzhmir, Volhynia, Menakhem Kipnis was a cantor’s son who entered the world of Jewish music at a young age. He served as a cantor’s assistant in local synagogues on the High Holidays and as a choirboy at the Choral Synagogue in Zhitomir. He also performed throughout the Pale of Settlement.
A genre of Yiddish performance, kleynkunst (“little art”; also known as minyatur teater [miniature theater]) developed in the early twentieth century, primarily under the influence of Russian and Polish literary cabaret. The genre was also indebted to older forms of Yiddish performance, that of purim-shpilers and badkhonim, as well as to the nineteenth-century semiprofessional performers known as the Broder Singers. Rooted in traditional Jewish societies, such performers nevertheless subjected the Jewish community and its leadership to merciless parody while exposing a range of injustices. Integrating song and dance with sketches and routines of various kinds, kleynkunst satirized both Jewish society and the political and social order of the non-Jewish world, especially its impact on Jews.
(1827–1903), publisher, journalist, and Orthodox maskil. Yosef Kohen-Tsedek (last name also rendered Kohen-Zedek) was born in Lwów. While primarily engaged in rabbinic scholarship, he also taught himself languages and secular studies. In 1853, he established a publishing house in Lwów and was among the pioneering publishers of Hebrew periodicals in Galicia. He founded and edited the first Hebrew weekly in Galicia, Ha-Mevaser, with its literary supplement, Ha-Nesher, between 1861 and 1866. The newspaper served, among other things, as a platform for rabbinic authors as well as for moderate maskilim from Galicia and Lithuania. Kohen-Tsedek often challenged radical positions expressed in the competing newspaper, ‘Ivri anokhi, published by Barukh Werber.
(1807–1848), rabbi and preacher. Born in Zalužani, Bohemia, Abraham Kohn completed his secondary and religious schooling; he later took courses in philosophy at the University of Prague. Ordained as a rabbi in 1832 by Shemu’el Landau and the two Bohemian district rabbis, in 1833 he was appointed rabbi of Hohenems, a town in which many of the Jews were already progressive in their outlook. Kohn established an artisans’ society and invested his efforts in youth education. During his tenure, the synagogue established a choir, but his attempts to abolish the custom of selling Torah honors on the Sabbath were unsuccessful.
(1891–1971), Zionist activist, journalist, and scholar of modern nationalism. Hans Kohn was born in Prague to a bilingual (Czech and German) Jewish family; his parents came from the Czech regions outside the Bohemian capital. In 1910, upon his graduation from a German high school and just before he was accepted as a student of law at the Karl-Ferdinand German University of Prague, Kohn joined the Zionist students’ Bar Kochba association, which, until the outbreak of World War I, was the center for Zionist activity in Prague. He served as its chair from 1912 to 1913.
(1874–1935), philosopher and lawyer. Jindřich Kohn was born in Příbram, studied law at the Czech University in Prague, where he worked as junior lawyer, and later became an advocate in Pilsen (Plzeň). In 1927 he moved to Prague, where he took over an attorney’s office.
(1898–1982), Yiddish poet and short-story writer. Raised on a farming estate called Sucha Gora (Dry Mountain) in eastern Galicia, Rokhl Korn was tutored in the classics of Polish literature. Polish was the language of her household, her neighbors, and her education. She began her literary career writing in that language in 1918, publishing two short stories, one in Nowy Dziennik, a Zionist newspaper, and another in Głos Przemyski, a socialist journal.
(1852–1909), banker and financial expert. Zsigmond Kornfeld was born in the Czech town of Golčûv Jenikov (Ger., Goltsch-Jenikau), the nephew of Aharon Kornfeld, who was the last great head of a yeshiva in Bohemia. At age 16, Kornfeld left school to work for the Torsch Bank House in Vienna. After a short trip to Paris in 1872, he was employed by the Böhmischer Bankverein in Prague; four years later he was promoted to be vice manager of the local branch of the Vienna Creditanstalt. Early in 1878, Albert Rothschild appointed Kornfeld to direct its partner institution, the Hungarian General Credit Bank in Budapest. From 1900, Kornfeld was the managing director and from 1905 the president.
(ca. 1740–1804), preacher and exegete known popularly as the Dubno Magid, and dubbed “the Jewish Aesop” by Moses Mendelssohn. Ya‘akov Kranz was born in the town of Zietil (Dzyatłava) to Ze’ev Volf and Hinde, daughter of Naḥum, rabbi of Kobrin. After a failed business venture with his father-in-law, he was forced to preach professionally. His homiletic style was marked by folksy, incisive parables that often highlighted the different treatment accorded the poor and the rich, a disparity made painfully clear after his own impoverishment.
(1843–1931), historian, poet, and translator. Born in Warsaw, Aleksander Kraushar came from a moderately prosperous commercial family—his father, Herman, was a senior broker in the Warsaw stock exchange. Kraushar attended a scientific gymnasium and was in the same class as the banker Hipolit Wawelberg. He then studied law at the Szkoła Główna, the proto-university established by Aleksander Wielopolski in the early 1860s.
(1883–1951), composer and cellist. Aleksandr Krein was born in the Russian city of Nizhnii Novgorod into a family of musicians. His father, Avraham (1838–1921), was a klezmer violinist and amateur folk-song collector. Seven of his ten children became professional musicians, notably David (1869–1926), the concertmaster of Moscow’s Bolshoi Theater orchestra, and Grigorii (1879–1955), also a composer. After a childhood spent performing in his father’s klezmer band, Krein entered the Moscow Conservatory at age 13 as a cello student. He went on to study music theory and composition with composers Sergei Taneyev and Boleslav Yavorsky.
Indigenous Rabbinite Jewish community of the Crimean Peninsula. The term Krymchak (also Krimchak; “inhabitant of Crimea”) was first introduced by Russians following the annexation of Crimea in 1783; the name was chosen to distinguish them from Karaites as well as from the Ashkenazic Jews of Eastern Europe. Gradually the members of the community, whose language is Judeo-Crimean Tatar, also began to refer to themselves by this term, their previous self-appellation of Syrael (Israel) surviving residually in their folk poetry. Officially, in Crimean Tatar, both Rabbinite and Karaite Jews were called Yahudiler, but in the unofficial everyday language the pejorative term Chufutlar (“Yids”) was applied to both groups. Rabbinites were called Zülüflü Chufutlar (“Yids” with sidelocks) and the Karaites Zülüfsüz Chufutlar (“Yids” without sidelocks).
(1758–1829), Hebrew-language printer in Prague and an influential figure in that city’s Haskalah. Yisra’el Landau, the third son of Yeḥezkel Landau (chief rabbi of Prague from 1754 to 1793), was born in Prague. In his youth, he studied in Brody with Yisra’el Zamość (ca. 1700–1772), the Talmudist and early maskil, who had previously taught Moses Mendelssohn in Berlin. Landau was actively involved in the Prague Haskalah, as were such other influential figures as Baruch Jeitteles (1762–1813).
(1886–1941), folklorist. Shmuel Lehman collected material from marginal social groups such as the Jewish underworld and prostitutes. Although not formally trained in academics or in theories of folklore, he dedicated his life to culling folk songs, proverbs, purim-shpils, and folktales from a wide spectrum of Yiddish-speaking society in Poland. He used whatever work he did, including bill collecting and selling lottery tickets, as an excuse to meet ordinary people and record their folklore. By the time of his death in the Warsaw ghetto, he had published more data than any other Yiddish folklorist.
Russian-language Jewish samizdat journal published in Leningrad between 1982 and 1989. Leningradskii evreiskii al’manakh (Leningrad Jewish Almanac) was the organ of Leningrad refuseniks (persons denied the right to emigrate to Israel). Among the founding editors were Eduard Erlikh, Iakov Gorodetskii, Iurii Kolker, and Grigorii Vasserman. Initially its creators viewed the journal as the organ of Leningradskoe Obshchestvo po Izucheniiu Evreiskoi Kul’tury (Leningrad Society for the Study of Jewish Culture), which they had tried, unsuccessfully, to register with the authorities in 1982. Its editors changed as some were allowed to emigrate, and the first group was replaced by Mikhail Beizer, Semen Frumkin, and Rimma Zapesotskaia.
(1905–1942?), Hebrew poet and translator. Ḥayim Lenski’s parents divorced when he was an infant, and though he had been born in Slonim, he was raised by his paternal grandfather in a nearby village. During his youth he was an avid reader of Hebrew, Yiddish, Russian, and German literature. Lenski wrote his first poem—rhyming verses about the fall of the tsar—at age 12. At 16, he moved to Vilna and studied at a teachers’ seminary. There, he and a friend published Leket (Anthology; 1922?), which included his first collection of poems.
(fl. late 14th century), financier. Lewko was the most important financial backer to serve Polish kings during the second half of the fourteenth century. Coming from Kraków, he was the son of Yarden and Kaszyca; was married to Swonka (Zwonka); and was the father of Avraham, Kena‘an, Yisra’el, Yarden, and Golda. A member of a council convened by Casimir the Great in 1368 to discuss the organization of salt mines, Lewko became the co-lessee of such mines in Bochnia and Wieliczka and also helped administer the royal mint in Kraków.
(1877–1924), ethnographer, folklorist, and writer. Born in Zawichost near Sandomierz, Regina Lilientalowa settled in Warsaw after her marriage. She was at first self-taught, but completed her education by taking clandestine academic courses at the so-called “Flying University.” Influenced by her teacher, sociologist Ludwik Krzywicki, Lilientalowa developed a particular interest in Jewish folklore and published her early studies in Poland’s leading anthropological journals Wisła (Vistula) and Lud (Folk) from 1898 until 1905. She never held an academic position.
(1605–1658), rabbi, halakhic authority, and author. Lima served as rabbi of Slonim (1637), Vilna (prior to 1650), and Brisk (1655). In Vilna he presided over the prestigious rabbinical court, where his associates included Efrayim ben Ya‘akov ha-Kohen and Shabetai ben-Me’ir ha-Kohen. Other prominent members of the court were Aharon Shemu’el ben Yisra’el Koidonover and Hillel ben Naftali Tsevi.
To treat the development of critical and scholarly writing about Jewish literature, this entry includes three articles. The first two treat criticism of Hebrew and Yiddish literature, respectively, detailing the major critics and scholars of literature in each language, the journals in which their writings appeared, and the major critical genres. Russian Literary Criticism takes note of important Jewish figures who developed the major schools of Russian criticism from the formalists through the Tartu School. See also Literary Journals.
About this Article (Literary Criticism and Scholarship)
The stirrings of Hebrew literature in Galicia and Lithuania in the first half of the nineteenth century were accompanied by early critical appraisals. In the periodicals Bikure ha-‘itim (The First Fruits of the Times; 1831) and Kerem ḥemed (Vineyard of Delight; 1839), Shelomoh Yehudah Rapoport (Shir), one of the outstanding intellectuals of Galicia, published articles about Yosef Perl’s satire Megaleh temirin (Revealer of Secrets; 1819) and about its roots in the European satirical tradition. In the journal Pirḥe tsafon (Flowers of the North; 1844), editor Shemu’el Yosef Fuenn published a detailed discussion of Adam ha-Kohen’s Shire sefat kodesh (Poems in the Holy Tongue), and Fuenn’s editorial colleague Eli‘ezer Lipman Horovitz wrote a historical survey of Hebrew poetry from the biblical period to modern times. However, these and others were isolated and rare publications.
Hebrew Criticism and Scholarship (Literary Criticism and Scholarship)
Most Russian maskilim of the 1860s were no less contemptuous of Yiddish, the noxious zhargon (jargon), than were their Berlin colleagues, yet—against the grain—the maskil Aleksander Zederbaum (1816–1893) in 1862 issued Kol mevaser (Herald) in Odessa as a Yiddish supplement to the Hebrew weekly Ha-Melits (The Advocate) from 1862 to 1872.
Yiddish Literary Journals (Literary Journals)
Town in southwestern Romania, on the Timiş River, 60 km east of Timişoara. The first documentary reference to Lugoj (Ger., Lugosch; Hun., Lugos) dates to 1334. From 1658 to 1688, Lugoj was under Turkish rule. The presence of Jews in the town was first recorded in the late seventeenth century.
(1877–1943), lawyer and Zionist leader. Born in Sosnowitz (Pol., Sosnowiec), Katowice province, to an Orthodox family, Emil Margulies became active in Zionism while studying law in Vienna, where he became acquainted with Theodor Herzl. In 1903, Margulies settled in Teplitz Schönau (Teplice Šanov) in northern Bohemia, where he worked as a legal clerk and promoted Zionism through lecture tours, leaflets, and proclamations in the local press.
(1897–1975), Yiddish linguist, educator, and political activist. Born in Palanga, Lithuania (in the Russian Empire), Yudl Mark was educated by private Jewish teachers and at local Russian schools. From 1915 to 1918, he studied at the historical-philological faculty of Petrograd University. He belonged to historian Simon Dubnow’s intellectual circle, whose followers formed the Folkspartey, or Jewish People’s Party.
(1887–1964), poet and writer. Samuil Marshak’s father, a soapmaker, descended from a family of rabbis. His mother was the daughter of the Vitebsk government rabbi, in whose house Marshak began to study Hebrew at the age of six. Marshak’s talents later drew the attention of the art historian Vladimir Stasov and the writer Maksim Gorky.
(1873–1938), rabbi in Russia and the Soviet Union. Born in Kretinga, Lithuania, Shemaryahu Yosef Leib Medal’e received his rabbinic ordination from the Slobodka yeshiva. His marriage into a Hasidic family brought him close to Lubavitch. In 1898, he was appointed rabbi of the provincial capital of Tula, outside the Pale of Settlement, and had to learn Russian to communicate with his congregation. He became rabbi of Korelichi (Belarus) in 1901. In 1907, he was chosen as rabbi of the provincial capital Vitebsk, the city where he officiated for many years and with which he is generally identified.
Medal’e, Shemaryahu Yosef Leib Iankelevich
(Weisser; 1809–1879), rabbi and biblical commentator, known by the acronym Malbim. Born in Volochisk (in Volhynia), Me’ir Leib was a child when his father died, after which he studied under the local rabbi, Mosheh Leib Horowitz. Married at 14, Me’ir Leib divorced four years later, leaving a son (of whom little is known except that he attended Moscow University) and daughter (Freida, who married Eliyahu Heilpern of Vilna). After the trauma of divorce, Malbim immersed himself in rabbinic scholarship, and in 1834 traveled throughout Europe—visiting Pressburg, Trieste, Amsterdam, and Breslau—to publicize his first halakhic work, Artsot ha-ḥayim (1837; on , Oraḥ ḥayim), among the prominent rabbis of his day.
(1889–1953), Communist Party activist and Soviet government official. Born in Odessa to the family of a minor official, from 1904 to 1911 Lev Mekhlis worked as a clerk and earned extra income by tutoring. From 1907 to 1910, he was a member of Po‘ale Tsiyon. Drafted in 1911, Mekhlis served as an artilleryman during World War I. In 1918 he joined the Bolshevik Party and was appointed to be a political officer in the Red Army with the rank of brigade commissar. He was later promoted to division commissar, eventually becoming corps commissar.
Town in northern Moldavia. Mihăileni was established in 1792, subsequent to the opening of a customs station between Austria and Moldavia. The town was originally named Vlădeni, but eventually the Moldavian prince Mihail Sturdza (r. 1834–1849) changed it into Mihăileni and, aiming to turn it into an important trading center, encouraged the settlement of Jews from Galicia, exempting them from taxes.
Established in Lemberg in the summer of 1883 as an organization for students, Mikra Kodesh (Holy Assembly) is sometimes considered the first Zionist association in Galicia, though it was not connected to the emergent Ḥoveve Tsiyon (Lovers of Zion) movement in Russia. The organization was founded by Joseph Kobak, a Haskalah rabbi trained in Germany who was then serving as educator and unofficial rabbi at the Lemberg Temple, and Re’uven Bierer, who had just returned to his native Galicia after completing medical training at the University of Vienna, where he had cofounded Austria’s first Zionist fraternity, Kadimah.
Jewish tradition marks milestones in the life cycle with domestic commemorative acts and artifacts, including yortsayt candles, tombstones, fast days, and even the pinch of a Sabbath challah as a burnt offering to commemorate the destruction of the ancient temple. Beyond the memorials of daily religious observance, there are also larger, communal, and even collective memorials and monuments such as the remains of ancient synagogues, cemeteries, and ghetto walls, as well as ruins, artifacts, museums, and historical markers of more recent catastrophes such as the Holocaust.
(1812–1854), rabbi and religious reformer. Abraham Neuda was born in Loštice (Ger., Loschitz) in the Habsburg province of Moravia. The only son of Aron Moses Neuda, rabbi of Loštice, Abraham attended yeshiva in Mikulov (Nikolsburg), where he studied under Moravian chief rabbi Neḥemyah Trebitsch. While there, Neuda secretly pursued secular “German” subjects with his fellow students.
(1814–1874), Polish assimilationist activist, pedagogue, and journalist. Daniel Neufeld was born in Praszka near Wieluń, Great Poland, which from the beginning of the nineteenth century was a center of the Haskalah. He received a traditional religious education and attended a Catholic secondary school, although he ended his formal education in 1830. He was an autodidact both in the traditional literature of Judaism, as well as in contemporary academic literature about Jews, which he explored mainly in German.
(1820–1895), activist, journalist, and cofounder of the Jewish integration movement in Warsaw. Born in Warsaw, Hilary (Hillel) Nussbaum graduated from rabbinical school and taught at an elementary school. He then became a merchant, possibly under the influence of his father-in-law, the prominent maskil Mosheh Tannenbaum (1795–1849).
(1883–1945), Yiddish writer and literary historian. Born in Horodok, Belorussia, Ber Orshanski received a traditional education until the age of 16. From 1902 to 1906 he lived in Riga, where he joined the Bund. Subsequently he moved to Vilna, where he wrote and published his first Yiddish plays. Between 1910 and 1913, Orshanski worked as a proofreader at a number of Vilna-based newspapers, including Vilner vokhnblat (Vilna Weekly), edited by Lipman Levin. Orshanski also edited an almanac, Der shnayder (The Tailor), in 1913.
(1846–1875), lawyer, historian, and publisher. Il’ia Orshanskii was born into a wealthy Jewish family in Ekaterinoslav (mod. Dnipropetrovs’k). After receiving a traditional Jewish education, he studied law at Novorossiiskii University, Odessa, graduating in 1868. Because he refused to convert to Russian Orthodoxy, Orshanskii was denied a lectureship at Novorossiiskii University. He subsequently opened a private law practice in Odessa, and at the same time became involved in communal activities, publishing several articles and books on Jewish topics.
(Ohrenstein; 1919–1941), poet. Jiří Ohrenstein was the second of three sons of an assimilated Jewish family in the town of Kutná Hora near Prague. His parents owned a haberdashery; his father’s death in 1936 further intensified Jiří’s close relationship to his mother, an amateur actress who passed some of her theatrical talent and character on to her sons. In 1937 Jiří began drama school in Prague, after having failed the entrance exams the previous year. As a student, he began publishing in literary magazines, taking in 1936 the pseudonym Orten; he also participated in theatrical life, acting, adapting texts for the stage, and conceiving a fateful and futile love for the actress Věra Fingerová. Poetry, however, gradually emerged as his first love and true calling.
Coal-mining and industrial town in northern Moravia (near the Polish border) in today’s Czech Republic. Ostrava (Ger., Mährisch-Ostrau; known as Moravská Ostrava until 1918) was one of the youngest Jewish communities in Moravia. Like most mining towns in the Habsburg lands, Ostrava was off-limits to Jews until the late eighteenth century. One of its first Jewish inhabitants in modern times, a distiller, arrived in 1792, and the first regular prayer service took place in 1832. Jews began arriving in larger numbers after 1848, when Habsburg Jews were granted freedom of movement, and again after 1860, when residential restrictions were finally lifted.
Hebrew publication, issued between 1887 and 1896 and again in 1902. Otsar ha-sifrut (Treasury of Literature), known also as Bet otsar ha-sifrut, appeared in five volumes between 1887 and 1896 and then was intended as a monthly paper; however, only a single issue was published in 1902. The first volume was published in Jarosław and was edited by Shalti’el Yitsḥak Graber, assisted by the author Re’uven Asher Braudes; later volumes were published in Kharkov.
(1897–1945), Hungarian writer. The third child of Miksa Pollák (1868–1944), rabbi of Sopron, Károly Pap was 17 and attending high school when World War I broke out. He volunteered and served as an officer on the Italian front. His earliest drama, Leviát György (George Leviát), written in 1926 but first published only seven decades later, depicts the war as experienced by various types of assimilating Jews against the background of a hostile and prejudiced society.
The making of paper cuts by Jews in Eastern Europe, which differed in style from those made by Jews elsewhere, flourished particularly in the nineteenth century and began to fade as an art in the 1920s. These developments coincided in time and place with paper cuts created by rural Poles and Ukrainians. Researchers nevertheless insist on the distinctiveness of Jewish paper cuts because they were closely related to religious practices, and maintain that the influence of their neighbors, both in techniques and artistic motifs, was limited.
(1862–1945), painter. Born in Odessa to a poor innkeeper’s family of nine, Leonid Pasternak completed his gymnasium education in 1879. He then studied first at the Odessa Drawing School and between 1882 and 1886 at the Munich Art Academy. Upon his return to Odessa, he painted a series of impressionistic genre works depicting impoverished Jews. Pasternak was first acclaimed in Russia for his Chtenie pis’ma s rodiny (Letter from Home; 1889), a traditional genre scene that portrayed Russian army life in a realist style. In 1889, he married and settled in Moscow, becoming the father of the well-known writer Boris Pasternak. From 1894 to 1918 he taught at the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture where he introduced moderate impressionism (a Russian version of French impressionism, with more muted colors) and followed new teaching methods.
(1871–1927), leader of the Polish Socialist Party, writer, editor, and Polish parliamentarian. Born in Warsaw to a Polish-speaking, middle-class Jewish family, Feliks Perl was raised in a Polonizing household, his father having been arrested for participation in the anti-Russian Polish insurrection of 1863. After graduating from a Russian gymnasium in Warsaw, Perl entered the School of Law at Warsaw University, where he joined illegal radical circles and, in 1889, became active in an underground Polish revolutionary organization. In the wake of police repression, Perl fled to Germany in April 1892.
Religious law calls on Jews to undertake ritual washings or ablutions that range from immersion of the whole body (tevilah) to pouring water over the hands (netilat yadayim), although there is no evidence to prove that the practice of such rituals contributed to higher standards of hygiene among the Jews of Eastern Europe. Still, these laws infused with an aspiration for physical purity had some bearing on the general approach of the East European Jew to his or her level of hygiene and grooming. Thus, according to the Shulḥan ‘arukh, it is incumbent upon a Jew on awakening to purify himself by washing his hands and face and rinsing his mouth. Jews must also flow water over their hands before meals and recite a blessing. Immersion in a mikveh (ritual bath) is required to cleanse a man of an impurity such as a seminal issue and, in the case of women, immersion is performed before marriage and after menstruation, among other states of ritual impurity. No ablution, however, is valid unless the person or, in certain cases an object, has been made scrupulously clean beforehand, so as to ensure that no barrier of foreign matter intervenes between the person or object being immersed and the purifying waters. These laws most certainly contributed to the Jews’ perception of what was hygienic, although immediate factors such as the availability of water, cleansers, and medicine, as well as contemporary understandings of what constituted hygiene were certainly even more important to the hygienic life of East European Jewry.
(1887–1940), poet and translator. Otto Pick belonged to the German-speaking Jewish community in Prague and to the literary circle that included Max Brod, Franz Kafka, and Franz Werfel. With Willy Haas he edited their important, though short-lived, magazine, the Herder-Blätter. As a young man, Pick worked in a bank and devoted his spare time to literature. He published a collection of poems, Freundliches Erleben (Kindly Experience; 1912), and a book of short stories, Die Probe (The Test; 1913).
The prohibition to consume pork is perhaps the most familiar aspect of kashrut, the system of Jewish dietary laws, even though the pig is only one of a number of unclean animals mentioned in the Pentateuch. In Jewish memory, the rejection of pigs is an indicator of Jewish difference; one Yiddish expression characterizes a pig, dover akher (“another thing”) as something not to be mentioned by name.
(1843–1928), Zionist leader. Samuel Pineles was born in Brody, Galicia; his father was the Hebrew writer Hirsh Mendel Pineles (1806–1870). After graduating from high school in 1860, Pineles moved to Galați, joining his family and working at a business. In 1864 he became secretary of the local committee of the Alliance Israélite Universelle, a position he held until 1900. Hoping the organization would support the emancipation of Romanian Jews, he welcomed its diplomatic success at the Congress of Berlin (1878), but was disappointed when decisions failed to be implemented.
The Jewish Socialist Zionist Workers Sports Federation. Ha-Po‘el (“the Worker”) sports clubs were established at a conference in Tel Aviv on 15 May 1926, under the aegis of the Histadrut labor union. The Ha-Po‘el federation considered itself part of the organized socialist workers’ movement and, by 1927, had joined the Socialist Workers Sports International (SWSI). The federation soon set up Ha-Po‘el organizations in Eastern Europe.
By the end of the twentieth century, most of the East European Jews who survived the Holocaust and their descendants had moved overseas. The migration that occurred before World War II saved many Jewish lives. Between 1919 and 2005, the total volume of Jewish international migration from Eastern Europe can be roughly estimated at about 3.8 million (for 1969–2005, this figure includes non-Jewish relatives of Jews); of these, approximately 1.95 million went first to Palestine/Israel, and 1.85 million to other countries (see Table 1: Jewish International Migration from Eastern Europe, 1919-2005). Subsequently, part of the former moved on to Western countries; at the same time, a smaller percentage of the latter re-migrated to Palestine/Israel. Internal migration also played a very important role in the demographic development of this Jewry, especially in a country as large as the former Soviet Union (FSU).
Migration since World War I (Population and Migration)
(1872–1941), leader of the Bund in Poland. Under the name Noyekh (and sometimes as Józef), Yekusiel Portnoy (actually Portney—the spelling can be traced to an error on the part of a Russian registrar) was one of the leading representatives of non-Zionist Jewish socialism in Eastern Europe. To adherents of the Bund (the General Union of Jewish Workers) in Poland between the wars, he was a charismatic paternal figure with enormous moral authority.
(ca. 1670–after 1736?), Sabbatian prophet and messianic pretender; central figure in early eighteenth-century Moravian Sabbatianism. Yehudah Leib Prossnitz was born in the southeastern Moravian town of Uherský Brod (Broda), and settled after his marriage in Prossnitz (Prostějov), where his wife’s family lived. Although he was not an educated man, at about age 30 he was drawn to Kabbalah, possibly under the influence of traveling Sabbatian prophets and preachers who visited Moravia at that time, such as Yehoshu‘a Heshel Tsoref, Yehudah Ḥasid, and Ḥayim Malakh. He adopted the ascetic life they preached, began to study the Zohar and other kabbalistic texts, and claimed to receive otherworldly instruction from the deceased Yitsḥak Luria and Shabetai Tsevi. Yehudah Leib soon acquired the reputation of an inspired kabbalistic preacher, attracting a local following and gaining the support of the local rabbi of Prossnitz, Me’ir Eisenstadt (ca. 1670–1744), who was not unsympathetic to Sabbatianism.
Prossnitz, Yehudah Leib ben Ya‘akov Holleschau
(Hirsh-Sholem Prilutski, 1862–1942), journalist, editor, and early Zionist. Born and raised in a merchant family in Kremenets, Ukraine, Tsevi Pryłucki was educated in the spirit of the Haskalah by his father, a personal friend and pupil of Yitsḥak Ber Levinzon.
(1854–1919), yeshiva head and rabbinic scholar. Yitsḥak Ya‘akov Rabinovich (Reb Itsele Ponevezher) was born in Shereshevo, Belorussia, the son of a wealthy merchant. After receiving private instruction in Talmud, at the age of 14 he went to study with Yeruḥam Perlman—later a noted rabbi in Minsk—in nearby Selets, and a few years later studied in Brest-Litovsk with Ḥayim Soloveichik (who became the “Brisker rov”) under the tutelage of the latter’s father, Yosef Dov Soloveichik.
(1854–1945), Hebrew writer. Aleksander Ziskind Rabinovitz (known as Azar) was born in Liady, in the Mogilev district, to a poor family. Although he received a comprehensive Talmudic education, as an adolescent he grew acquainted with Hebrew maskilic literature. At the same time, he took it upon himself to study the (Jewish) Bible and, later on, Russian. He married at age 18 and went to live at his father-in-law’s home in nearby Romnova. Three years later, he became a peddler, as his father had done before him, but was not successful in that venture. He then traversed Lithuania, eking out a living from tutoring until eventually finding a permanent teaching position in the Smolensk regional town of Viazma. He published his first batch of articles in the Jewish Russian press, nurturing the hope that eventually he would become a Russian journalist.
(1842/43–1905), rabbi in Lithuania and Jerusalem. Eliyahu Rabinowitz-Te’omim was born in Pikeln (Lith., Pikeliai), in western Lithuania. His father, Binyamin Rabinowitz (1813–1869), served as a rabbi in several Lithuanian communities. Eliyahu had a twin brother, Tsevi Yehudah (rabbi of Ragula; d. 1887), and this is the source of the additional name Te’omim, or “twins.” Rabinowitz was the father-in-law of Avraham Yitsḥak Kook, the first chief rabbi of Palestine.
Rabinowitz-Te’omim, Eliyahu David ben Binyamin
Eliyahu David ben Binyamin Rabinowitz-Te’omim
(1900–1941), Yiddish author. Yisroel Rabon (orig. Rubin) was born in Gowarchów but grew up in Balut, a working-class suburb of Łódź. He had little formal education but read voraciously, acquiring a broad literary knowledge at an early age and publishing his first poems in his teens. He spent most of the interwar years in Łódź as a professional writer. After the Germans invaded Poland in September 1939, he escaped to Vilna, and was shot in 1941 in Ponar.
(1910–1944), poet and translator. Considered one of the great Hungarian poets of the twentieth century, Miklós Radnóti was born Miklós Glatter, of Jewish parents, although he remained indifferent toward his Jewish roots all his life, converting formally to Catholicism in 1943. “I do not feel Jewish,” he wrote in a 1942 letter to Hungarian Jewish literary critic Aladár Komlós. “I was never taught to be religious, I do not feel a need for it, I don’t practice it. Race, blood ties, unseverable roots, ancient pangs quivering in every fiber—I consider such things utter nonsense, and not the defining characteristic of either my intellectuality, my spirituality, or my poetry.” Yet he died as a persecuted Jew. In 1944, during a forced march westward across Hungary, Radnóti and members of his labor battalion were shot dead by their Hungarian guards. After the war, his body was removed from a mass grave, and his last poems, his most gripping, were discovered in his coat pocket. His final, prophetic “Razglednica,” or Postcard, is dated 31 October 1944:
The Hasidic dynasty of Radomsk (Radomsko) dates from 1843, when the town’s communal rabbi, Shelomoh ha-Kohen Rabinowicz (Rabinovich; 1803–1866; appointed rabbi in 1834), began to conduct himself as a Hasidic rebbe. Rabinowicz had been trained in the more popular wing of Polish Hasidism, following those disciples of Ya‘akov Yitsḥak Horowitz (the Seer of Lublin) who did not join the Pshiskhe–Kotsk school. These included Me’ir of Apt (Opatów; d. 1827/31) and Yisakhar Ber of Radeshits (Radoszyce; 1765–1843).
(Moisei Grigor’evich; 1883–1942), public and political figure active in the Bund and Evsektsiia. Born in Vilna into a family of wine merchants, Moyshe Rafes first attended heder, then a Russian primary school, and passed his examinations as an external pupil at a five-year high school. Rafes joined the Bund while still a youth and devoted himself to party work. He was first arrested in 1903 and spent half a year in prison in Vilna before being released on bail. Later he was suspected of being implicated in the plans for Hirsh Lekert’s attempt on the life of Vilna Governor-General Victor Von Wahl, although Rafes denied this involvement.
(1862–1935), pseudonym of Adalbert Östreicher, writer and journalist. Vojtěch Rakous attended school in a Czech village and at age 12 spent a year at a Jewish school in Brandýs nad Labem. At 13 he left for Prague and worked as an apprentice for a haberdashery; he also began to learn German. After nine years of vocational training, he returned to his native Brandýs area and lived in the village of Mrátín, working as a peddler and a grain merchant. In 1895 he went back to Prague, where he and his brother founded a footwear company; his brother operated the head office while Vojtěch took charge of the Libeň branch. Rakous was recognized by his contemporaries as a solid tradesman, but he apparently had a rough demeanor. Ultimately his business failed when a rival company entered the market.
(Tiktin; also Rebecca of Tykocin; d. 1605), the first female author of a Yiddish book; preacher and teacher of women. Rivke bas Me’ir was descended from a family whose roots lay in the town of Tiktin (Pol., Tykocin, near Białystok), as indicated by her father’s name, Me’ir Tikotin or Tiktiner. She may have been born and raised in Poland and her date of birth is also unknown, but she spent at least the last years of her life in Prague, where she died. Her headstone in the old Jewish cemetery of that city asserts that she “had preached day and night to women in every pious community.” Her epitaph also refers to her father as “morenu ha-rav rabi [our teacher and master, rabbi] Me’ir,” suggesting that she was the daughter of a scholar and had probably acquired her knowledge of Hebrew and rabbinical literature at her parents’ home. Presumably her husband was not a rabbi and therefore it can be assumed that the titles rabanit (teacher) and darshanit ve-rabanit (preacher and teacher) were honorifics bestowed on her out of respect for her activities in Prague and its surrounding communities.
Established in Bucharest on 1 August 1948, the first Romanian State Yiddish Theater was located on the premises of the Baraşeum Theater in the Jewish quarter of Bucharest, where Jewish actors had given Romanian-language performances during World War II. Between 1944 and 1948, Yiddish actors performed for private groups or were subsidized by various cultural associations.
(1847/53–1908), writer. Moise Ronetti-Roman (Aron Blumenfeld) was born into a Hasidic family in Jezierzany, Galicia (now Ozeryany, Ukr.); as a teenager, he moved to Moldavia and worked as a Hebrew tutor. In 1869, Ronetti-Roman left for Berlin to study medicine, philosophy, and philology, but did not graduate. In the same period, he contributed articles in Hebrew to Ha-Magid under the name Mosheh Roman. Throughout his life he avoided using his true surname and even kept his given name a secret.
(1912–1996), Polish flyweight boxing champion; member of the Ordnungsdienst (Jewish order police) of the Warsaw ghetto. Before World War II, Stanisław (Shepsel) Rotholc was a member of the boxing division of the Jewish sports club Gwiazda (also known by its Yiddish name, Shtern, meaning Star) in Warsaw. This workers’ sports organization was affiliated with the Left Po‘ale Tsiyon. Competing in the flyweight category, in 1933 Rotholc was the first Jewish boxer to become a Polish national champion.
(1831–1902), rabbi, journalist, and author. From 1865 to 1898, Isaak Rülf served as rabbi to the Jewish community of Klaipėda (Ger., Memel) in East Prussia, on the border between Prussia and the Russian Empire. Through his philanthropic and journalistic activities on behalf of the Jewish communities of Lithuania, Rülf attained the status of a spokesperson for Russian Jewry. He was also among the minor intellectual fathers of modern Zionism.
Following the disintegration of the Soviet Union in late 1991, its 15 component union republics became independent states. By far the largest of these in both size and population was the Russian Federation, which retained the precise borders of the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic (RSFSR). Due to demographic processes underway over several decades, its Jewish population was among the oldest in the world (median age 52.3 in 1989), with roughly four deaths to every birth. The proportion of mixed marriages was high (73.2 percent for Jewish men and 62.8 percent for Jewish women in the late 1980s), yet the enlarged Jewish population—those living in mixed households—was also declining, along with the core population. The ratio of core to enlarged Jewish population was estimated at the end of the 1980s at 1:1.8.
The question of Sabbath rest, also called Sunday rest, goes directly to the heart of two fundamental issues that confronted Jews in Eastern Europe as they entered the modern era: the question of relations with the non-Jews among whom they lived, and the issue of Jews’ ability to adapt to the surrounding society while maintaining their own separate sense of identity and community.
(1913–1989), Polish writer, literary historian, and critic. A classical philologist educated in Lwów, Artur Sandauer taught at the Hebrew high school in Kraków between 1937 and 1939. He published in both Polish and Polish Jewish literary journals. After escaping from the Sambor ghetto, he spent the remainder of World War II on the Aryan side of the city. After the war, he served as editor of Odrodzenie (1948–1949) and spent several years in Paris. Awarded a doctorate in 1948, Sandauer became a lecturer (1963) and subsequently a professor (1974) at the University of Warsaw.
Hasidic dynasty active from the second decade of the nineteenth century until the Holocaust. The founder was Shim‘on Shelomoh (d. ca. 1802), a disciple of the Magid of Mezritsh, who was a preacher in Savran (Podolia). Shim‘on’s two sons established independent Hasidic dynasties in Podolia and Bessarabia.
(1913–1985), rabbi and scholar, rector of the Rabbinical Seminary of Budapest. Sándor Scheiber was a descendant of rabbis on both sides of his family; he studied at the Rabbinical Seminary in Budapest and was ordained in 1938. At the same time, he attended Pázmány Péter University, earning a doctorate of philosophy in 1937. He was a student of the famous Jewish scholar and head of the Jewish Theological Seminary in Budapest, Bernát Heller.
(1883–1935), founder of the Orthodox education network Beys Yankev (Bet Ya‘akov; Beth Jacob). Born in Kraków to a Belz Hasidic family, Sara Schenirer finished her studies in a government-sponsored primary school, and worked as a seamstress while educating herself intensively in Jewish philosophy and scripture. She was deeply influenced by the writings of Samson Raphael Hirsch.
(1888–1961), Polish Zionist leader. Born in Chrzanów, Ignacy (Yitsḥak) Schwarzbart took a law degree at Kraków’s Jagiellonian University, where he was a member of the Zionist student association Przedświt (The Dawn). Following service in the Austrian and Polish armies during and after World War I, he settled in Kraków and opened a law practice.
(1899–1973), Yiddish linguist. Born in Khmelnik, Ukraine, into a religious teacher’s family, Moyshe Shapiro received a traditional education but also attended a Russian high school. In 1923 he was appointed director of a Yiddish school, in which he taught Yiddish and Russian language and literature, as well as mathematics. He graduated from the Kiev Pedagogical Institute in the late 1920s, and also received a degree in mathematics via a correspondence course.
(born Lev Shvartsman; 1866–1938), Russian philosopher, advocate of religious existentialism. Born to a wealthy family in Kiev, a city open then to a small number of Jews, Shestov was taught Jewish subjects by private tutors. Early in life, however, he chose assimilation to Russian culture as the keystone to his intellectual development.
(Poliakewicz; 1893–1937), Hebrew poet and playwright. Matityahu Shoham was born to an affluent family in Warsaw. As a student, he read the classics of Hebrew, Yiddish, Russian, Polish, and German literature. In 1915, he married the daughter of one of the wealthiest men in Warsaw, and for the next few years enjoyed a luxurious lifestyle. In 1919, David Frishman published Shoham’s first poem in the prominent journal Ha-Tekufah, exposing him to literary circles.
City in central Romania, on the Cibin River. The records of a legal dispute in villages near Sibiu (Ger., Hermannstadt; Lat., Cibinium; Hun., Nagyszeben) in 1357 include the earliest reference to a Jew in Transylvania: Petrus Judaeus. In 1492, the king of Hungary, Vladislav II, ordered the judge of Sibiu to arbitrate legal disputes between Jews and Christians. In 1586, mention was also made of a Jewish organist by the name of Pantalone.
(1883–1957), Polish Zionist leader. Born near Tarnopol, Sommerstein studied law at Lwów University and established a legal practice. Active in Zionist student organizations, he became president of the Zionist Federation of East Galicia after World War I. In 1922 he was elected to the Polish Sejm (the lower house of parliament), serving until 1927 and again from 1929 through 1939.
Town, district center, and port on the Dniester River, now in the Republic of Moldova. The first reference to a settlement in Soroca (Rus., Soroki; Yid., Soroke) dates from 1499. The town was home to one of the oldest Jewish communities in Bessarabia, mentioned by the Swedish preacher Conrad Jacob Hildebrandt in 1653. The oldest Jewish tombstones are from the sixteenth century and the first notations in the local pinkas (communal record book) are from 1770. The main synagogue was built in 1775. In 1772, a dozen Jewish families (out of a total of 170 households) lived in Soroca.
(1762/69–1842), mathematician, inventor, translator, and censor. As an inventor, a committed adherent of Orthodox religious education, and a holder of various official posts, Abraham Stern was highly regarded in administrative circles as well as by broad sections of the Jewish public. By virtue of his talents, the Hrubieszów-born watchmaker was invited to Warsaw on the initiative of the leading reformer Stanisław Staszic. There Stern developed numerous complicated apparatuses, including an agricultural machine and, in 1813, a calculator. The latter device was presented to Tsar Alexander I, who, in acknowledgment, awarded Stern a state pension. On the basis of these and other inventions, Stern was welcomed into the Polish Academy of Sciences.
(1848–1931), politician, lawyer, diplomat, and man of letters. Adolphe (Avner) Stern was born in Bucharest, where his father was a jeweler. After completing high school in that city, Stern moved to Berlin to study law. He then defended a doctoral thesis in legal and administrative sciences, earning his degree in Leipzig in 1869. He was the first Jewish lawyer in Romania.
(1874–1947), business and communal leader. Samu Stern was born into a rural family in Nemesszalok, near Pápa in western Hungary. He received a general education, studied at the Jánosháza yeshiva for two years, and attended a science high school in Győr. He then moved to Budapest to study commerce.
(1894–1951), artist. Artur Szyk was born in Łódź, at that time a Polish, Jewish, and German city under Russian rule. He studied art in Paris and Kraków, and during World War I and its aftermath took part in the armed struggle for Polish independence. During the interwar years he divided his time between Poland and Western Europe. In 1940 he settled in the United States, where he died 11 years later.
Rabbinic family. Originally from Galicia, many members of the Taubes family moved, beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, to Romania. Taubes men filled rabbinic posts in various communities in Romania, chief of which was Iaşi in Moldavia, where members of the family occupied the rabbinate of that city from 1852 until World War II.
(1882–1935), Yiddish poet and prose writer. Born in Vartai, Moyshe Taytsh studied with private teachers until the age of 14, when he was sent to nearby Vilna. He finished school at the Jewish Teachers Institute and was admitted to the institute proper, but soon was expelled for disciplinary reasons. In 1901, Taytsh was imprisoned for involvement in Bundist revolutionary activities. In prison he began to write Yiddish poems, influenced by Avrom Reyzen.
(1870–1949), rabbi, scholar, publicist, and public figure. Born in the shtetl of Sebesh in Vitebsk guberniia, Ḥayim Tchernowitz (known as Rav Tsa‘ir) studied in Kovno in 1895–1896 and received rabbinical ordination from Yitsḥak Elḥanan Spektor. From 1897, Tchernowitz served as a rabbi in Odessa, where he also established a yeshiva.
Only sparse information has been gleaned about toys and games enjoyed prior to the mid-nineteenth century. Moreover, in East European memoirs describing childhood in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the heder (elementary school), where young boys frequently spent long hours, dominates the texts. These depictions portray childhood in general and the heder in particular in the darkest of terms—exposing a brutal regime dominated by ignorant teachers who robbed boys of their childhoods. This image became somewhat more nuanced in literature from the turn of the twentieth century. Still, the extremely negative images substantially served the ideological program of the Haskalah that sought to broaden and modernize Jewish education and Jewish life in general, leading to a more positive attitude toward playing and imagination.
(1902–1990), film director, scriptwriter, and educator. In 1920 Trauberg moved from Odessa to Petrograd, where he worked as a journalist and participated in amateur plays. He also attended the Comic Opera Theater School and studied directing. In 1921 Trauberg became acquainted with the directors Grigorii Kozintsev, Sergei Iutkevich, and Georgii Kryzhitskii, with whom he organized Fabrika Ekstsentricheskogo Aktera (Factory of the Eccentric Actor; FEKS); their collaboration continued until 1926, first as a theater and then as a cinema collective that exerted great influence over the aesthetics of Soviet cinematography throughout the 1930s.
Youth movement of the Mizraḥi religious Zionist movement. The movement combined Mizraḥi’s religious Zionist vision with a call for productive labor and for the construction of a new and just society. Tse‘ire Mizraḥi’s social revolutionary views, which were influenced by the secular Zionist labor movement, were presented by Mizraḥi as religious values. The organization also incorporated elements from Hasidism and the German neo-Orthodox Torah ‘im Derekh Erets (Torah Study and Secular Culture) movement.
(1888–1959), Yiddish poet and journalist. The youngest brother of critic Shmuel Niger and political activist Borekh Vladek-Tsharni, Daniel Tsharni (last name also rendered Charney) was born in Dukor, Belorussia. His father died when Tsharni was 18 months old, and his mother, who inherited a small business, worked hard to support her six children. A delicate child, Tsharni received no formal education.
(1794–1871), maskil and author; Jewish liaison to Polish government. Jakob Tugendhold was born in Działoszyce, the son of a Prussian maskil. He received a traditional heder education and from 1811 or 1812 pursued secular studies in Breslau. From 1814 to 1819, Tugendhold worked as a private tutor in Kraków, Lwów, and Warsaw, and in 1819 was commissioned to create Poland’s first state-run Jewish elementary schools.
(1832–1913), explorer, ethnographer, diplomat, and spy. Born Hermann Wamberger (Bamberger) in Szenthyörgy, Ármin Vámbéry attended heder and yeshiva as well as the Protestant elementary school in Dunaszerdahely from age eight. He was a tailor’s apprentice for a short time. Due to a dislocated hip, his left leg was paralyzed when he was a small child; he used crutches and later a walking stick for the rest of his life. He never completed high school.
(Weiszfeld; 1868–1926), lawyer, member of parliament, minister of justice, and the first professing Jewish cabinet minister in Hungary. Vilmos Vázsonyi’s father, a principal of the local Jewish school in Sümeg, was the son of a rabbi; Vilmos’s maternal grandfather owned a factory. The family moved to Budapest in 1874, where Vázsonyi’s father worked as a schoolteacher. Vázsonyi studied in a Catholic gymnasium and started legal studies in the University of Budapest in 1886.
Town in Kujawy-Pomorze province in northern Poland. Jews were not allowed to live in Włocławek, a bishop-owned town, until the early nineteenth century, though the town was never granted an official privilege de non tolerandis Judaeis. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Jewish traders occasionally appeared at the markets and customs office on the Vistula River. After the town lost its status of ecclesiastical settlement in 1793, the first four Jewish families settled there in 1803–1805; by 1812, there were 99 Jews. In 1824, a Jewish rewir (quarter) was established, and in 1825–1826, officials forcibly moved all but three families to that district. In 1841, however, 32 families were nevertheless still living outside the rewir.
(1920–2002), philosopher, logician, and essayist. Henri Wald was born in Bucharest, to the family of a small merchant. In 1940, discriminatory legislation forced him to leave high school; however, he was able to pursue his studies at a private college for Jewish students. He was mobilized during World War II, as a Jew, in a forced labor detachment. A radical antifascist, he supported the Communist Party, which was still illegal at the time. After the war, Wald began to publish articles in the leftist press, making his debut in September 1944 in the newspaper Tribuna poporului (The People’s Tribune), and eventually contributing to several periodicals of the same ideological orientation as well as to cultural publications such as Revista fundațiilor regale (The Review of Royal Foundations).
(1884–1937), Czech poet, prose writer, and journalist. Weiner’s parents ran a distillery and confectionary in southern Bohemia; Richard, the oldest of five children, studied chemistry and was expected to take over the family business. At the age of 27, however, he abandoned this promising career to devote himself to writing; in 1912 he moved to Paris, where he would launch his journalistic career, and soon published two volumes of poetry.
(1882–1940), novelist and physician. Born in Brünn (Brno), Moravia, Ernst Weiss studied medicine in Prague and Vienna, traveled to the Far East as a ship’s doctor, and became a surgeon in a Vienna hospital. He was friendly with Franz Kafka, who accompanied him and Weiss’s long-term partner, the actress Rahel Sanzara (Johanna Bleschke; 1894–1936), on holiday in Denmark in summer 1914. Weiss and Kafka later quarreled. From 1921 to 1933, Weiss lived in Berlin. The Nazis’ seizure of power drove him into exile in Paris, where he committed suicide as German troops approached the city.
(1891–1984), Zionist activist, journalist, and essayist. Robert Weltsch was born in Prague to one of the oldest and most respected Jewish families in the city. His father, attorney Theodore Weltsch, was active in local Jewish public affairs and at the turn of the century served as director general of the Centralverein zur Pflege Jüdischer Angelegenheiten (Central Society for Handling Jewish Affairs), founded in Prague in 1885.
In East European Jewish folklore, the city of Chelm (Pol., Chełm; Yid., Khelem) functions as an imaginary city of fools, similar to that of the Greek Abdera, the English Gotham, and the German Schilda, among numerous others. The legendary “town of fools,” often presented ironically as “The Wise Men of . . . ,” is a feature common to most European folklores. Chelm, as was the case with its counterparts in other cultures, spawned hundreds of tales describing outlandish naiveté and stupidity that have been printed in dozens of editions in a variety of languages. Many of these are titled The Wise Men of Chelm. Chelm, located approximately 65 kilometers southeast of Lublin, had a Jewish population from at least the fourteenth century, and was a real town whose residents bore no connection to the stories. If anything, the town was known for Torah scholarship.
(1907–1992), writer, poet, and translator. Abandoning his youthful involvement in the Zionism embraced by his father, Yitsḥak, Stanisław (Szaja) Wygodzki became active in the Communist movement and suffered political repression in Poland. As a member of the Polish section of the International Office of Revolutionary Literature in Moscow, he contributed to its Polish paper, Kultura Mas, and other left-wing periodicals.
Professional association of Jewish actors in Poland in the interwar period (1919–1939). Known by its Yiddish name Yidisher Artistn Fareyn (YAF) or by the official Polish name Związek Artystów Scen Żydowskich (ZASŻ), the union was founded in Warsaw by a group of actors and directors, including Aizik Samberg (1889–194?), Andrzej Marek (Marek Arnsztejn), Yankev Kelter (1880–1938), Mordechai Mazo, Leon Kharaz (1886–?), and Simkhe Rozen (1893–194?). Other YAF activists who played an important role in the union’s history were Zishe Kats (1892–194?), Yitskhok Nożyk, Zygmunt Turkow, Michał Weichert, Mark Yuviler (1904–?), and Maks Brin (1884–194?).
Yiddish linguistic journal published in Kiev from 1927 to 1930. A bimonthly journal, Di yidishe shprakh (The Yiddish Language) was published by the cooperative publishing house Kultur-lige and was the main philological publication of the Kiev Yiddish academic center. Its editor was the veteran Yiddishist Nokhem Shtif, a founder of YIVO, who had returned to Kiev from Germany in 1926.
(fl. 12th century), Talmudic scholar. Also known as Yitsḥak of Bohemia and Yitsḥak of Regensburg, Yitsḥak ben Ya‘akov reputedly acquired the nickname ha-Lavan (White) because of the color of his hair, but according to other sources the name was connected to that of the river Labe (Elbe). Yitsḥak ha-Lavan lived and worked in Prague, although it is not certain that he actually came from Bohemia. He studied in Germany and France and was a student of Yitsḥak ben Asher ha-Levi and Ya‘akov ben Me’ir Tam (Rabenu Tam). Throughout his life he associated with members of the Prague school of Tosafists (including Yitsḥak ben Mordekhai and Eli‘ezer ben Yitsḥak), who maintained ties to the centers of Jewish culture in northern France and Germany.
(1908–1975), Yiddish writer. Born in Rogachev, Ukraine, into the family of a potter, Nosn Zabara received a traditional Jewish education, studied at a secondary school in nearby Novograd-Volynskii, and later worked in a Kiev bookstore. His first publications appeared in 1930. Zabara studied at the aspirantur (graduate program) of the Kiev Institute for Jewish Proletarian Culture, and soon was recognized as an accomplished prose writer. Zabara’s first novel, Radio-roman (Radio Novel; 1932), devoted to Red Army soldiers and officers, was published after his demobilization.
(also Segal; ca. 1700–1772), early maskil who promoted the study of science and wrote commentaries on three classics of medieval Jewish thought. Yisra’el ben Mosheh was born in Bóbrka (near mod. L’viv) to an undistinguished family and studied in Zamość, which is why he is generally known as Yisra’el Zamość. The scientific knowledge he acquired in Zamość was astonishingly broad but outdated, drawn only from Hebrew books, almost all medieval (one exception was Yosef Delmedigo’s Sefer elim [1629], on which Yisra’el wrote a commentary, now lost). His authorities were Aristotle and Ptolemy (his unpublished astronomical treatise, “Arubot ha-shamayim” [The Windows of Heaven], takes a geocentric approach). The exceptional availability of books, many in manuscript, reflected the high level of learning in Zamość, a town with a presence of Sephardic Jews deliberately brought there by its founder, Jan Zamoyski (1541–1605). In Zamość, Yisra’el had followers and allies; the town became a center of early Haskalah a generation later.
(Jewish News), Czech-language Zionist journal published from 1918 until 1938. Following the short-lived Židovské listy pro Hechy, Moravu a Slezsko (Jewish Paper for Bohemia, Moravia, and Silesia), which had been edited by Gustav Fantl and Jehošua Sušický from 1913 to 1914, Židovské zprávy was the first successful Zionist fortnightly published in the Czech language. It appeared initially in April 1918 and became a weekly at the end of that year.
Monthly journal, issued in Bucharest from 1929 to 1940. Adam followed the traditions of the Jewish cultural press in Romania, and in this sense was similar to the publications Anuar pentru israeliți (Yearbook for Israelites) and Sinai: Anuar de studii judaice (Sinai: Judaic Studies Yearbook). Adam was distinct, however, in that it gave particular attention to literary matters and political issues relevant to Romanian Jews. After 1932, its editors dedicated a significant share of each issue to articles on the rise of antisemitism in Nazi Germany and to similar developments in Romania.
(1895–1949), artist. Yankl (Jakub) Adler was born in Tuszyn, near Łódź, and died in England. Apprenticed in engraving in Łódź in 1912, he moved to Düsseldorf in 1913 for further studies. There Adler came into contact with the Düsseldorf-based artists of Das Junge Rheinland (Young Germany; 1918). He subsequently moved back to Łódź, joining Moyshe Broderzon as cofounder of Yung-yidish, the first avant-garde Jewish cultural movement in independent Poland.
(1869–1922), Russian fiction writer and playwright. Born in Nikolaev, in the Russian Empire (now Mikolayiv, Ukraine), David Aizman led an itinerant life most of his adult years. In an autobiographical note he wrote, “To the present day I have no certain place of residence. . . . I suffer a great deal from the absence of a residence permit. . . . I am a writer. I pass myself for a shop assistant” (Odessa, 15 January 1914).
General Zionist youth movement. Akiva’s beginnings, and its main followers, were in western Galicia and Silesia. Its origins can be traced to a Zionist youth group formed in Kraków in 1901. Members of that group founded Agudat ha-No‘ar ha-‘Ivri ‘Akiva (Association of Hebrew Youth) in 1924.
(1904–1941), Yiddish poet. Born in Molodechno, Belorussia, Zelik Akselrod was 11 years old when his family found themselves among the Jews expelled by the Russian army from the World War I theater of operation. From Tambov, where the family lived after the expulsion, they moved to Minsk, while Zelik went to Moscow to study at the Briusov Institute for Literature and Art (1922–1925). His brother Meyer (or Meer; 1902–1970) also studied in Moscow, becoming a noted artist. Zelik Akselrod was close to his fellow students Izi Kharik and Shmuel-Nisn Godiner, who were active in proletarian literary circles. Aesthetically, however, Akselrod was quite removed from the proletarian poets. His first poetry collection, Tsapl (Tremble; 1922), was published in Kiev by Kultur-lige. From 1925, he lived in Minsk, working at an orphanage and, later, at the State Publishing House.
(1890–1981), Yiddish writer. Born in the shtetl of Lipkan in Bessarabia, Moyshe Altman received a traditional Jewish education and attended the Russian school in Kamenets Podolski. Thanks to his exceptional memory and diligence, he acquired an encyclopedic education and mastered six languages. In 1919, he moved to Chernivtsi, where, beginning in 1921, he worked for the Yiddish Culture Federation of Romania, lecturing on Jewish and world literature in the shtetls of Bessarabia.
Printers active in Hebrew and Yiddish publishing. The Bak family apparently originated in Venice, where Ya‘akov ben Gershon Bak (1574–1619) followed his father, Gershon ben Mosheh, in training as a printer. After Ya‘akov Bak had printed Maharal of Prague’s Tif’eret Yisra’el (1599), the latter evidently persuaded him to move to Prague. When Bak arrived in that city, he was associated in business with the brothers Avraham ben Mosheh and Yehudah Leib Shidel; by 1605, Yitsḥak ben Aharon Bak had joined them. From the time of the death of Ya‘akov Bak to 1767, the Bak family firm printed 213 texts. Between 1767 and 1788, they and their partners published another 21 books.
(1884–1949), film theoretician and screenwriter. Balázs was born Herbert Bauer, the son of assimilated German Jewish parents, both school teachers, in Szeged, Hungary. After studying at the Budapest University of Arts, he published poetry and plays; his friends and associates included composers Zoltán Kodály and Béla Bartók, philosopher Georg Lukács, art historian Arnold Hauser, and sociologist Karl Mannheim. Balász held several cultural posts with the revolutionary Hungarian Soviet Republic of 1919. When the regime fell, he went into exile, first in Vienna—where he published his early works on “film culture”—and then Berlin. Balázs was among the first and most lucid writers on film language, with a particular appreciation for the power of the close-up; his formalism was tempered by a sense of vision as essentially cultural and motion pictures as determined by economics.
Region in the southwestern section of Romania, between the Mureş and Danube Rivers. The oldest traces of a Jewish presence in the area date to the Roman period in the second through fourth centuries. A second-century coin issued by Shim‘on bar Kokhba discovered in Pojejena, as well as golden plates with Hebrew characters and Judaic symbols found in Dierna-Orşova, prove the existence of Jews among Roman colonists. After Banat became part of the medieval Hungarian kingdom in the eleventh century, the earliest reference to a Jew from the region dates to 1521 in the area of Caransebeş.
(1889–1952), Hebrew writer and editor. Born in Lopatyn, near Brody in Galicia, Asher Barash was the son of Naftali Herts Barash, a grain merchant who was descended from a rabbinical family. Barash received both a traditional Jewish education at heder and bet midrash and a secular education at a local Polish government school. He was proficient in languages and by adolescence was familiar with Hebrew maskilic literature as well as Polish and German texts. He was also attracted to the Zionist movement.
(1891–1941), Yiddish pedagogue, folklorist, writer; and editor; pioneer of Yiddish secular schooling. Born in Vilna to a poor family, Shloyme Bastomski was orphaned at an early age. After attending a Talmud Torah school, he graduated from the Vilna Teacher’s Institute in 1912. He then taught in nearby towns for two years before being hired to teach at the newly formed school of the Khevre Mefitse Haskole (Society for the Promotion of Enlightenment among the Jews of Russia), the first nontraditional boys’ school in Vilna. Yiddish was the language of instruction, and Bastomski taught there through the 1930s.
In Poland–Lithuania, the emergence of Jewish beggars as a large group with its own subculture can be traced to the Khmel’nyts’kyi massacres of 1648, which destroyed much of the Jewish communal wealth and infrastructure. It has been estimated that up to 20 percent of the Jewish population belonged to the class of beggars at the end of the seventeenth century. East European governments regularly harassed the Jewish poor. In March 1773, Habsburg authorities ordered the expulsion of Betteljuden, Jewish beggars, from Galicia. At the same time, Poland closed its borders to impoverished Jewish refugees. Residents of Oświęcim, a town close to the border of Poland and Prussia, witnessed “caravans of beggars” who were expelled from Galicia but were not admitted to Poland. In 1898, a total of 35 percent of Russian Jews depended on charity institutions to maintain their existence.
(pseudonym of Mark [Mordechai] Iakovlevich Rabinovich; ca. 1854–1932), writer, publicist, and early Zionist theorist. Ben-Ami’s life is a particularly representative example of the world of the shtetl. His articles and memoirs about the Jewish question reflect the period of the birth of Zionist thought in Russia.
(1894–1967), painter, graphic designer, typographer, and critic. Henryk Berlewi was a leading figure among constructivist artists in Poland in the 1920s. Though his fame rests on his posters, book jackets, and page designs in Yiddish and Hebrew, he is also known for his advanced constructivist paintings, drawings, and especially his cutting-edge graphic designs based on his theory of Mechano-faktura. He published studies on art in Yiddish, Polish, and German.
(1836–1909), folklorist, bibliophile, philanthropist, and compiler of the largest published collection of Yiddish proverbs. Born into a well-to-do maskilic family in Vinnytsa, Podolia (Ukraine), Ignatz Bernstein moved with his parents to Warsaw in 1856. During a visit to Berlin in 1859, he came across a small German book of Jewish proverbs, which inspired his lifelong preoccupation with collecting Yiddish proverbs and assembling a paroemiological library. The fruit of his labor was the still unsurpassed 1908 volume, Yidishe shprikhverter un rednsartn (Yiddish Proverbs and Proverbial Expressions), containing 3,993 entries, and a personal collection of more than 6,000 titles dealing with proverbs in more than 100 languages.
(1824–1908), banker, art collector, and patron. Mathias Bersohn (Berson) managed a sugar refinery set up by his father, Me’ir Bersohn (1801–1873), and founded a private bank. As a young man, Bersohn began to invest in Polish art and Judaica, ultimately amassing one of the most important private collections of such objects. From the mid-1860s, he also began to collect Polish Jewish handicrafts.
(1825–1885), pioneering Russian Jewish writer. Born in Poltava, Grigorii Bogrov was a typical maskil who rebelled against tradition and his family, first learning Russian and devouring secular books on the sly, then divorcing his wife. In 1863, he finished half of Zapiski evreia (Notes of a Jew), a semiautobiographical novel that ultimately was 600 pages long. It was completed and published serially in Otechestvennye zapiski (Fatherland Notes), a popular liberal journal, in 1871–1873. Bogrov then wrote stories and novels on Jewish themes and worked on two Russian Jewish publications, Slovo (Word) and Russkii evrei (The Russian Jew). Shortly before he died, he converted to Christianity to marry a gentile woman.
(1906–1987), poet, playwright, prose writer, and translator. Roman Brandstaetter studied philosophy and Polish literature in Kraków, earning a doctorate for a thesis on Adam Mickiewicz in 1932. Two years of research in Paris (1929–1931) resulted in the publication of Legion żydowski Adama Mickiewicza (Adam Mickiewicz’s Jewish Legion; 1932). Initially, Brandstaetter actively participated in Polish literary life, publishing, among other things, literary guidelines for the generation of Polish poets entering the literary scene during the interwar period. In the early 1930s, however, he became more closely associated with Jewish national circles, joining the editorial board of Opinia, a Zionist weekly where he published his manifesto on Polish Jewish poetry.
(1903–1966), painter and graphic artist. Born in Piatra-Neamț, Victor Brauner grew up in a wealthy family in which artistic expression was encouraged (his father was a photographer). From 1919 to 1922, Brauner studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Bucharest and began to travel in avant-garde circles that included Ilarie Voronca, Marcel Iancu, Ion Vinea, Max Hermann Maxy, Stephan Roll, and Claude Sernet (Mihai Cosma).
(1870–1951), physician, political figure, and historian. Born in Polangen (Palanga), Courland, Iulii Brutskus (Julius Brutzkus) was the brother of the economist Boris Brutskus (1874–1938). Iulii studied medicine in Moscow (earning his medical degree in 1894), where he joined the Ḥibat Tsiyon movement. When Jews were expelled from Moscow in 1891–1892, he came to their aid. In 1894, he moved to Saint Petersburg, where he was active in the Society for the Promotion of Culture among the Jews of Russia (OPE) and the Jewish Colonization Association (ICA). From 1898, he was a member of the editorial board of Voskhod but resigned with other Zionist sympathizers when the journal’s editors became hostile to the Jewish national movement. He showed little sympathy for socialism.
(1881–1937), Yiddish folklorist. Born in Vilna, Yehudah Leib Cahan moved to Warsaw in 1889. He studied in heder and later learned watchmaking. At a young age he began to collect and notate Yiddish songs. In 1899 he became a frequenter of the Saturday gatherings in the home of the writer Y. L. Peretz, who encouraged him in his interest in gathering folk songs. In 1901 he moved to London, where he founded the Zionist labor union Forverts (Forward), gave speeches for proletarian Zionist groups, and continued to collect songs.
(Paul Antschel; 1920–1970), poet. Considered one of the most important post–World War II European poets, Paul Celan was born in Czernowitz, in Bucovina, the easternmost province of the former Habsburg monarchy, which had been incorporated into Romania in 1918. Though he learned and spoke Romanian at school, German remained Celan’s primary cultural language and Vienna his cultural lodestar.
Organ of the Czech Jewish movement. The first issue of Českožidovské listy (Czech Jewish Press) was published in 1894 under the editorship of Moric Schönbaum, who was succeeded by Jakub Scharf in 1896. The impulse for creating the journal came from the Národní Jednota Českožidovská (National Czech Jewish Union), which was founded in 1893.
(1805–1855), rabbi and scholar. Tsevi Hirsh Chajes was born in Brody into a wealthy and distinguished family. In 1829, he was appointed rabbi of the Żółkiew district and served in that capacity for more than 20 years. Chajes was active in a circle of Galician maskilic rabbis whose response to modernity in the first half of the nineteenth century was complex. He was the most prominent Galician rabbinic scholar who also engaged in historical research.
Established in January 1918, the Commissariat for Jewish National Affairs (Evreiskii Komissariat; EVKOM) was affiliated with the People’s Commissariat for Nationality Affairs (Narodnyi Komissariat po delam Natsionalnostei; Narkomnats). EVKOM’s purpose was to win Jewish support for the Bolshevik regime both within Soviet Russia and abroad by disseminating Communist and Soviet materials in Yiddish. In contrast to the other ethnic commissariats established slightly earlier, EVKOM was considered temporary. Semen Dimanshtein was appointed commissar. During the first months of EVKOM’s existence, its central body included delegates representing Left Social Revolutionaries or SRs (Il’ia Dobkovskii) as well as Po‘ale Tsiyon (Tsevi Fridlender; 1897–1936). EVKOM’s Yiddish newspaper Di varhayt appeared from 8 March to 1 September 1918.
Commissariat for Jewish National Affairs
(1901–1940), Yiddish prose writer and playwright. Born in Dvinsk (mod. Daugavpils), Latvia, M. Daniel (born Mordekhai [Mark] Meyerovitsh) lived in several places as a child, and then was employed as a worker, clerk, and teacher. In 1921 he went to Moscow, where he studied at the Academy of Education and, later, the Yiddish department at the Second Moscow State University, from which he graduated in 1924.
(1748–1820), halakhic authority and author. Born in Gdańsk (Danzig), Avraham Danzig studied in Prague with, among others, Rabbi Yeḥezkel Landau. Danzig married and moved to Vilna, where he worked in business and refused to earn a rabbinic salary. He remained steadfast in this refusal even after he was appointed dayan (rabbinic judge) in Vilna in 1794; only after his business failed, in 1812, did he agree to receive remuneration. It was during this period that he wrote most of his books.
(1856–1931), Hebrew poet and novelist. Born in Białystok, Menaḥem Mendel Dolitzki received a traditional education. At an early age, he was attracted to the Haskalah, and in 1875–1876 he traveled to Vienna. There Dolitzki became acquainted with Perets Smolenskin, editor of the Hebrew periodical Ha-Shaḥar.
Bilingual Polish and Yiddish weekly, 44 issues of which appeared in Warsaw between December 1823 and September 1824. Dostrzegacz Nadwiślański / Der Beobakhter an der Vayksel was the first Jewish journal published in Poland. Originally intended as a bilingual Polish and Hebrew periodical, it eventually appeared in a Polish and Yiddish version with pages split into two parallel linguistic columns.
(1906–1992), Polish Jewish historian. Artur Eisenbach was one of the last representatives of a distinguished group of scholars who, in the years before World War I and in independent Poland between 1918 and 1939, laid the foundation for an investigation of the Polish Jewish past.
(1868–1919), literary historian, writer, critic, editor, and politician. Born into a poor Orthodox family in Zbaraż, Wilhelm Feldman ultimately found a place among Poland’s intellectual elite. At 18 he broke with his Hasidic milieu and moved to Lwów, a stronghold of the Haskalah movement. There he joined Agudas Akhim, a group of young maskilim promoting Polish (as opposed to the traditionally German) political orientation among Galician Jews. Intense social activism did not prevent him from immediately launching a career as a writer, publicist, and literary critic.
(1787–1875), Karaite author and collector of ancient manuscripts. Avraam Firkovich was born in Łuck; his family, though possessed of a long and distinguished lineage, was poor, and Firkovich did not receive much education in his childhood. After his marriage in 1808, Firkovich worked as a miller in Volhynia. In 1813 he studied Torah with the prominent Karaite scholar Mordekhai Sultanskii, with whom he eventually quarreled. Firkovich moved to the Crimean city of Gözleve in 1822, and in 1825 was appointed ḥazan (head) of the local Karaite community (although ḥazan refers to a cantor in Rabbinite communities, for the Karaites the term refers instead to the head of a community). He used his status to submit memorandums suggesting to the Russian government that it resettle Rabbinite Jews from the border areas and recommended that they be forced into agriculture, a measure that he thought would prevent them from involvement in smuggling (Rabbinite Jews, who practiced rabbinic rather than scripture-based Judaism, were scorned by Karaites).
(1897–1944), president of the Women’s International Zionist Organization (WIZO) in interwar Czechoslovakia and a leading activist of the Pracovna Skupina (Working Group), an informal leadership group of Slovak Jewry during World War II, who dedicated her life to rescue and welfare efforts. Born in Bratislava to an Orthodox family, Gisi (as she was known) was a relative of Rabbi Mikha’el Dov Ber Weissmandel, later her colleague in the Working Group. Instrumental in social and communal work, she became chairperson of HICEM (the combined acronym for the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society [HIAS], Jewish Colonization Association [ICA], and Emigration-Direct, a German organization) and a much-trusted member of the Joint Distribution Committee and of the Zionist federation executive committees. Most notable are her efforts to render support and organize escape routes for refugees from Germany (1933), Austria (1938), and the Protektorat (1940) who were trying to work their way to safer Hungary or to Palestine.
(1838–1902), Hebrew author and translator. Also known as Har Shalom (or by the acronym Hash), Avraham Shalom Friedberg was born in Grodno, Lithuania. After he turned 13, he chose to study watchmaking, while continuing his traditional Jewish education. In 1854, Friedberg left Grodno to receive advanced training in his craft and to gain a firsthand impression of life in southern Russia.
Daily independent Yiddish newspaper. Frimorgn (Morning) was a nationally oriented, democratic newspaper issued in Riga from 17 January 1926 until 15 May 1934. The paper was founded by a group of employees who had left the Riga newspaper Dos folk (The Folk), who used the facilities of the publishing group of the popular Riga Russian-language newspaper Segodnia (Today). The paper initially enjoyed financial support from a number of Jewish public figures.
(1856–1939), scholar, rabbi, Zionist, folklorist. Moses Gaster was born in Bucharest to a renowned Jewish family; his grandfather Asriel Gaster had been a community leader and synagogue founder, and his father Abraham Emanuel Gaster was the consul of the Netherlands in Bucharest.
(Also Walentyn Potocki, Graf Potocki), legendary son of a duke who converted to Judaism and died a martyr’s death in Vilna (Wilno). In the late eighteenth century, a well-crafted legend of a nobleman who converted to Judaism attained popularity. (The term ger tsedek refers generally to a righteous convert to Judaism.) The story maintained that Walentyn Potocki had become Jewish and was subsequently burned at the stake in Vilna. A subplot mentions the conversion of Potocki’s friend, Zaremba, who similarly converted along with Zaremba’s wife.
(1873–1945), physician, socialist activist, and writer. Born in the Romanian city of Iaşi, Litman (Leon) Ghelerter attended a commercial high school. As a student at the Faculty of Medicine in Iaşi, he also took courses in law and taught at the Cultura school in Iaşi, a renowned “Israelite–Romanian” institution. Ghelerter earned his medical degree in 1899; his defense of his thesis on alcoholism revealed an interest in social medicine that informed his entire career.
(1859–1939), sculptor. A child prodigy, Gintsburg was born in Grodno; he became a student of Mark Antokol’skii, who took him to Saint Petersburg in 1870. Gintsburg entered the Russian Academy in 1878 and received the official title of “academician” or professor in 1911. In the formative years of his career, he enjoyed a high degree of commercial success, concentrating in portraiture and small, highly detailed narrative sculptures. He was known primarily for his rendering of contemporary cultural figures “at work.” These included his portraits of the painter Vasilii Vereshchagin, the chemist Dmitrii Mendeleev, the writer Leo Tolstoy, and the composer and conductor Anton Rubinstein, most of whom he knew personally and described in his memoirs.
(1889–1947), politician, lawyer, and Zionist leader. Angelo Goldstein was born into a rabbi’s family in Milevsko (Mühlhausen), Bohemia. He studied law in Prague and was an active member of the Zionist Bar Kochba Association. He was the cofounder of the Theodor Herzl Association in 1909 and chaired this first Czech Zionist student group in 1909–1910. He served in the Austro-Hungarian army during World War I and was wounded. After the war, he opened a law office in Prague.
(1856–1922), Zionist thinker. Aharon David Gordon was born in Troyanov, a village in Podolia. His father had left Vilna to manage the country estate of Baron Evzel’ Gintsburg. Gordon’s early life in wooded, natural surroundings seems to have informed his later emphasis on the need to bond with nature. Following his marriage at age 19, Gordon lived with his wife’s family in Obodovka, where he seems to have come into contact with Hasidism.
(1823–1890), Hebrew-Yiddish maskil and popular songwriter. Born in Vilna, Mikhl Gordon was a second-generation maskil. His great uncle, Yisra’el Gordon, was the government rabbi of Vilna, and Mikhl’s father, Aharon David, published a Hebrew work that imitated the style of Mosheh Ḥayim Luzzato. At the age of 16, Mikhl married Neḥamah Gordon, the sister of writer Yehudah Leib Gordon, and lived comfortably under his father-in-law’s roof for the next seven years.
(1909–1998), Yiddish writer. Born in Kovno (mod. Kaunas), Shmuel Gordon spent his youth in Jewish orphanages in Ukraine. In 1929, as a student in the Yiddish Department at the Second Moscow State University, he was castigated in the Soviet press for sending poems to the Warsaw “bourgeois nationalistic publication” Literarishe bleter (Literary Pages). This incident signaled the total alienation of Soviet Yiddish literary figures from their Western colleagues. Nevertheless, in 1931 Gordon graduated from the university and had a successful, albeit unglamorous, career as a Yiddish journalist and prose writer.
(1890–1966), poet. Iacob Ashel Groper is considered to be the first modern Yiddish writer of the former Romanian kingdom (Walachia and Moldavia). He was born in Mihăileni (near the border of Bucovina), and attended the Israelite-Romanian elementary school. He then studied law at the University of Iaşi and after World War I moved to Bucharest.
(1895–1941), Soviet Russian and Yiddish literary critic and scholar. Aron Gurshteyn was born in Chernigov guberniia, Ukraine, to the family of a transport official. Because his father frequently relocated, Gurshteyn studied in various religious and secular schools and with private tutors. He graduated from a Jewish secondary school in Vilna in 1913, and in 1916 began studying Hebrew literature at Petrograd University. During the civil war, Gurshteyn served in the Red Army, and in 1921 he settled in Moscow, working as a journalist and educator.
(1891–1973), critic and editor. The son of a German-speaking Jewish lawyer in Prague, Willy Haas became friendly with Franz Kafka, Max Brod, and Franz Werfel while still at school and was a central member of the literary Prague circle, serving as editor, with Otto Pick, of its literary magazine Herder-Blätter. The journal was sponsored by the Herder-Verein, a society founded by the Prague branch of B’nai B’rith to promote Jewish culture, and named after the eighteenth-century writer and ethnologist Johann Gottfried Herder. Lacking funds, the magazine was issued only four times (April 1911 and February, May, and October 1912), but it published the works of notable young writers from Prague, Vienna, and Berlin, including Brod, Kafka, Werfel, Max Mell, Franz Blei, and Ernst Blass.
(1882–1945), historian. Coming from a Polonized Jewish family, Marceli Handelsman married the daughter of Józef Kernbaum, a well-known Warsaw Jewish industrialist and philanthropist. Handelsman’s own paternal uncle had been the commander of the insurgents in the Gostynin district during the 1863 uprising.
(1821–1872), poet and journalist. Moritz Hartmann was born in Dušnik, Bohemia, and died in Vienna. Coming from a well-to-do family, he studied medicine and philosophy in Prague and Vienna. Hartmann associated with a circle of writers who wrote in German; some of them, including Leopold Kompert and Ludwig August Frankl, were Jews; others, such as August Meissner and Joseph Rank, were Christian. As was the case with the members of his circle, Hartmann wrote poetry based on themes from Czech history. He lived for a time in Breslau, then in Leipzig, where he befriended the German Jewish writer Berthold Auerbach.
(1865–1908), painter, born in Łódź into an observant family. Despite the opposition of his father, a textile worker, Szmul Hirszenberg enrolled at the Kraków School of Fine Arts (1881–1883), where he was influenced by the historical school founded by the Polish painter Jan Matejko. He continued his studies at the Munich Academy (1883–1887) and in Paris at the Académie Colarosi (1889–1892). In 1892, Hirszenberg returned to Poland, living in Łódź and later (1904–1907) in Kraków.
A Labor Zionist party established in 1920 uniting the Po‘el ha-Tsa‘ir (Young Workers) party of Palestine with members of Tse‘ire Tsiyon (Zionist Youth) in the Diaspora. The formal name of Hit’aḥadut, which means union, changed more than once before 1932 when the party amalgamated with Po‘ale Tsiyon (Workers of Zion) in the Iḥud ‘Olami (World Union).
(1889–1942?), Yiddish and Polish author and critic. Shmuel Yankev Imber was born in the provincial town of Jezierna in eastern Galicia; his father was Shemaryahu Imber, a maskil Zionist author and nephew of Naftali Herz Imber (who wrote “Hatikvah”). In addition to obtaining a traditional Jewish education, Imber also studied at Polish gymnasiums in Zloczów and Tarnopol. He traveled briefly to Palestine in 1912 and began studying German and Oriental studies at the university in Lwów. In 1915, he was recruited into the Imperial Austro-Hungarian Army and was therefore unable to graduate.
(Also ‘Ivri anokhi), weekly Hebrew publication, issued between 1865 and 1890. In order to avoid the difficulty of obtaining a license for a weekly publication, the editors employed the common tactic of alternating the title each week between Ha-‘Ivri (The Hebrew) and ‘Ivri anokhi (I Am a Hebrew) as if they were two different biweeklies, which would not face the same licensing restrictions. The journal appeared in 26 annual volumes, and was published mainly in Lwów. Volumes 3 through 6 were published in Brody.
One of the most radical dynasties in nineteenth-century Hasidism. Although the Izhbits-Radzin (Pol., Iżbica-Radzyn) Hasidim never attracted a large following, their influence on contemporary Hasidic and non-Hasidic Judaism has been profound. The dynasty was founded by Mordekhai Yosef Leiner (1800–1854) and continues to thrive both in Brooklyn, New York, and in Bene Berak, Israel.
(1893–1958), author and storyteller. Froyim Kaganovski was born in Warsaw, but few facts about his background and early years are available. It is known that he displayed an aptitude for painting and studied at an art school. He published his first story, “Bay nakht” (At Night), when he was just 16, in the weekly Teater velt. In the same year (1909), Kaganovski became acquainted with Y. L. Peretz and was honored by having another story, “In der alter mil” (At the Old Mill), included in the literary collection that Peretz edited, Yidish (1910). This recognition enabled Kaganovski to become a regular guest at the Peretz home.
(1886–1969), rabbi, head of yeshiva, and communal activist. Kahaneman was born in Kool (Kuliai), Lithuania. In 1896 he left home to study in the nearby small town of Plungian (Plunge) and in 1901 continued his education at the Telz yeshiva, where he remained for six years. After an additional short stay at the Novaredok yeshiva, he moved in 1908 to Radin, studying at the yeshiva of Yisra’el Me’ir ha-Kohen (known as Ḥafets Ḥayim; 1838–1933). In 1910 Kahaneman was appointed rabbi of Vidze, Lithuania, married Feige Rubin, and shortly thereafter founded a yeshiva. During World War I, he remained in Lithuania, and in 1919 was appointed rabbi of Panevėžys (Ponevezh), a position he held for 20 years. While in Panevėžys, he founded a yeshiva that gained national fame.
(1878–1953), Talmudic scholar and Orthodox religious authority. Avraham Yesha‘yahu Karelitz, known as Ḥazon Ish, was one of the most prominent religious authorities of the twentieth century and a major leader of Ḥaredi Jewry in Israel in the 1940s and 1950s.
(Ger., Karlsbad or Carlsbad), town and spa in the Czech Republic, 110 kilometers west of Prague. In 1921 and 1923, Karlovy Vary hosted the Twelfth and Thirteenth World Zionist Congresses.
(1852–1899), scholar and manuscript collector. Born in Kojetín (Ger., Kojetein) in the Habsburg province of Moravia, one of five children of a rural leaseholder, David Kaufmann attended the town’s Jewish elementary school from 1856 to 1860. He then studied at the Piarist gymnasium in nearby Kromĕříž from 1860 to 1867, and at the Jewish Theological Seminary in Breslau from 1867 until his ordination as a rabbi in 1877. He took courses at Breslau University, and in 1874 received his doctorate from Leipzig University for a dissertation about Sa‘adyah Gaon’s philosophy of religion.
(1853–1921), painter. Izidor Kaufmann was born in Arad (today in Romania), a frontier fortress of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, where his father served as captain of a Hungarian regiment. While working as a bank clerk in 1874, Kaufmann created his first painting—a head of Moses—and began to study art, first at the Budapest State School of Drawing and from 1875 at the Vienna Academy of Visual Arts. Among his early genre scenes, which from 1886 he successfully exhibited in Vienna, Berlin, and Munich, were scenes of Jewish life. Die Schachspieler (Chess Players), Das Examen oder Der Besuch des Rabbi (The Exam, or The Rabbi’s Visit), Isaak the Junk Dealer, Kaufmännischer Untericht (Commercial Instruction), and Geschäftsgeheimnis (Business Secret)—created between 1886 and 1893—depict traditional Jews in a humorous and sympathetic light.
(1897–1943), Yiddish poet. Born in Buki, near Uman, Ukraine, into the family of a Talmud Torah teacher, Moyshe Khashchevatski studied at a heder and later at a commerce school in Uman, which he finished in 1916. He wrote poems in Russian and Yiddish, but initially had only one outlet to showcase his works—a handwritten Yiddish journal that he produced in Uman with his friends Leyb Kvitko and Ezra Fininberg. In 1916, Yekhezkl Dobrushin, already a central figure among the Kiev Yiddish literati, wrote to him, criticizing his poems for lack of “color scale and new cultural achievements.”
(1841–1920), rabbi and historian. Sámuel Kohn was born in Baja, Hungary. Several of his ancestors were rabbis, including his paternal grandfather, Götz Kohn-Schwerin, chief rabbi of Baja and Bács County and one of the outstanding rabbinic authorities in the first half of the nineteenth century. Kohn attended the Catholic gymnasium in Baja and then studied at the yeshivas of Esriel Hildesheimer in Kismarton and Sámuel Sommer in Pápa. In 1858, Kohn enrolled at the Jewish Theological Seminary of Breslau; at the same time, he attended the University of Breslau, where he studied philosophy, history, and linguistics, completing his doctoral dissertation, “De Pentateucho Samaritano” (The Samaritan Pentateuch), in 1865.
Rabbinical seminary, opened in Moscow in 1957. The last yeshivas in the Soviet Union had been closed in the 1920s. Subsequently, at the end of World War II Jews had not been allowed to open a seminary, whereas other religious groups were permitted to do so. Realizing the declining status of Jewish learning and its implications for the future of the rabbinate—and of Judaism as a whole—in the Soviet Union, which would remain without Jewish religious functionaries of any kind, Rabbi Solomon Shlifer (unofficially acknowledged as chief rabbi of Soviet Jewry) persistently requested the authorities to endorse the establishment of a Jewish theological seminary. Eventually, in May 1956 permission was granted, and in January 1957 the Kol Ya‘akov Yeshiva began operating on the precincts of the Moscow Choral Synagogue with Shlifer as first rector.
(1898–1940), journalist. Mikhail Kol’tsov (originally Fridliand) was born into an artisan family in Kiev. In 1915, he started his studies at the Petrograd Psycho-Neurological Institute, and in 1916 wrote articles for the periodical Put’ studenchestva (Students’ Way). Kol’tsov participated in the February and October 1917 revolutions, and as a member of the workers’ militia took part in the arrest of tsarist ministers.
Short-lived political formation of leftist Jews in the USSR in 1919. As World War I drew to a close in November 1918, the tensions among Jewish socialist parties in Ukraine regarding the Bolshevik revolution and the Soviet regime came out into the open. Communist uprisings in Germany, which seemed to support the Bolshevik prognosis that the revolution would spread across Europe, together with the growing stability of the Bolshevik government, intensified inter- and intraparty conflict. Jews were increasingly fearful of persecution and distrusted the Ukrainian powers who opposed the Bolsheviks.
(1905–1973), Soviet film director. Grigorii Kozintsev began his career as a student of the artist Aleksandra Ekster; after the revolution, he organized large-scale street theater. In 1920 he entered the studio school of the Petrograd Academy of Arts.
(1865–1935), socialist political leader; known as “Father of the Bund.” Alternately called Aleksandr or Solomon, Arkadii Kremer was born in Sventsian (now Švenčionys, Lith.), Vilna guberniia, to a religious maskilic family. At age 12 he moved to Vilna, where he attended Realschule, later studying at the Technological Institute in Saint Petersburg. His studies were interrupted in 1889 when he was jailed for revolutionary activity. Upon his release in 1890, Kremer was banned from Saint Petersburg.
(1774–1837), rabbinic scholar. Born in Alt-Ofen (Óbuda), Hungary, Mosheh Kunitz studied Talmud with the leading authorities of his day: Wolf Boskowitz, Mosheh Münz, Yeḥezkel (Ezekiel) Landau, and Isaiah Berlin (Pick) of Breslau. In Prague he was influenced by the maskil Baruch Jeitteles. Kunitz also studied languages and secular subjects in Breslau.
The Lakhovits-Kobrin-Slonim Hasidic dynasties, from Belorussia, trace their origins to the third-generation Hasidic leader Avraham of Kalisk (d. 1810), and more specifically to his opposition to Lubavitch’s aggressive approach to the propagation of Kabbalah. This dispute generated a network of dynastic lines within Lithuanian and Belorussian Hasidism that adopted more conservative forms of Hasidic piety, eschewing the popularization of mystical contemplation.
(1842–1902), publicist, editor, and publisher. Adolph Landau, first known as Aharon Landau, was born in Rassein, Kovno province, to a maskilic merchant’s family. He received a traditional Jewish education and studied at the Vilna Rabbinical Seminary (1855–1862). In 1860, he began publishing short articles about contemporary Jewish life; he wrote for various newspapers, including the Russian Jewish journals Razsvet and Sion.
(1908–1968), theoretical physicist. Born in Baku, Lev Landau graduated from Leningrad University at the age of 19. For the next two years, he was a doctoral student at the Leningrad Physical-Technical Institute; he also published his first two seminal papers. Then from 1929 to 1931 he studied in Europe, mostly in Copenhagen with Niels Bohr, whom he visited again in 1933–1934 and considered to be his principal teacher.
Founded in 1926, Landkentenish (Pol., Krajoznawstwo), the Jewish movement to promote touring the countryside, brought together two disparate ideological strands: the ideal of the French Physiocrats, who extolled agricultural labor as being most productive, and the new nationalism that laid exclusive claim to the land and its historic landmarks. Because Jewish membership in the Polish Touring Society was severely restricted, and because the Poles made no effort to preserve Jewish landmarks, Jewish historians, ethnographers, novelists, poets, and other engagé intellectuals formed their own society and issued their own publications: Land un lebn (1927–1928), edited by Yitskhok Lejpuner, as well as the bilingual Landkentenish / Krajoznawstwo (1933–1935) and Landkentenish: Yedies fun Yi. G. F. L. / Krajoznawstwo: Wiadomosci Z. T. K. (1936–1938), both edited by Emanuel Ringelblum.
(1894–1943), Hebrew and Czech writer. Jiří (Mordekhai Georgo) Langer was born in Prague to an assimilated merchant family. His eldest brother was the well-known Czech writer and playwright František Langer (1888–1965). Langer’s parents sent him to Czech schools, but he noted that even as a young child he was drawn to Judaism and studied Talmud and Kabbalah on a regular basis with his classmate, Alfred Fuchs.
Hebrew in Eastern Europe (traditionally called in Hebrew and Yiddish loshn koydesh, “the holy tongue,” or by modernizers loshn ivri, sefas ever, or ivris) was never strictly speaking a vernacular, though Jews lacking a shared language did sometimes use it as a lingua franca. Rather, as throughout the Diaspora, it was to varying degrees a medium of study, writing, and recitation, part of a Jewish “polysystem” of two or more languages. Aside from Hebrew proper, the least lettered Jew employed a large stock of Hebraisms, many Judaism-specific, many not, if he or she spoke Yiddish; indeed, Yiddish was an incubator that kept Hebrew alive among the masses. At the same time, to season one’s Yiddish with Hebraic erudition or wit was the mark of an intellectual. This entry treats Hebrew proper.
The Jewish courts of Eastern Europe were for centuries a central dimension of autonomous Jewish life in the region: a fully functioning judicial system exercised authority over many aspects of Jewish communal life. The Jewish court system gradually fell into a state of decline, however, and by the early part of the twentieth century was limited in its authority to matters of ritual and family law. Earlier, the rabbinical courts (Heb., bate din; sg., bet din) and lay courts of individual communities and the regional courts of each medinah (province) not only determined matters of ritual law, but also served as the central courts with respect to commercial matters, family law, intercommunal disputes, and even many criminal matters.
(1877–1937), poet and essayist. The great-grandson of Antoni Eisenbaum, director of the Warsaw Rabbinical School, Leśmian (whose last name originally was Lesman) was baptized in 1887. He spent his youth in Ukraine where, in 1901, he earned a law degree from the University of Kiev. After returning to Warsaw, he was active in the city’s literary life, joining a circle of modernist writers gathered around the journal Chimera, co-funding and directing the innovative Artistic Theater, and traveling extensively in Europe. During the interwar period he worked as a notary in Hrubieszów and Zamość. In 1933, Leśmian was elected to the Polish Academy of Literature.
(1876–1966), historian and sociologist; specialist in Jewish demography and economic history. Born in Horodishche, near Kiev, Jakob Lestschinsky (Yankev Leshtshinski) received a traditional Jewish education. In 1898, his interests in secular studies led him to Odessa, where he tutored Hebrew while studying for an external matriculation. In 1901, he attended universities in Bern and later in Zurich.
Town now in the southeastern Polish province of Rzeszów. A royal town founded in the fourteenth century, Leżajsk (also Leżańsk; Yid., Lizhensk) had a Jewish presence by 1521. In 1538, seven Jewish families paid the poll tax, and by 1577 the number of taxpayers had increased to 12. A synagogue was first mentioned in 1626; in that same year, Jews and Christians struggled over the right to trade in leather.
(1898–1937), Soviet historian, journalist, and functionary. Born in Starokonstantinov, Ukraine, into the family of a clerk, Yoysef Liberberg was educated in Kiev—first at a Russian gymnasium, which gave him a full scholarship, and then at the faculty of history and philosophy at Saint Vladimir University. At the age of 15 he began working at the Kiev Jewish library and became interested in Jewish history. He also joined the local Labor Zionist organization.
(1843–1880), socialist author, Hebrew translator, and political essayist. Aharon Shemu’el Lieberman (Liebermann) was born in Luna, Grodno district, Russia. His father, Eli‘ezer Dov Lieberman (1820–1897), was a maskilic author, translator, and political writer. Lieberman studied at the rabbinical seminary in Vilna (1861–1867), worked as a teacher and clerk, and spent time in Białystok, Saint Petersburg, Vilna, and other cities. In 1866, he married Raḥel, the daughter of Mosheh Trotsky, and had three daughters and a son.
(Ger., Libau), Baltic port and the second largest city in Latvia. Jews began to arrive in Liepāja in 1795 and numbered more than 10,000 before World War I (for population, see Table 1).
One of the salient features of modern literary criticism is the proliferation of schools, approaches, and methodologies. In his cross-cultural survey made in 1961, the eminent scholar of comparative literature René Wellek was able to distinguish six “main trends” especially characteristic of the era, ranging from psychoanalytic to myth criticism. As for twentieth-century Russian literary criticism, it was shaped in the main by two divergent, and often opposing, forces—the vitality of the “modern” movement in the arts and, throughout the Soviet period, the privileged status of Marxist or quasi-Marxist perspectives. While many of the figures mentioned in this article have recognizably Jewish names, any connection between their background and the critical methodologies that they championed seems to be tenuous at best.
Russian Criticism and Scholarship (Literary Criticism and Scholarship)
Russian literary criticism and scholarship
(1876–1951), revolutionary, Communist Party activist, and Soviet diplomat. Born to a Jewish merchant family in Białystok, Maksim Litvinov (also known as Meir-Henekh Moiseevich Wallach) received a traditional Jewish education and graduated from a secondary school. He was a member of the Rossiiskaia Sotsial-Demokraticheskaia Rabochaia Partiia (Russian Social-Democratic Workers Party) from 1898 and became actively involved in distributing the illegal Communist paper Iskra.
(1758–1837), rabbi and yeshiva head. El‘azar Löw was born in Wodzisław, Poland to a rabbinical family; his father, Aryeh Leib, was a wealthy merchant. El‘azar studied with his grandfather Pinḥas Zelig, author of ‘Ateret paz, until the age of 16. After his marriage the following year, he was elected a dayan (rabbinic judge) of his native town. At age 20 he was appointed rabbi of Pilica, Poland, where he served for two decades. In 1800, he became the rabbi of the Moravian community of Triesch (now Ťrešt’), at the recommendation of Moravia’s chief rabbi, Mordekhai Benet.
(1854–1944), rabbi, orientalist, art historian, and member of the Hungarian Parliament. The son of Leopold (Lipót) Löw, chief rabbi of the Neolog Jewish community of Szeged, Immánuel Löw completed his university and theological studies in Berlin and Leipzig. The Jewish community of Szeged elected him its rabbi in 1878 (his father had died in 1875). After World War I, he was imprisoned for 13 months because of his condemnation of the White Terror and Admiral Miklós Horthy.
(1811–1874), leading Hungarian Orthodox rabbi. Yirmiyahu Löw was descended from the most distinguished line of rabbis in Hungary after the Sofer-Eger family. Both his father, Binyamin Ze’ev, the author of Sha‘are Torah, and his grandfather El‘azar, the author of Shemen rokeaḥ, were famous scholars and important heads of yeshivas in Poland, Bohemia and Moravia, and, finally, in Hungary. Löw enjoyed great prestige by virtue of his descent, personality, and acknowledged wisdom, and was considered a natural leader among Orthodox rabbis, second only to the rabbi of Pressburg, Avraham Shemu’el Binyamin Sofer (Schreiber), the Ketav Sofer. A man of not inconsiderable Western culture who was fluent in German, Löw was also the head, in Újhely, of one of the largest Hungarian yeshivas, with between 100 and 150 students in 1865.
(1878–1952), political figure and trade unionist. Born in Ekaterinoslav province, the son of a melamed, Solomon Lozovskii (born with the surname Dridzo) joined the Russian Social-Democratic Workers Party in 1901 and in 1905 affiliated with the Bolsheviks. In 1908 he escaped from Siberia, where he had been exiled, and moved to France, where he was active in the Socialist Party. He returned to Russia in June 1917. From 1921 to 1937 he served as secretary-general of the Profintern, the Communist-controlled trade union international, which he had helped found. Simultaneously, Lozovskii was a presidium member of the Comintern (the Communist International) and a delegate at six of its congresses.
(also Meisel; 1528–1601), financier, merchant, philanthropist, Jewish community head, and builder of Prague’s Jewish Town. References to Mordecai Maisel’s family in Prague date from as early as 1477; he is first mentioned as a business partner of his father-in-law, Yitsḥak Rofe, in 1569. From 1576 on, Maisel was a member of the Prague Jewish Communal Council, he later became its head.
(1846–1902), Hebrew poet, author of a major biblical concordance. Born in Mlynów, Volhynia, Shelomoh Mandelkern received a broad traditional education. At the age of 16 he was sent to Dubno to continue his studies, and for some time he lived in Kock (Kotsk), Poland. There he studied Kabbalah and Hasidism with David, the son of Menaḥem Mendel of Kotsk. Drawn to secular studies in the early 1860s, Mandelkern began to send articles to the Hebrew press. While attending rabbinical seminaries from 1865, first in Zhitomir and then in Vilna, he associated with the poet Adam ha-Kohen (Avraham Dov Lebensohn). Under the latter’s patronage, Mandelkern published his first book of poetry, the biblical long poem Bat-Sheva‘ (1866). In that year he also published a collection of satirical verses called Ḥitsim shenunim (Sharp Arrows), as well as a Hebrew translation of the story “‘Ezra ha-sofer” (Ezra the Scribe) by Ludwig Philippson.
(1760–1828), merchant, halakhic authority, and rabbinic author. Efrayim Zalman ben Menaḥem Manes Margoliot (last name also rendered Margalioth) was born into a distinguished family and was counted among the most successful merchants of Brody. In 1817, he was granted a permit to establish a wholesale commercial establishment in Vienna together with several partners. The business remained in operation until 1837, about 10 years after Margoliot’s death.
Margoliot, Efrayim Zalman ben Menaḥem Manes
(1931–2003), literary and cultural historian; translator. The son of poet Perets Markish, Shimon (Simon Peretsovich) Markish was educated as a classical scholar, a choice determined by his father’s arrest in 1949, which precluded other, more prestigious choices. After his father’s execution, Markish was arrested and sent with the family to exile to Kazakhstan from 1953 to 1954.
(1859–1924), Russian rabbi, publicist, and Zionist leader. Born in Mogilev, Iakov Maze lost his father at an early age and was raised by his maternal grandfather, who gave him a thorough Jewish education. While studying at the gymnasium in Kerch (Crimea), Maze was shocked to overhear an antisemitic remark by the reputedly liberal Tsar Alexander II. Maze remained observant—unusual for his era—while studying law at Moscow University. He then practiced law for a time after graduation.
(1870–1952), political leader and Bundist activist. John Mill (also known as Yoysef Shloyme Mil) was one of the founders of the Jewish Labor Bund and a central activist during its first two decades. He was born in Panevėžys (Kovno province, Lithuania; then in tsarist Russia) to a family of acculturated Jews. Despite being exposed to some Yiddish at home, his first language was Russian, he studied in Russian public schools, and most of his childhood friends were Russian-speaking.
(1886–1964), Yiddish actor, director, translator, and essayist. Avrom Morevski (also Morewski; Menaker) was born in Vilna into a comfortable merchant family. He received both a traditional Jewish and a secular education. Drawn to theater and Russian literature, in 1905 he began performing on the Russian stage and in 1910 graduated from the Russian-language Suvorin Theater School in Saint Petersburg. He performed in Russian until 1918 when he turned to the Yiddish stage, first in Vilna and then in Łódź.
The sport organization of the Jewish Labor Bund in Poland from 1926 to 1939. Morgnshtern was also the name of the Polish Jewish section of the Socialist Workers Sport International (SWSI). With 5,000 members (more than 1,500 in Warsaw alone) and more than 170 branches, Morgnshtern was one of the largest sport organizations in Poland. Morgnshtern’s first national Congress (Land Tsuzamenfor) was held in 1929. Arbeter sportler, Morgnshtern’s monthly publication, was replaced in the 1930s by Folks-tsaytung far sport, a biweekly section of the Naye folks-tsaytung (the Bund’s daily newspaper).
(1737/48–ca.1800), Hasidic author. Mosheh Ḥayim Efrayim was born in Międzyboż (Yid., Mezhbizh; mod. Ukr., Medzhibizh); his mother, Edel, was the daughter of Yisra’el Ba‘al Shem Tov (the Besht); his father was Yeḥi’el Mikhl Ashkenazi of Mezhbizh; and his younger brother was Barukh of Mezhbizh. Mosheh Ḥayim was a preacher in Sudylków (Yid., Sudilkov), Volhynia, where he lived until shortly before his death. He is remembered chiefly as the author of Degel maḥaneh Efrayim, which was printed by his son, Ya‘akov Yeḥi’el, in Korets in 1810. The book includes traditions and stories about the Besht, with whom Mosheh Ḥayim lived until the age of 12.
(ca. 1750–1831), rabbi. Born in the village of Minkowitz (Podolia), Mosheh Münz studied with Meshulam Igra of Tysmenitsa. After marrying the daughter of a prominent rabbi, he settled in Brody where he headed a yeshiva. Later, he served as the rabbi of Vishnawitz and subsequently of Radivil. He corresponded with Yeḥezkel Landau of Prague, who regarded him highly and recommended his appointment as rabbi of Alt-Ofen (Óbuda), the second most important community in Hungary. Münz served in this post for 40 years until his death.
By the later sixteenth to early seventeenth centuries in Bohemia and then in the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, Jewish musicians began to form their own guilds. The formation of guilds raised the social status of Jewish musicians, and led to the abandonment of the older term leyts (scoffer, clown), applied in Central Europe to singers, instrumentalists, clowns, and dancers, in favor of the new, more respectable term klezmer (from kele zemer, musical instruments or vessels of song; pl., klezmorim), designating exclusively an instrumentalist. The term klezmer made its way to Germany only in the eighteenth century, with the influx of Jewish musicians from Bohemia and Poland. Klezmer was a more favorable term for a Jewish musician, in contrast to the derogatory muzikant. This distinction persisted until the later nineteenth century, when Jews gained admission to conservatories in Russia and Austria-Hungary in significant numbers.
Traditional and Instrumental Music (Music)
(1890–1918), Yiddish poet. Leyb Naydus was born in Grodno (Hrodna) to a wealthy, somewhat maskilic family. Most of his childhood was spent on a spacious estate near his birthplace, where he had private tutors for Jewish and general studies. He later attended Russian schools, but never graduated. He wrote in Russian, Hebrew, and Yiddish from an early age and published poems in the provincial Russian press. A collection of his youthful Russian poems remained unpublished.
(1812–1875), journalist, editor, and communal leader. Adolf Neustadt (Neustadtl) was exposed early in his life to the world of the Prague literati in his father’s antique bookshop. While studying at the local Piarist secondary school where his literary talent was encouraged, he also came under the wing of the maskil Peter Beer. In his youth, Neustadt made fast friendships with some of the outstanding personalities of his generation, including the publicist and political figure Ignaz Jeitteles; the journalist, editor, member of parliament, and Viennese communal leader, Ignaz Kuranda; and the high civil servant Baron Karl Hock, whose conversion did not diminish their close relationship.
(1783–1845), chief rabbi of Transylvania. In the eighteenth century, the Paneth family formed the core of the small Jewish settlement in Bielitz (Bielsko-Biała) in Austrian Silesia; the town was located between Moravia to the west and Galicia to the east. Yeḥezkel Paneth’s father Yosef (as his father before him) was a wealthy leaseholder on the estates of Christian, Graf von Haugwitz. A considerably learned man with good connections to the economic and scholarly elite, Yosef sent his teenage son to study in Moravia and Bohemia. Yeḥezkel spent two years at the Leipnik yeshiva of Barukh Fränkl-Te’omim, and from 1799 to 1802 in Prague, primarily at the yeshiva for advanced students of Yehudah Leib Fischeles. The campaign to eradicate the last vestiges of the Sabbatian movement in Prague was in full swing, led by El‘azar Fleckeles. Furthermore, the Haskalah was flourishing under the moderating influence of Barukh Jeitteles, a member of the Prague’s rabbinical court.
(1840–1919), Hebrew poet and critic. Avraham Ya‘akov Paperna was born in Kapolia (Kapyl), in the Minsk district of Russia, and was drawn to the Haskalah from an early age. In 1859, Paperna’s family moved to Bobruisk, and a year later he married. From 1862 to 1864, he studied at the rabbinical seminary in Zhitomir, and from 1864 to 1867 he was at the rabbinical seminary in Vilna. After teaching for a short time at a government school in Zakroczym, Poland (1868), he was appointed to teach religion at the government secondary school in Plotsk. During World War I, he fled to Bobruisk in 1915, and subsequently to Odessa, where he remained until his death.
(1814–1857), Hebrew printer, publisher, and bookseller. The son of impoverished parents, Wolf Pascheles earned his livelihood from childhood by tutoring in Prague and its immediate vicinity. In 1828, he edited and published a book of German prayers for Jewish women titled Deutsche Gebete für Frauen (in German with Hebrew letters), whose popularity was evidenced by the appearance of several editions under various titles. In 1832, during the cholera epidemic in Prague, Pascheles edited a booklet containing the prayers and seliḥot (penitential prayers) of Rabbi Eli‘ezer Ashkenazi. With the money earned from editions of the Hebrew and Yiddish prayer books, Pascheles in 1836 opened Prague’s first Hebrew bookshop—selling both new and used books—and another in Brno in 1844.
(1893–1960), prominent official of the Communist International (Comintern), Romanian Communist leader, and foreign minister of Romania. Born Ana Rabinsohn to impoverished Orthodox Jewish parents, Ana Pauker grew up in Bucharest and began teaching Hebrew and Judaica at a Jewish community school when she was 17 or 18. In 1915 she joined the fledgling Romanian Workers Social Democratic Party and supported its pro-Bolshevik wing after the 1917 Russian Revolution; four years later, she and her husband, the Romanian Jewish socialist Marcel Pauker, emerged within the leading ranks of the newly formed Romanian Communist Party (RCP).
(1888–1943), novelist. Yoshue Perle was born in Radom (central Poland); his father was a merchant. After several years of traditional Jewish education, Perle was sent to a Russian school and became a bookkeeper. At age 17, he made his way to Warsaw, where he worked in a bank. His free time was spent in reading literature, visiting the theater, and meeting with other young Jewish writers. His first work in Yiddish, an article titled “Shabes,” was published in 1908.
(1890–1950), Yiddish writer. Shmuel Persov was born in the shtetl of Pochep, Ukraine, to the family of a religious teacher. In addition to receiving a traditional Jewish education, he read secular books at a private library organized with the assistance of the Hebrew writer Uri Nisan Gnessin. Persov was a member of the Bund in 1905 and 1906. Later, he moved to the United States, where he published short stories in the anarchist newspaper Fraye arbeter shtime (Free Workers’ Voice).
(ca. 1460–after 1532), regarded as the first rosh yeshivah in Poland and as the inventor of a unique method of Talmud study. Although his name suggests Polish origins, Ya‘akov Pollak was apparently born in Germany, or at least he grew up and was educated there. He was a student of Ya‘akov Margaliot, the outstanding rosh yeshivah in Germany of that time, in Nuremberg or in Regensburg.
(1901–1942), Hebrew poet and translator. Berl Pomerantz was born in Odrizhin, a village near Pinsk. From his youth, he was an avid reader of Hebrew, Yiddish, and Russian literature. After the Revolution of 1917, his family moved to Janów; later, Pomerantz went on his own to Vilna, where he was admitted to the Hebrew Teachers Seminary and to the conservatory. While in Vilna he became fluent in Polish; he then taught Hebrew and Bible at the Tarbut secondary school in Janów.
Demographic sources for the entire period before the end of the nineteenth century are not nearly as reliable as those for more recent times. Readers should note, therefore, that the data presented below are speculative and based on the “best guesses” of scholars. A partial exception is material gleaned from the 1764–1765 census of Jews in the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, which is somewhat better documented.
Population and Migration before World War I (Population and Migration)
In the course of the nineteenth century, the geographical center of Hebrew and Yiddish printing shifted decisively to Eastern Europe. Demographic and cultural changes in European Jewry dovetailed with changing patterns of consumption and modes of reading. In addition, economic and technological transformations in the print industry helped to shape a new Jewish print culture. In this new environment, the premodern staples of the Jewish print corpus were joined and to some extent supplanted by Jewish versions of the media and genres common to the modern pan-European sphere.
Printing and Publishing after 1800 (Printing and Publishing)
Town in northeastern Romania, in the region of southern Bucovina and the present county of Suceava. Jews first settled in Rădăuți (Ger., Radautz), at the end of the eighteenth century, along with German colonists from Bohemia who had been invited to Bucovina by the Austrian regime established after 1774. Whereas in 1807 there had been only three Jewish tax-paying families, in 1880 there were 3,452 Jews living in Rădăuți out of a total of 11,162 inhabitants. The Jewish population swelled to almost 7,000 people by 1914, mainly as a result of emigration from Galicia and Ukraine.
(1860–1934), politician and Zionist leader. Born in Pinsk, Shimshon Rosenboim studied at the Volozhin yeshiva and, after obtaining a high school diploma, went on to study law at universities in Vienna and Odessa. He established a law practice in Minsk and was involved in a number of cases of a political character and seeking redress for pogrom victims. He was also very active in the Zionist movement, becoming one of its leaders in Russia and participating in the First Zionist Congress in 1897 and many subsequent congresses (he was among the leaders of the opposition to Herzl’s so-called Uganda plan in 1903). In 1906, he was elected to the Russian Duma (parliament), objecting strenuously when it was disbanded.
(1906–1987), prose writer, critic, and translator. Rivke Rubin was born into a family of artisans in Minsk. In 1930, she received a degree from the literature faculty of the Minsk Pedagogical Institute and took graduate studies at the Belorussian Academy of Sciences. She later taught Yiddish literature and literary theory at the Minsk Pedagogical Institute. In 1934, Rubin moved to Moscow and began teaching in that city’s Pedagogical Institute’s Yiddish department.
(1891–1967), jurist, journalist, and public figure. Ruvn Rubinshteyn had a traditional religious education and graduated from the Kagan Jewish Secondary School in Vilna. In 1910, he moved to Saint Petersburg, where he graduated from the law faculty of Saint Petersburg University and also attended the Jewish seminars for oriental studies of Baron David Gintsburg. In 1913 he joined the Organization of Zionist Student Youth He-Ḥaver. From August 1917 to February 1918 he edited Evreiskii student (Jewish Student), and from January to August 1918, the Zionist daily Unzer togblat (Our Daily Newspaper). For a time, Rubinshetyn served as secretary to Moisei Aizenshtadt, the Saint Petersburg crown rabbi.
(1880–1945), rabbi and Zionist leader. Born in Dotnuva, Lithuania, Yitsḥak Rubinstein studied at yeshivas in Kovno, Slutsk, and Volozhin as well as at the University of Moscow. He was appointed rabbi of Genicheck, Ukraine, in 1906, and in 1910 was chosen as the government-appointed rabbi of Vilna, with the support of the Orthodox community. During World War I, he remained in Vilna, representing the interests of Jews before the Russian and German authorities, and was one of the heads of the Merkaz le-‘Ezrah, a center for providing humanitarian aid.
Organization created in January 1996 at a founding congress in Moscow with the declared goal of unifying all Jewish organizations in Russia. The charter of the Russian Jewish Congress (Rossiiskii Evreiskii Kongress; REK) declares it to be “a Jewish social and nonpolitical organization operating on the territory of the Russian Federation.” It is registered as a welfare fund.
(1795–1858), humorist, poet, feature writer, and literary and theater critic. The son of a Jewish businessman from one of the most prominent Jewish families in Hungary, Moritz (Moses) Saphir received a traditional Jewish education and subsequently attended yeshivas in Pressburg (Bratislava) and Prague. In Prague he taught himself secular sciences, foreign languages, and world literature; he later studied the classics in Pest. Never having learned proper Hungarian, he consciously decided to adopt German culture at a time when Jews began to assimilate into Hungarian society. Saphir thus realized one of the alternative models of self-definition available to Hungarian Jewish intellectuals.
Ultraconservative, anti-Zionist Hasidic sect founded in 1928 by Yo’el Teitelbaum (Reb Yoelish; 1887–1979) in the town of Szatmár (Hun., more properly Szatmárnémeti; now Rom., Satu Mare), the youngest son of the Hasidic rebbe of Sighet (Rom., more fully, Sighet Marmației; Hun., Máramarossziget or Sziget), Ḥananyah Yom Tov Lipa Teitelbaum (1836–1904), author of the biblical commentary Kedushat Yom Tov (1905). Ḥananyah had succeeded his father, Yekuti’el Yehudah Teitelbaum (1808–1883), who served as rabbi of Sighet from 1858 and is best known for his biblical homilies, Yitav lev (5 vols.; 1875). Yekuti’el Yehudah, who allied himself with the Sandz dynasty and struggled to establish Sighet as his own dynastic base in the face of opposition from followers of Vizhnits Hasidism, was the grandson of one of the most prominent figures in the history of Hungarian Hasidism, Mosheh Teitelbaum (1759–1841). A disciple of Ya`akov Yitsḥak Horowitz, the Seer of Lublin, Mosheh was the rabbi of Uyhel (Sátoraljaújhely), and the author of the seminal, multivolume Hasidic biblical commentary Yismaḥ Mosheh (5 vols.; 1848–1861).
(Hun., Szatmárnémeti; Yid., Satmar; also Satmer), a small town in northwestern Romania. Satu Mare was part of Hungary until World War I and again between 1940 and 1944. Jews first appeared there toward the early eighteenth century: they distilled brandy and leased taverns on crown estates. In 1715, however, when Satu Mare became a royal town, their influx came to a halt and Jews who had arrived earlier were expelled. Allowed to come into town just for fairs, Jews did not begin to resettle until the 1820s. Jewish arrivals accelerated in the 1850s: by 1869 the Jewish population had grown to 1,357; by 1890 to 3,427; and by 1910 to 7,194 (representing 7.4%, 16.5%, and 20.6% of the total population, respectively). By 1941, there were 12,960 Jews in Satu Mare—24.9 percent of the total number of residents.
(1887–1933), rabbi, educator, Sejm deputy, and leader of Agudas Yisroel. Me’ir Shapira was born in Shotz, Bucovina (today Suceava, Romania), to a Hasidic family of prominent lineage. By the time he reached adolescence, he had already been granted ordination by prestigious rabbis. Gaining renown as a scholar, Shapira married the daughter of Ya‘akov Breitman, a wealthy businessman from Tarnopol and a Hasid of the rebbe of Czortków, to whom Shapiro transferred his allegiance. At various points in his career, Shapira himself took on some of the mannerisms of a Hasidic rebbe. The young rabbi served congregations in Gliniany (1910–1920) and Sanok (1920–1924). In both communities he distinguished himself by his rhetorical ability and zealousness both in carrying out the duties of the rabbinate and in setting up and supervising traditional educational institutions for the young. His first book was Imre da‘at, on the weekly Torah portions (1910).
(1555–1631), rabbinical scholar and interpreter of the Talmud. Known as Maharsha—an acronym for “Our teacher, (the) Rabbi Shemu’el Edels (Adels)”—Edels was born in Kraków. He was a descendant of Yehudah Ḥasid on his father’s side, and was a member of the family of Yehudah Leib ben Betsal’el (Maharal of Prague) on his mother’s. He studied Torah in Poznań, where he married the daughter of his uncle, Mosheh Ashkenazi-Halperin (Lifshits), the rabbi of Brisk (Brest Litovsk). His wealthy mother-in-law, Edel, supported his yeshiva for 20 years, in recognition of which he adopted the name Edels.
Shemu’el Eli‘ezer ben Yehudah ha-Levi Edels
(d. 1648), kabbalist. Shimshon of Ostropolye’s name suggests that he may have been born, or else lived for a time, in the Volhynian town of Ostropolye (Ostropol). Little is known about his life beyond the fact that he died a martyr’s death in July 1648, during the Khmel’nyts’kyi massacre in the town of Polnoye (Pol., Połonne), where he served as resident preacher. According to Natan Hannover’s contemporary account of the event, Yeven metsulah (1653), a heavenly teacher (magid), who used to appear to Shimshon regularly and instruct him in the secrets of the Kabbalah, had warned him in advance of the impending catastrophe and advised him to call on the community to repent in order to avert it—which they did, but to no avail.
(1860–1939), Lithuanian Talmudist. Shim‘on Shkop studied in the Mir and Volozhin yeshivas, where he stood out as a brilliant student. In Volozhin he met Ḥayim Soloveichik, who became his principal teacher and greatly influenced his approach to Talmud study.
(1890–1957), rabbi of the Moscow Choral Synagogue. Born in Smila, Kiev province (now Smela, Cherkassy province), Solomon (Shelomoh) Shlifer worked as a rabbi in Aleksandria, later Aleksandrovka (Kherson province), from 1913 to 1922. He then moved to Moscow, where he became secretary to the city rabbinate and served as a dayan (rabbinic judge) until the Moscow rabbinic court was liquidated at the end of the 1920s. From then until 1943 Shlifer worked as a bookkeeper.
(1880–1960), rabbi and Zionist activist. Gustav (Benjamin Ze’ev) Sicher was born in Klatovy, in the Czech lands. He studied medicine in Vienna but decided to become a rabbi. Later he completed a doctoral dissertation in philosophy under František Drtina at the Charles University in Prague.
(ca. 1550–ca. 1619), Polish rabbi, probably born in Grodno or nearby Tykocin, possibly in the territory disputed by both communities, for he was called Binyamin Horodno (Grodno) on the title page of the 1606 Italian translation of his 1577 work Seyder mitsves noshim. Slonik (also Solnik) served as rabbi in Podhajce and Silesia, and claims to have been “in Russia in [his] youth” (Mas’at Binyamin, no. 62), probably referring to southeastern Poland, that is, Ruthenia, sometimes known as Red Russia (Ruś Czerwona). He lived in Kraków for a time before and after the death of Mosheh Isserles in 1572, but there is a question about whether he served there as a rabbi.
(1905–1993), Polish and Soviet Yiddish writer and editor. Born to a poor family in the town of Zambrów, Poland, Hersh Smolar (also rendered Smolyar) attended primary school until the age of 11, when he began working, and soon became involved in revolutionary activities. He was a leader of the local branch of the Jewish Socialist Youth Association from 1918 to 1920. During the 1920 Polish–Soviet War, Smolar belonged to a revolutionary committee that had formed in Zambrów when the Red Army had occupied the town.
(1821–1886), halakhist, Orthodox leader, and ideologue. Ḥayim Sofer’s grandfather, a native of Frankfurt am Main, settled in Pressburg (Bratislava; then in northwest Hungary, today in Slovakia) toward the end of the eighteenth century. Sofer’s father, Mordekhai Efrayim Fishel, was a religious functionary in the community and a close disciple and confidant (though not a relative) of Mosheh Sofer (known as Ḥatam Sofer, 1762–1839). Although initially Ḥayim Sofer’s father opposed rabbinic careers for his seven sons, the Sofers became one of the major rabbinical families in Hungary. Ḥayim (the sixth son) received his training at Ḥatam Sofer’s yeshiva and internalized the antimodernist approach of his mentor exemplified in the famous slogan, “that which is new is biblically forbidden.”
Sofer, Ḥayim ben Mordekhai Efrayim Fishel
(ca. 1893–1943), Hebrew translator, writer, and Judaic studies scholar. Edmund (Menaḥem Mendel) Stein was born either in Dobromyl or Borynia, shtetls in eastern Galicia. He received a traditional education, continued his studies at a high school in Borysław, and later studied classical linguistics and ancient history in Kraków and Berlin, earning a doctoral degree. In 1929, he completed his studies at the Hochschule für die Wissenschaft des Judentums in Berlin, as a student of Leo Baeck and Julius Guttman.
Rabbinic scholars and public figures in nineteenth-century Vilna. Shemu’el Strashun (1793–1872) continued the Lithuanian style of scholarship that had been formulated by the Gaon of Vilna. Shemu’el’s son Matityahu (1817–1885) was a rabbi and a prominent maskil, biblical commentator, bibliographer, historian, and community organizer.
A town in southeastern Lithuania, Trakai was home to many Jews as well as to the most ancient and important Karaite community in the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth. The town was founded before 1321 and served as the ancient capital of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. Known as Troki in Polish, and Trok in Yiddish, Trakai (its official Lithuanian name today) was in the Commonwealth until 1795, when it became part of the Russian Empire. Between 1922 and 1939 it belonged to the Polish Republic, and since 1939 it has been part of the Republic of Lithuania. It is located 25 km west of Vilnius.
(1836–1913), Yiddish folk poet and songwriter. Known as Lyokemke Badkhn (Elyokem the Wedding Entertainer) and the “people’s bard,” Elyokem Tsunzer was born in Vilna (then Russia)—in 1841 rather than 1836, according to his own account—and died in New York, where he is buried in Washington Cemetery, Brooklyn. Tsunzer received a heder education but was raised when ideas of the Haskalah were reaching Eastern Europe; consequently, his years spanned modernization of Jewish life in Russia, eventual emancipation of Jews, secularization, Jewish participation in modern political movements, and the creation of specifically Jewish movements such as Zionism and Yiddishism.
Town in southeastern Moravia, in the present Czech Republic. Jews probably settled in Uherský Brod (Ger., Ungarisch Brod) as early as the thirteenth century, but they are first mentioned in a municipal document dating from 1470. In 1558, there were 4 Jewish families, presumably attracted by the growing trade between the German lands and Hungary, and in 1615 the number rose to 18.
Prominent family in nineteenth-century Hungary; active as rabbis and business leaders. The Ullmann (Ulman) family originated in Fürth and was related to the Steinhardt family. Isser Yisra’el Ullmann’s four sons—Shalom (d. 1825), Avraham (d. ca. 1823), Mosheh, and Zalman—went to Hungary in the late eighteenth century. The oldest brother, known as Shalom Ḥarif because of his sharp mind, served as rabbi of Ansbach, Germany, later of Stompfa (Stampfen) between 1792 and 1799, of Somogy county from 1799 to 1802, and of Frauenkirchen (Boldogasszony), before establishing an important yeshiva in the Burgenland community of Lakenbach (Lakompak).
(1877–1938), Bund and Evsektsiia activist, then Soviet government official. Born in Vilna, Vainshtein, who used the pseudonym Rakhmiel, graduated from that city’s Jewish teachers’ institute in 1897. The following year he joined the Bund in Warsaw, and in 1901 (at the Bund’s Fourth Congress) became a member of its Central Committee. Vainshtein published widely in the Bundist Yiddish press (Arbeter shtime; Folks-tsaytung). He was arrested several times for revolutionary activity and was exiled to Siberia in 1914. Subsequently, after the February 1917 Revolution, he returned to Petrograd.
Town in the Moldavian region of Romania. Jewish settlement dates from the middle of the eighteenth century, with numbers increasing in the nineteenth century due to immigration from Galicia and Russia and occasional periods of decrease during times such as the cholera epidemic of 1848.
(1900–1942), writer, art critic, and philosopher. Dvora Vogel was born in Burshtyn in Galicia into an intellectual family. During World War I, the family fled to Vienna. Upon their return, Vogel attended high school in Lwów and then studied philosophy and psychology at the universities of Lwów and Kraków. Her first literary efforts were in German, but subsequently Vogel switched to Yiddish, allegedly under the influence of her friend and fellow student Rokhl Oyerbakh (Rachel Auerbach).
(1903–1946), poet. Ilarie Voronca (Eduard Marcus) was born in Brăila, Romania. After graduating from law school in Bucharest, he worked for various insurance companies and banks and traveled on several occasions to Paris, where he settled in 1933. His first anthology, Restrişti (Hard Times), was published in 1923 with illustrations by Victor Brauner. The poems reveal the poet’s desperation in words sounding like stifled screams, and tell of his anguish when faced with the monotony of life in the shtetls of Moldavia, the region where most of Romania’s Jews lived. Nine more volumes followed: Colomba (An Ode to the Beloved Woman; 1927), Ulisse (1928), Plante şi animale (Plants and Animals; 1929), Brățara nopților (The Bracelet of the Nights; 1929), Zodiac (1930), Invitație la bal (Invitation to the Ball; 1931), Incantații (Incantations; 1931), Petre Schlemihl (1932), and Patmos (1933).
(1900–1967), poet, prose writer, and publicist. Aleksander Wat (born Chwat) studied philosophy and psychology at the University of Warsaw. As a young poet, Wat cofounded the Polish futurist movement and participated in the drafting of its manifestos. He also coedited avant-garde literary journals and expressed his pro-Communist sympathies in the left-wing press. Imprisoned by the Soviets in 1940–1941, he spent the remainder of World War II in Kazakhstan and returned to Poland in 1946. Seriously ill, Wat traveled several times for treatment to France, where he eventually settled in 1963.
(1833–1916), writer. Pauline Wengeroff is the author of the two-volume Memoiren einer Grossmutter, Bilder aus der Kulturgeschichte der Juden Russlands im 19 Jahrhundert (Memoirs of a Grandmother: Scenes from the Cultural History of the Jews of Russia in the Nineteenth Century; vol. 1, 1908; republished with vol. 2, 1910; subsequent editions in 1913, 1919, and 1922). Written after the close of the era of the Haskalah, the memoirs offer a sweeping perspective on Russian Jewry’s passage from traditionalism to modernity. They paint a rich portrait of traditional society as modernity began to make inroads; depict the unraveling of this society under the impact of tsarist policies and the lure of Haskalah; and portray the devastating effect this dissolution had on families and, especially, women.
(1855–1941), physician, public leader, and Zionist activist. Jakub Wygodzki was born in Bobruisk (Bobruysk). In 1860, his family moved to Vilna, where he received a traditional Jewish education. He completed his high school studies in Marijampole and then attended medical school at the University of Saint Petersburg. Following additional studies in Vienna, Berlin, and Paris, he returned to Vilna, where he served as a gynecologist, pediatrician, and medical researcher and writer. He also established and chaired the Society of Jewish Physicians.
(1726–1781), Hasidic leader in Galicia. Yeḥi’el Mikhl was born in Brody. His father, Yitsḥak of Drohobycz (d. ca. 1760), a scholar and kabbalist, was a magid, rabbi, and dayan in Ostróg, Brody, and other towns. A Hasid of the “old” type, Yitsḥak had contact with the Besht but nevertheless remained independent. Renowned both as a wonder worker and as an uncompromising person, Yitsḥak was undeterred by friction with important contemporary rabbis.
In Eastern Europe, the concept of yikhes evolved from a narrow biological meaning of lineage or genealogy to a prestigious trait that could be acquired through marriage based on scholarly merit, wealth, or political status (i.e., holders of rabbinical or communal offices).
(ca. 1180–ca. 1250), legal scholar. Usually referred to as Yitsḥak Or Zaru‘a from the title of his main work, Yitsḥak ben Mosheh was born in Bohemia. He studied in Prague with Yitsḥak ben Ya‘akov ha-Lavan, the latter’s son Ya‘akov ben Yitsḥak, and Avraham ben ‘Azri’el (the “Old Man of Bohemia”).
The Yiddish term yizker-bikher (sg., yizker-bukh) has come to refer primarily to a vast body of memorial books commemorating Jewish communities destroyed in the Holocaust, primarily from prewar Poland though also throughout Eastern Europe (similar works have been created for other parts of Europe and the Mediterranean region). Survivors and émigrés from various communities that have organized landsmanshaftn (associations of Jews from the same hometowns abroad) in the United States, Israel, and elsewhere have produced many hundreds of such books, generally in Yiddish and/or Hebrew.
Literary journal edited by Shmuel Niger and published in Vilna by Boris Kletskin from January 1913 until April 1915. Di yudishe velt (in modern orthography, Di yidishe velt; The Jewish World) was considered the most influential Yiddish journal of its type to appear in Eastern Europe before World War I. Each issue of this Russian-style “thick” monthly was as long as 160 pages and included belles lettres, literary criticism, essays on philology and ethnography, and in-depth journalistic pieces known as publitsitik.
Youth movement of the Left Po‘ale Tsiyon Party, literally meaning youth in Yiddish. Founded in 1904 in Galicia, Yugnt worked in parallel with two organizations: the student youth organization Frayer Shoymer (The Free Scout), whose membership consisted of Polish-speaking gymnasium students in Warsaw, from 1926; and the children’s movement Yungbor (Yung Borokhovisten [Young Borochovists, after the Labor Zionist Ber Borokhov]), which was primarily a scouting organization, from 1927. Yet another youth group affiliated with Yugnt was the sports union Shtern, the only Jewish sports organization that was a member of a general socialist Polish sports union.
(1829–1893), banker, philanthropist, and public figure. Avraam Zak was born into a well-established family in Bobruisk (now Bobruysk, Belarus), where he may have been influenced by local maskilim. He was self-taught, mostly in mathematics and later in economics, and showed an interest in Hebrew literature and music.
(1859–1941), rabbi, public figure, and writer. Yehudah Leib Zirelson (also Tsirel’son) was born in the shtetl of Kozelets, Chernigov province (mod. Ukr., Chernihiv). After receiving rabbinical ordination, he was chosen to serve as the spiritual rabbi of the town of Priluki in Poltava province. In 1907, he was also appointed to be the town’s crown (government-approved) rabbi, and from 1908 he served as both the spiritual and crown rabbi in Kishinev.
(1860–1930), Hebrew and Yiddish journalist, writer, and critic. Shemu’el Leib Zitron was born in Minsk and received most of his education from his father. After his father’s death in 1870, Zitron studied at various yeshivas, including Volozhin (1875–1876), where he was attracted to the Haskalah. In 1876 he went to Vienna, where he befriended the writer and editor Perets Smolenskin.
(Association of Brothers; Pol., Przymierze Braci), cultural and social organization. Founded in Lemberg (Lwów) in 1882, Agudas Akhim aimed to sever the traditional connection of Galician Jewry to German language and culture and to strive for integration within the Galician Polish sphere. Behind Agudas Akhim was a group of youths in their last years of high school as well as university students; its most prominent early leaders were Alfred Nossig, Adolf Lilien, Wilhelm Feldman, and Herman Diamand.
(1890–1943), leader of the Polish Bund, and of Poland’s Jewish trade union movement. Wiktor Alter was born in Mława to a Hasidic family. His father, a wood merchant, died when Alter was a year old; subsequently, the family moved to Warsaw. Alter was educated in a public school, as his stepfather wanted his children to receive a secular education. When Alter was 15, the 1905 Revolution broke out. He and other students at his Warsaw gymnasium organized a students’ strike to protest the fact that studies were conducted in Russian rather than Polish.
(1894–1950), publicist, writer, and translator. In the period between the two world wars, Jakub Appenszlak was a member of the editorial board of the Warsaw daily Nasz Przegląd, publisher of the literary weekly Lektura (1934), chair of the Jewish Association for the Advancement of Fine Arts, and a Zionist activist. He published poetry, a novel, and translations of works by Theodore Herzl, Sholem Aleichem, and Sholem Asch. He also wrote the screenplay for Henryk Bojm’s film Shaḥar, yom ve-lailah shel Erets Yisra’el (1934).
(1868–1953), author, playwright, editor, and journalist in Hebrew, Yiddish, German, and Polish. Gershom Bader was born in Kraków and was a representative figure of the mid-nineteenth-century East European Haskalah. He was the son of a learned melamed (teacher), descendant of a line of prominent rabbis, and a scholar who wrote novels under a pseudonym.
(1570–1634), financier, merchant, and court Jew. Born in Italy (likely in Verona), Ya‘akov Bassevi of Treuenberg (also known as Bazzevi, Passeni, Bashe [from Heb., Bat Sheva], and Jakob Schmiles) went to Prague with his brother Samuel at the end of the sixteenth century. In 1599, both brothers were granted imperial privileges of free trade, similar to those given to Mordecai Maisel a few years earlier. These privileges were later confirmed by Emperor Mathias in 1611, who named Bassevi his court Jew.
(1901–1979), Hebrew poet and one of the most influential female figures in Hebrew modernism. Yokheved Bat-Miriam (born Zhelezhiak) completed pedagogical courses in Kharkov and then studied at universities in Odessa and Moscow. She immigrated to Palestine in 1928.
(1883–1941), prose writer and poet. The blind poet Oskar Baum was a member of the Prague Circle of German-speaking Jewish writers in the first decades of the twentieth century as well as a particularly close friend of Franz Kafka, to whom the author read his early drafts of “The Metamorphosis” and other manuscripts. As was the case with Kafka and the rest of this informal literary group, Baum was a German writer of Jewish background in a period of intense Czech nationalist challenge to German cultural hegemony.
Hungarian German-language periodical published initially in 1844 and then between 1858 and 1867, edited by Leopold Löw. When Löw published what was to be the first Jewish periodical in Hungary, Ben Chananja: Blätter für israelitisch-ungarische Angelegenheiten in 1844, his choice of German was praised by contemporaries as realistic, given that few Hungarian Jews at the time were fluent in Magyar. The quarterly was discontinued after the pilot issue.
(1895–1971), writer, playwright, and journalist. Ury Benador (Simon Schmidt) was born in southern Bucovina in the village of Milişăuți; his father was an impoverished tailor and the family had many children. As a teenager, Benador was forced to leave school to work at various trades. He began to write in Yiddish, his mother tongue, and contributed his first works in 1916 to Der hamer. He continued to publish sporadically in Yiddish until the 1940s, but eventually made Romanian his language of preference.
(in some sources, Ber Birkenthal; 1723–1805), wine merchant, Hebrew writer, and memoirist. Born in the Polish province of Ruthenia (later Galicia), Ber of Bolechów proves the existence of a class of men within the eighteenth-century Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth whose worldviews encompassed deep traditional Jewish learning and broad secular knowledge even before the formal Jewish Enlightenment movement began in Eastern Europe.
(1892–1961), Jewish folklorist and ethnomusicologist. Born in Ukraine into the family of a melamed (itinerant teacher), Moisei Beregovskii was given a traditional Jewish heder education. In 1905 he went to Kiev, where he received an external degree for high school studies (1912), learned music theory, and took cello lessons; from 1915 to 1920, he studied at the Kiev Conservatory (cello with Friedrich von Müllert, composition theory with Boleslav Yavorski). From 1916 to 1922, Beregovskii taught music at various Jewish schools and conducted the chorus at the Kiev Society for Jewish Music.
(1860–1940), historian, journalist, editor, and translator. Shim‘on Bernfeld was born in Stanisławów, Galicia (now Ivano-Frankivs’k, Ukraine). In the face of persecution by Hasidic circles in Stanisławów, Bernfeld’s father, who was a maskil, relocated in 1872 to Lwów, where Shim‘on took up Hebrew and general studies. When he was 17, he became acquainted with other young maskilim in Lwów and began reading the works of Voltaire, Rousseau, Goethe, Schiller, and Spinoza.
(1871–1908), Hebrew writer. Born in the village of Zimoshti in the Grodno region, Yesha‘yahu Bershadsky (originally surnamed Domashevitski) received a private education in Hebrew and Russian. From 1887 he worked as a teacher in Białystok. In 1889, he started publishing articles in Ha-Melits, and in the early 1890s, his stories appeared in Ha-Tsefirah. He moved to Baku in 1896, and from there to Ekaterinoslav, where he taught and compiled his principal works.
(1772–1831), Hebrew writer, satirist, translator, and merchant. Ya‘akov Shemu’el Bick was one of the most prominent figures in the first generation of Galician maskilim but was eventually drawn to Hasidism. He was born in Brody in eastern Galicia, a major commercial town that became famous, in those years, as a focal point in the conflict between Hasidism and its opponents.
Jewish youth movement that functioned between 1927 and 1937, mainly in the Vilna district and the city of Vilna. Bin (Bee), whose name derives from the original intention of shaping the movement as a structured hierarchical system similar to that of a beehive, was a movement for children and young people (ages 8 to 17). The movement also included a level of senior members, who served primarily as leaders. Its founders were Yiddishist culture activists whose political tendencies were Folkist-socialist; Max Weinreich, who headed the movement, had the most profound impact on its character. Throughout its existence, the movement had a total membership of several thousand.
City in central Romania, in the Bîrsei Depression at the foot of the Tîmpa Massif. Braşov has been variously called Kronstadt (Ger.), Corona (Lat.), and Brassó (Hun.); from 1950 to 1960 its official name was Stalin City. The first references to the town’s Jewish population date from the fifteenth century. In the 1500s, Jewish traders supplied guilds in Braşov with wool and dyes from the Ottoman Empire. Once Jewish residence was restricted to the city of Alba Iulia in the 1600s, there was no further mention of a Jewish presence in Braşov until a plague in Walachia in 1811 compelled several Jewish families to take refuge in this city.
(1827–1906), scholar of rabbinic literature and public activist in Lwów. Salomon (Shelomoh) Buber’s family provided him with a traditional education. His father’s rich and varied library of Talmudic and rabbinic texts enabled Buber to avail himself of homiletic sources that would become the mainstay of his scholarly activity. As a young man, Buber also immersed himself in the writings of the forerunners of the scientific study of Judaism and was influenced greatly by Naḥman Krochmal, Shelomoh Yehudah Rapoport, and Leopold Zunz. Married at age 20, he made his living from business, which afforded him a comfortable lifestyle.
Town in northeastern Romania, situated in southern Bucovina, currently in the county of Suceava. The early Jews who lived there—mainly small tradesmen but also farmers—were first mentioned in 1684. Following the occupation of Bucovina by the Austrian army in 1774, there were 46 Jews recorded as residing in Câmpulung; however, measures implemented by the authorities to prevent Galician Jews from settling there led to the banishment of eight Jewish families from Câmpulung in 1781.
Yiddish folklore about Christmas exemplifies the complex understanding that East European Jews evolved of their neighbors’ religiosity. Documentation of this lore, while limited, appears in a variety of linguistic and folkloristic sources dating from the early twentieth century. Ignatz Bernstein’s 1908 collection of Yiddish sayings offers a single proverb—Nitl iz a beyzer layd (Christmas is a wicked burden)—and explains that this saying reflects a history of violence against Jews on Christmas Eve from the time of the Middle Ages.
Town in southwest Romania; capital of the province of Oltenia. In the eighteenth century, Craiova was a craft center and a hub for specialists in dressing and tanning skins and hides, as there was demand for such products in the neighboring markets of the Habsburg Empire.
(1925–1968), fiction writer, poet, translator, and Soviet dissident. Born in Moscow, Daniel’ went from school directly to the front lines of World War II, where he was wounded and demobilized. Upon his return, he graduated from the Moscow Pedagogical Institute and began publishing his poems and translations. Beginning in the 1950s, he smuggled his works to the West, where they were issued under the pseudonym Nikolai Arzhak. In the fall of 1965, this activity led to his arrest, as well as to the arrest of his fellow writer Andrei Siniavskii, a non-Jew who had published abroad under the Jewish-sounding name Abram Terts. In February 1966, Daniel’ was sentenced to five years in labor camp, an experience reflected in his poetry. His works were not officially published in Russia until after his death.
(1886–1938), Soviet government and Communist Party figure. Semen Dimanshtein, first known as Shimon Dimanshtein, was born into the family of a craftsman in Sebezh and studied at the Slobodka and Lubavitch yeshivas. He received two rabbinical ordinations, one of which was from the renowned rabbi Ḥayim Ozer Grodzenski. However, by 1904 Dimanshtein had joined the Russian Social Democratic Workers Party in Vilna and worked at translating the party platform into Hebrew and Yiddish. He soon joined the Bolsheviks and participated in their struggle with the Bund.
(1855–1920), socialist ideologist, theoretician, and literary critic. Solomon Katz, known later in Romania under the pseudonym Constantin Dobrogeanu-Gherea, was born in Slavianka, Ukraine, and attended elementary school in his native village and secondary school in Ekaterinoslav. In 1872, Dobrogeanu-Gherea left for Kharkov and studied at the faculty of science. He joined student revolutionary (Narodnik) circles, traveling to villages to spread propaganda among the peasants. Constantly followed by the police, he crossed the border into Romania in March 1875. One month later, he left for Switzerland, where numerous Russian revolutionaries had emigrated, and then in May came to Iaşi, where he was involved with socialist Romanian student and intellectual groups.
(1878–1950), Russian and Yiddish writer, playwright, and journalist. Osip Dymov (also Dymow; Yosef Perelman) was born in Białystok, where his father was a merchant; Dymov’s brother, Iakov (1882–1942), was a well-known popular-science writer. Following graduation from a technical high school in 1896, Dymov studied land surveying at the Forestry Institute in Saint Petersburg. He began his literary career as a columnist for Teatr i iskusstvo (Theater and Art), a weekly in that city. As was the case with many Yiddish writers of his generation, Dymov immigrated to the United States.
Two groups of literary works were translated from Hebrew into East Slavic in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The first group, earlier and shorter than the other, consists mainly of historical accounts integrated into Russian compilations, that is, into universal chronicles called chronographs. Notable among these are excerpts from the tenth-century Hebrew Yosipon (an anonymous Hebrew chronicle based on the works of Josephus Flavius) in the Akademicheskii Khronograf (Academy Chronograph) describing, for example, Zerubbabel and King Darius, Alexander the Great in Jerusalem, the persecutions under Antiochus Epiphanes, and the Maccabean revolt. Also among these is a complete translation of a later reworking of the last part of the Yosipon, preserved in Hebrew in a single manuscript dated to 1462, recounting the siege of Jerusalem and the destruction of the Second Temple. In Slavic, the latter is titled Plenenie Ierusalima Tretee, Titovo (The Third Sacking of Jerusalem, by Titus) and is integrated into the second redaction of the Ellinskii i Rimskii Letopisec (Hellenic and Roman Chronicler). The Paleia Tolkovaia (Interpreted Palaea) includes a translation of the Zhitie i voskhod Moiseia (Chronicle of Moses Our Teacher).
As operational units of the Sicherheitsdienst (Security Service; SD) and Sicherheitspolizei (Security Police; Sipo), the Einsatzgruppen (Action Squads) accompanied the German army during the Nazi conquests of Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland, and the Soviet Union. Their main task was to eliminate political opposition.
(1830–1908), rabbi, scholar, and halakhic authority. Born in Bobruisk, Belorussia, Yeḥi’el Mikhl Epstein was successively the brother-in-law and then the father-in-law of Naftali Tsevi Yehudah Berlin, head of the Volozhin yeshiva. In 1862, Epstein was appointed rabbi of Novozybkov in Chernigov guberniia. From 1874, he served as rabbi of the Novogrudok community in northern Belorussia.
East European Jewry commonly adhered to Ashkenazic legal traditions and customs in family matters even as people were exposed to new Sephardic traditions through close ties to Jews in the Ottoman Empire and Italy. Even as emerging political states strove for standardization, family practices and arrangements remained diverse, reflecting a wide range of collective strategies and individual interests.
(1760–ca. 1817), Hebrew poet, novelist, playwright, and linguist. Born in Przedbórz (in the Kraków district), Tuviah Feder wandered from Piotrków Trybunalski where his father-in-law lived, to Chełm, Kempen, Wołodarka, Berdichev, and finally to Brody and Tarnopol. Failing at commerce, he worked as a proofreader, a preacher, and an assistant cantor. As of 1786, he led the life of a poor, itinerant teacher. While in Galicia, Feder became acquainted with the first maskilim and was known for his aggressive style. He aspired to bring Haskalah closer to Jewish tradition.
The most influential family in Kraków’s Jewish community from the 1470s to the mid-sixteenth century. Members of the Fiszel family served as creditors to King Casimir the Jagiellonian and his sons Jan Olbracht, Aleksander, and Sigismund I. The family’s origins are disputed; it is possible that they came from Prague, elsewhere in Bohemia, or Germany.
(1903–1943), commander of the Jewish police in the Vilna ghetto and later the ghetto’s strongman. Born in Illovieciai, Lithuania, Jakub Gens joined the Lithuanian army at age 16, eventually rising to the rank of captain. In 1935 he graduated from Kaunas University in law and economics. A member of Betar, the rightist youth movement of the Revisionist Zionist party, he moved to Vilna following the annexation of Lithuania to the Soviet Union in June 1940. In September 1941, when the ghetto was established following the German invasion and occupation of Lithuania, Anatol Fried, chairman of the Judenrat, appointed him commander of the ghetto Jewish police. Gradually becoming the ghetto’s strongman by establishing direct contacts with the German authorities, he made the police a decisive force in ghetto life. In the summer of 1942 the Germans dismissed the Judenrat, and Gens officially became the only representative of the ghetto, as well as of the camps and small ghettos nearby. A year later, on 14 September 1943, just 10 days before the final liquidation of the ghetto, he was shot to death in the Gestapo courtyard.
(1695/96–1785), better known as Sha’agat Aryeh (or by his French name, Lion Asser; his surname also spelled Günzberg), Talmudic scholar. Born in Lithuania to a father who was the rabbi of Minsk, Gintsburg was teaching in that city’s yeshiva by 1733. Though he was well respected for his learning, Gintsburg’s severe criticisms of some decisions of his peers were not well received. His debate with Yeḥi’el Heilprin, the rabbi of Minsk and head of the yeshiva, on the role of pilpul (dialectical reasoning) in the teaching of Talmud—Gintsburg practiced it, but refused to mention it in his writings—probably resulted in his having to give up his position in Minsk in 1742.
Yiddish literary monthly journal, published between July 1932 and April 1934. Globus was published in Warsaw by Arn Zeitlin, the chair of the Warsaw Yiddish PEN club. In this latter capacity (which he had held since 1930), Zeitlin aspired to present Yiddish literature as a modern form possessing an ancient and respectable past, while at the same time setting a high literary standard as a prerequisite for writers wishing to belong to the Yiddish PEN club.
(1892 [or 1893]–1942), Yiddish writer. Born in Telekhan, Belarus, in 1908 Shmuel-Nisn Godiner moved to Warsaw, where he was employed as a metalworker. Self-taught, he could read Russian, Polish, and German, and joined the circle of Jewish culture enthusiasts lead by Y. L. Peretz, who encouraged him to write in Yiddish. Drafted to the Russian army in 1912, Godiner was wounded during World War I and taken prisoner by the Austrians, but managed to escape.
(1880–1961), writer, critic, and literary scholar. Baron Lajos Hatvany was born in Budapest into a prominent Hungarian industrial and banking family. He studied classical philology at the University of Freiburg im Breisgau and received his doctorate in Budapest. Throughout his career, Hatvany was active in the Hungarian literary scene. Besides being a writer, critic, journalist, and literary scholar, he was an important patron of literature and a champion of modernism. He wrote major scholarly studies of the poets Sándor Petőfi and Endre Ady (the latter was his close friend).
(1898–1973), Hebrew writer. Ḥayim Hazaz was born in a village in the district of Kiev. Because his father was a logger, Hazaz spent extended periods of his childhood in Ukrainian forests and received some of his Jewish and secular education from private teachers. When he reached adolescence he left his parents’ home to complete his high school studies, and became an avid reader of Russian and Hebrew literature. During the Russian Revolution and the civil war that followed, he witnessed pogroms, the experience of which gave a foundation to his future literary works.
The first printers of Hebrew and Yiddish books in Poland (fl. 1530s–1550s). Shemu’el, Asher, and Elyakim were the sons of Ḥayim Helicz. After learning their trade in Prague, the three brothers began printing Hebrew and Yiddish books in Kraków in 1534. By 1537 they had published a Hebrew–Yiddish dictionary of biblical words (Merkevet ha-mishneh), a legal guide to the laws of kashrut (Sha‘are Dura’), a Yiddish legal handbook for women (Azhores nashim), a Yiddish ethical text (Muser un hanhoge), and perhaps a second such text (Ka‘arat kesef).
(1874–1924), publisher and Zionist leader active mainly in Brno (Brünn), Moravia. Born in Slavkov u Brna (Austerlitz), Moravia, Max Hickl came from a poor family and was self-taught. As a friend of Theodor Herzl, he helped to found the organization that eventually became Labor Zionism.
Political and cultural controversy surrounding the murder trials of Leopold Hilsner, a Jew from eastern Bohemia, in 1899 and 1900. The case involved an accusation of Jewish “ritual murder,” which was understood by most observers to lie at the heart of the prosecution.
(1892–1954), artist. Solomon Iudovin (or in Yiddish, Yudovin) was born in the village of Beshenkovichi near Vitebsk, into a family of artisans. His first art teacher, beginning in 1906, was Yehudah Pen. In 1910 Iudovin moved to Saint Petersburg, where he studied initially at the School of the Society for Encouragement of Art, and then in 1911–1913 with Mstislav Dobujinsky, one of Chagall’s first teachers. He matured as an artist during the Russian Revolution, and spent the years 1918–1923 in Vitebsk, at that time an important center for the Russian avant-garde.
(1868–1927), fiction writer and playwright. Semen Solomonovich Iushkevich grew up amid Odessa’s multiethnic population, which remained as a background in his literary imagination throughout his life. Acculturated urbanized Jews were his characters of choice. After marrying at 17, Iushkevich left home and supported himself by working as a pharmacist’s assistant and contributing to the Odesskii listok (Odessa Sheet). Between 1893 and 1902, Iushkevich lived in Paris, where he graduated from the medical faculty of the Sorbonne.
(1896–1982; convert to Orthodox Christianity in 1975), Russian linguist and philologist. One of the twentieth century’s most versatile and imaginative linguists and literary scholars, Roman Jakobson was born in Moscow. Already in his high-school days—he graduated in 1914 from the Lazarev Institute of Oriental Languages in Moscow—three hallmarks of his long scholarly career were apparent. The first was a penchant for group research and collaborative work; as a student of Slavic philology at the University of Moscow, he cofounded the Moscow Linguistic Circle in March 1915, and joined with the Russian formalists in their efforts to redirect the attention of literary scholars to the construction and form of literary works. A second hallmark was his impressive range of interests, stretching from folklore and mythology through literature, the visual arts, linguistics, and semiotics.
(1764–1809), colonel in the Polish Army. Berek Joselewicz was born in Kretynga (Lith., Kretinga), a small town near the city of Polągi (Lith., Palanga). After receiving a traditional Jewish education, he acted as provisioner and agent to the local landowner, Bishop Ignacy Jakub Massalski (1726–1794), in which capacity he also traveled to Western Europe. With the fortune he amassed through entrepreneurial activities, Joselewicz settled in the Warsaw suburb of Praga, where he married his wife Rokhl around 1788 and became a supplier to the army.
(1893–1991), Communist Party and Soviet government official. The son of a struggling artisan, Lazar’ Kaganovich was born in the Chernobyl district, Kiev province. An autodidact, from the age of 14 he worked in Kiev as a tanner and shoemaker. Kaganovich joined the Rossiiskaia Sotsial-Demokraticheskaia Rabochaia Partiia (Russian Social Democratic Workers Party) in 1911.
(1834–1901), Hebrew poet, physician, and socialist. Yitsḥak Kaminer was born in Levkiev, near Zhitomir. As a child, he received a traditional education, but also began to read Hebrew scientific and Haskalah literature. Hoping to keep him in the traditional fold, his parents married him to a young girl. Kaminer, however, abandoned his wife and headed for Vilna, where he associated with maskilim, in particular with Shemu’el Yosef Fuenn, who supervised the city’s rabbinical college.
(1821–1879), Czech and German poet, writer, and translator. Siegfried (Salomon) Kapper studied philosophy at Prague University (1837–1839) and medicine in Vienna (1841–1846), earning his doctorate in medicine in 1847. He then worked briefly in Croatia, took an active part in the revolution in Vienna in 1848, and served as an elected representative in the Austrian parliament. When shots were fired into the assembly in March 1848, he provided medical care to the wounded. Kapper was also a division leader of the academic legion, whose musical anthem used the text of one of his poems. His collection of poems titled Befreite Lieder (Liberated Songs; 1848) was infused with revolutionary sentiment.
(d. 1439), rabbi, Talmudic scholar, kabbalist, and poet. Very little is known about the life of Avigdor Kara, a contemporary of Yom Tov Lipmann Mülhausen. Kara survived the “Bloody Easter” pogrom in Prague during Passover 1389, though his father was probably a victim and is described as a martyr in Kara’s tombstone inscription. Kara may also have been the stepbrother of Menaḥem ben Ya‘akov Kara, another Prague scholar. Avigdor Kara’s name, as well as that of his wife Rivkah, appears in municipal registers.
(1929– ), writer and translator. The first Hungarian writer to receive the Nobel Prize, Imre Kertész was conspicuous for winning it as a Jew who wrote about the Holocaust. Kertész identifies himself as a Jew without adherence to Judaism, Jewish tradition, or Jewish nationhood. He wrote his major work, Sorstalanság (Fateless; 1975), about the experience of Auschwitz. Although the novel is written in Hungarian, Kertész in other ways saw his residence in Hungary as a kind of internal exile. He explains in his novel Kudarc (Fiasco; 1988) that he returned to Hungary from Buchenwald by chance, and that the only reason he did not leave in 1956 was because he could write Sorstalanság only in Hungarian; afterward, however, he had no reason to remain. For 35 years, he lived with his first wife in a 28-square-meter apartment, in which he shut himself off from the country’s social, intellectual, and political affairs. This self-exiled existence lies behind the dramatic strength and spiritual independence that can be felt in his work.
(1819–1911), orientalist. Daniil Khvol’son was born in Vilna. He received a traditional rabbinical education but then studied French, German, and Russian. To complement his traditional education, he moved to Riga. There, Max Lilienthal provided him with a letter of introduction to Abraham Geiger, who enabled Khvol’son to finish his studies at the University of Breslau.
(1885–1948), journalist, writer, and political activist. The twentieth-century image of the reporter as adventurer-hero is deeply indebted to the self-fashioning of the “roving reporter,” as Kisch called himself in the title of one of his many reportage collections. Kisch was from a prosperous, German-speaking Jewish family in Prague, in the same generation as Franz Kafka. He was a youth in a period of intense social and political conflict between Czechs and Germans in his home country, with the Jews in between; he was a young man during World War I and through the period of intense ideological conflict that followed. Both of these conflicts made powerful impressions on his image of himself and on his creative and political work. He was an innovator of the genre of reportage, a leader of the Communist uprising and brief takeover in Vienna after World War I, a tireless investigator and master of the exposé, and a leftist activist.
Port city on Lithuania’s western border with Germany. After World War I, Klaipėda (Ger., Memel) and its surrounding district were severed from Prussia by the Treaty of Versailles. In 1923, Lithuania annexed the entire area, most of whose population (141,000 persons) was German. The town became part of an autonomous region until it was captured by German troops in 1939 and turned into a military port.
(1892–1980), writer, poet, literary historian, high-school teacher, and university professor. A member of the second generation of the preeminent literary journal Nyugat (West), Aladár Komlós was among Hungary’s most important literary historians. Both his regular work as critic and his collections of essays, Új magyar líra (New Hungarian Poetry; 1928) and Írók és elvek (Writers and Principles; 1937), were of seminal importance in setting critical standards for Hungarian poetry. His historical study A magyar líra Petőfitől Adyig (Hungarian Poetry from Petőfi to Ady; 1959) is still the primary monograph of that era.
(1822–1886), novelist, poet, and journalist. The son of a struggling wool merchant in Münchengrätz (Mnichovo Hradiště), Leopold Kompert owed much of his interest in Judaism to his mother and his grandfather, a rabbi. He wrote during a time of great change: Jews in Bohemia were finally allowed to move and settle wherever they wished.
City in the center of eastern Slovakia. Košice (Hun., Kassa; Ger., Kaschau) belonged to Greater Hungary until World War I and was the seat of Abaúj-Torna county. Jews first settled in Kassa only after the Diet of 1839–1840 passed legislation permitting them to live in royal free towns. Until that time, Jews lived in nearby Rozgony and would come to the Kassa fairs. Town officials tried to impede Jewish settlement even after 1840, in an attempt to protect Christian trade guilds. Nonetheless, the Jewish community started to grow significantly after the 1850s: Kassa had 2,178 Jews in 1869 and 6,723 in 1910 (10% and 15.2% of the total population respectively), making it one of the larger Jewish communities in Hungary.
(1897–1966), educator and politician. Ḥayim Kugel was born in Minsk, Belorussia. His parents were members of Ḥoveve Tsiyon who sent him to study at the Herzliya gymnasium in Tel Aviv. With the outbreak of World War I, Kugel could not return to Palestine after his summer holidays, so he continued his schooling in Russia. Between 1920 and 1924, he attended the German University in Prague. He gave private lessons in modern Hebrew and founded the club ‘Ivriyah, which later became part of the Tarbut organization.
(1888–1965), dramatist, author, and essayist. František Langer was one of the most significant and internationally famous Czech dramatists of the twentieth century. He studied at the medical faculty of Charles University, specializing in psychiatry, and was awarded a doctorate in 1914. While a student, he was active in a group of anarchist writers, and in 1911 was a cofounder (with Jaroslav Hašek) of the Skupina Výtvarných Umělců (Artists’ Group [i.e., Club]), which became the political party Strana Mírného Pokroku v Mezích Zákona (Party of Moderate Progress within the Confines of the Law; SMPVMZ).
Yiddish is the historic language of Ashkenazic (Central and East European) Jewry, and is the third principal literary language in Jewish history, after classical Hebrew and (Jewish) Aramaic. The language is characterized by a synthesis of Germanic (the majority component, derived from medieval German city dialects, themselves recombined) with Hebrew and Aramaic. The word for the sun (zun) comes from Germanic, the word for the moon (levóne) from Hebrew, and the word for “probably” is from Aramaic (mistáme). The most basic fusion formula entails the insertion of a Semitic root into Germanic grammatical machinery, evident in such verbs as khásmen(en) (to sign) and táynen (to claim, express the view). Frequently words whose previous incarnations in the donor languages are dictionary synonyms become nuanced variants within Yiddish with a capacity for fine-tuned expression, particularly in things Jewish. Hence gest (from German) are any kind of guests, órkhim (from Hebrew) are usually poor visitors who need to be given Sabbath or holiday hospitality, and ushpízn (from Aramaic) are the seven biblical figures, from Abraham to David, who are believed, in Jewish mysticism, to visit the Sukkah during the holiday Súkes (Sukkot, Feast of Tabernacles). During the second half of the history of the language, a Slavic element (largely from neighboring Polish, Belarusian, and Ukrainian dialects in Eastern Europe) was acquired, providing a new layer. Famously, Yiddish words for god include the universal deity, got; the more personal deity interested in human fate, der éybershter (from Germanic); one called out to in second person (or in third, as an exclamation), rebóyne-shel-óylem (from Hebrew); the more philosophical rebóyne deálme (Aramaic); and the emotional, homespun god invoked by Slavic-derived endings in tátenyu zísinker and gótenyu. The process of recombination among the three core components of modern Yiddish has continued apace. There is a smattering of Romance from early times, including the verbs bentshn (to bless) and léyenen (to read), where Romance-derived roots fuse with Germanic endings.
(1881–1940), journalist and Zionist socialist leader. Born in Kiev, as a young child Ya‘akov (more fully, Ya‘akov Ze’ev Wolf; also later called Wilhelm) Latzky moved to Riga. After receiving a Jewish education, he went on to study at the Riga Polytechnic Institute, from which he was expelled in 1901 because of political activity. In 1901 or 1902 Latzky went to Berlin, where he became involved with Naḥman Syrkin’s Ḥerut group (a Zionist socialist organization), and where he took part in the publication of its Yiddish organ, Der hamoyn (The Masses), in 1903.
(1859–1944), writer; important figure in the Czech Jewish movement. Eduard Lederer (Leda) began his studies in Czech, German, and history at Prague University before turning to law, the field in which he took his degree in 1884. He then practiced law in Jindřichův Hradec and, from the mid-1920s, in Prague.
(1835–1888), journalist and fiction writer. Born in Minsk, Lev Levanda studied in a local Jewish school that, in response to governmental pressures, offered secular subjects; the students came from poor families who could not afford traditional education. Levanda went on to a government-sponsored rabbinical school in Vilna and a teaching job in Minsk, where he was also appointed to the government post of Jewish Expert, assisting with programs to study Jewish life and editing state textbooks for Jewish children.
The notion of life cycle may appear to reflect a natural human category, but is conditioned by social and cultural circumstances. Cultural elaboration of the special characteristics of “childhood” is associated with early modernity, and the idea of “adolescence” is connected with the Industrial Revolution, expansion of the middle class, extended education of young people, and their dependence on the family. Demographers claim that declining rates of infant mortality are followed by a reduction in birth rates and new images of family formation.
The slow development of Yiddish literary criticism in Eastern Europe in the second half of the nineteenth century mirrored the limited role that modern Yiddish literature played in Jewish cultural life at that time. A telling example: when Sholem Yankev Abramovitsh began his career as a Yiddish writer in 1864, he had already written two significant treatises on literary criticism and cultural issues, in Hebrew. He did not deem it necessary, however, to develop this genre in Yiddish in any substantial way because he considered Yiddish primarily suited to belles lettres. Until the 1880s, the beginnings of Yiddish literary criticism were modest and sporadic.
Yiddish Criticism and Scholarship (Literary Criticism and Scholarship)
(1912–1943), Hebrew poet, literary editor, and Zionist activist. Malki’el Lusternik was born in Łódź to an assimilated family. Lusternik received a Hebrew Zionist education in Łódź. As a student he was actively involved in Gordonia, the Labor Zionist pioneer youth movement founded in 1925. He wrote the words for the movement’s anthem and edited the movement’s journals in Polish, Hebrew, and Yiddish.
(d. ca. 1717), Sabbatian preacher. Ḥayim ben Shelomoh was born in Kalisz in the 1650s. Little is known about his background, but it is certain that he acquired an extensive Jewish education. During his youth he was associated with the Sabbatian prophet Yehoshu‘a Heshel Tsoref of Vilna. In 1690, Ḥayim went to Italy, where he studied with the leaders of the Italian Sabbatians, Avraham Rovigo and Binyamin Kohen, and was introduced to the doctrines of Natan of Gaza. Returning to Poland in 1692, Ḥayim was largely responsible for spreading Rovigo and Kohen’s version of Sabbatianism among Polish followers of the movement.
(1821–1912), rabbi of Łódź. Born in Horodok in Vilna guberniia, Eliyahu Ḥayim Meisel attended the Volozhin yeshiva, where his fellow students included Yosef Ber Soloveichik of Brisk and Yitsḥak Elḥanan Spektor. Meisel received rabbinic ordination at the age of 13 from Yitsḥak of Volozhin.
(1836–1926), journalist, lawyer, politician, and member of the Hungarian parliament. Mór Mezei concluded his secondary studies in Pest, where he also studied law. As one of the leading—and perhaps most important—figures and ideologists of the assimilationist movement among Jews in the nineteenth century, he was a founder of the Izraelita Magyar Egylet (National Israelite Magyar Association) in 1861, of which he became the secretary and finally its chairman.
(1894–1975), Yiddish poet, writer, teacher of Yiddish and Hebrew, and editor. Kadia Molodowsky (in Yiddish, Kadye Molodovski) was one of the most prolific and public of the Yiddish poets, editors, and teachers in Warsaw and New York. Her life and works were characterized by paradoxes: she advocated both Yiddishism and Zionism; she believed that poetry should be engaged, yet not political, and should reflect both the poet’s individuality and her connection to the Jewish people as a whole; and she wrote powerfully about the struggles of women, yet argued against being categorized as a “woman poet” writing “women’s poetry.”
Polish Jewish weekly (1933–1939) devoted to political, social, and literary issues. Published by the Alt-Naj Cooperative Publishing House, Opinia: Tygodnik żydowski polityczno-społeczny i literacki (Opinion: Political, Social and Literary Jewish Weekly) was associated with the daily Haynt and was ideologically close to Zionism. Its editorial board consisted of Moyshe Kleinbaum, Abraham Insler, Bronisław Sztraubaum, and Roman Brandstaetter; its editors in chief were Mosheh Indelman (1933) and Sztraubaum (1934). Opinia’s first issue appeared on 5 February 1933 in Warsaw. In 1935, the journal moved its operations to Lwów, where it was published until 1939 as Nasza Opinia under the editorship of Naftali Hauser. In all, 198 issues were published, with circulation reaching 25,000 copies.
(1882–1953), poet, scholar, and Zionist leader. In his life and work, József Patai is representative of the first generation of Hungarian Zionist intellectuals. He changed his name from Klein to Patai after his birthplace, Gyöngyöspata, a small village in northern Hungary. Patai’s father was a grocer and Talmudic scholar, a follower first of the rebbe of Belz and then of the rebbe of Satmar. It was this world that Patai depicted in his lyrical social study, his most enduring prose work, A középső kapu (1927; new ed., 1998 [published in English as The Middle Gate; 1994]).
A new genre of fiction in the Yiddish language (the term modern Yiddish literature can mislead) emerged in the first half of the nineteenth century, lagging somewhat behind innovations in drama and other literary genres. The new fiction, moreover, developed during the first half of the century at a very slow pace, first in Galicia and western Ukraine, and eventually (from the 1840s on) also in the Lithuanian north, with Vilna as its epicenter of production and dissemination. The emergence of the new fiction was closely related to the gradual spreading of the Haskalah throughout Eastern Europe. As Yiddish literature of the Haskalah came of age in the 1860s, its fiction quickly reached a high level of productivity.
Sigmund Freud, the originator of psychoanalysis, had deep roots in Eastern Galicia. Freud’s father’s family was from Tyśmenica and Buczacz; his mother was born in Brody and spent her childhood in Odessa, and his wife Martha’s family was from Brody as well. Many of the contributors to the development of psychoanalysis in subsequent decades—and all of Freud’s original followers—also had roots in Eastern Galicia. To this day, a high number of notable psychoanalysts are second- or third-generation descendants of East European Jews.
(1900–1987), Yiddish writer. Born in Grodno, Yoysef Rabin moved to Vilna in 1915 and studied at an evening school. As the leader of the underground Vilna Komsomol organization, he fled in 1920 to Moscow, where he worked as a Yiddish typesetter and studied at the Moscow Yiddish Printing School. In 1922, he was among the first recruits to the proletarian literary group lead by Khayim Gildin and Moyshe Taytsh.
(1839–1915), rabbi, rosh yeshivah, and halakhic authority. Born in Karlin, near Pinsk, Yitsḥak Ya‘akov Reines studied in the Volozhin yeshiva and served as rabbi in various Jewish communities in Lithuania, including Saukenai in the district of Kovno, Svencionys in the district of Vilna, and, from 1886 in Lida, Belorussia. Reines was one of the most prominent rabbis in Russia from the last quarter of the nineteenth century until World War I. His signature appears alongside those of rabbis Naftali Tsevi Berlin of Volozhin, Yosef Dov Soloveichik of Brisk (Brest), and others on various proclamations to Russian Jewry regarding communal issues, such as the introduction of general studies into the yeshiva curriculum and the establishment of the Kolel Perushimin Kovno. Eventually he was ostracized by much of the rabbinic leadership because of his support for political Zionism and the modernization of yeshiva education.
To treat the subject of the interaction between Jews and the majority populations of the areas of Eastern Europe in which they lived, this entry includes two articles. The first provides a historical overview, analyzing interaction at the community and personal level as well as the relationship between Jews and government authorities. The second article explores the image of non-Jews portrayed in works of Jewish literature. See also Antisemitic Parties and Movements; Assimilation; and Righteous Gentiles.
About this Article (Relations between Jews and Non-Jews)
Weekly publication issued in Bucharest by its editor, Samu (Samuel I.) Stern. The first issue was published on 14 September 1924, under the title Renaşterea (Renaissance); its goal was to promote the ideology of a literary club bearing the same name. The title was changed to Renaşterea Noastră (Our Revival) on 10 October 1925. The subtitle, “Organ național evreesc” (Jewish National Organ), defined its political orientation.
Romanian trilingual journal. Revista cultului mozaic din R.P.R. (Periodical of the Mosaic Religion in the Romanian People’s Republic) was started as an irregular monthly on 19 October 1956 and was published twice a month from 1965. In 1991 its production again became sporadic and its last issue was dated December 1991.
(1901–1994), theater director, actor, and painter. Born in Żelechów, Poland, Jakub Rotbaum (Yid., Yankev Rotboym) received a traditional heder education. He attended high school and then studied in Warsaw at the School of Decorative Arts, the School of Fine Arts, and the School of Film. Both of his sisters had careers in the theater, and it was in this realm that Rotbaum made his mark, although he had a considerable career as a painter as well.
The Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic (RSFSR) was the name of the largest member state of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), exceeding all the other states in both size (occupying three-quarters of the territory) and population (hosting more than half the citizens). The Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic was, in fact, the name of the successor state to the Russian Empire from January 1918 until December 1922 when the name Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was adopted for the entire state.
Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic (Russia)
Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic
(1886–1956), poet and translator, known in Hebrew as David Shim‘oni. Born in Bobruisk, Belorussia, David Shimonovitz moved to Palestine in 1909, where he stayed for about a year, working as a laborer and watchman at various moshavim (communal settlements). There he formed close friendships with the Hebrew writers Aharon David Gordon and Yosef Ḥayim Brenner.
(Yid., Shavli), town in northern Lithuania, center of Jewish learning and Haskalah. Šiauliai was a royal town during the period of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth. Jews were permitted to settle there under a charter from King Jan Sobieski in the second half of the seventeenth century, and the first synagogue was built in the early eighteenth century.
Town in Romania. Sziget (Hun., also Máramarossziget; in Jewish sources Sziget, Siget, or the older Sihot) was the capital of Máramaros county in the Kingdom of Hungary before northern Transylvania became part of Romania after World War I. The town was returned to Hungary briefly between 1940 and 1944. Surrounded by the Carpathian Mountains, it was located in a region least affected by modernization in the kingdom. In all of Hungary, the cultural and economic profile of the Jews of Máramaros county most resembled those of the eastern European shtetls.
(1876–1931), lawyer and politician. Ludvík Singer was a leader of Czech-speaking Zionists in Bohemia. He was born in Kolín and studied law at the Czech University in Prague, where he became involved in the Czech Jewish movement. In his first job as a lawyer in Liberec (Reichenberg) in northern Bohemia, he was confronted with the Czech–German national conflict, which apparently shook his belief in Czech Jewish assimilation.
In its brief existence (1908–ca. 1919) the Society for Jewish Folk Music (Rus., Obshchestvo Evreiskoi Narodnoi Muzyki; Yid., Gezelshaft far Yidisher Folks-Muzik) launched an influential movement among young Russian Jewish composers to create a modern national style of Jewish concert music. In the late 1890s and early 1900s, as part of the Russian Jewish intelligentsia’s growing interest in Jewish nationalism and Yiddish folk culture, musician and music critic Yo’el Engel and historian-folklorists Peysekh Marek and Sha’ul Ginsburg promoted the study of Jewish folk music from the Pale of Settlement through fieldwork, public lectures, and publications. These initial efforts, combined with the encouragement of Russian composer Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, soon inspired a group of young Jewish musicians at the Saint Petersburg Conservatory to organize the Society for Jewish Folk Music in 1908.
(1890–1950), Yiddish linguist. Elye Spivak was born in Vasilkov, Ukraine. The product of a traditional Jewish education and a secular self-education, he worked as a teacher in various places, including the Kultur-lige Yiddish schools in his hometown and Glukhov. In the early 1920s, he taught Yiddish at the Kiev Yiddish Teachers’ College and at Yiddish vocational schools in Kiev and Kharkov. Spivak was appointed professor of Yiddish linguistics at the Odessa Pedagogical Institute in 1925. When the Kiev Chair (later, Institute) for Jewish Culture opened its Odessa branch, he took an active part in its activities, working under the guidance of Yankev Reznik (1890–1944), a veteran of Yiddish education.
Although the earliest known sumptuary regulations from the world of East European Jewry date from the late sixteenth century, such regulations were promulgated, albeit in limited form, among medieval Ashkenazic Jews as early as the twelfth century. “Beginning in the fifteenth century,” as Salo Baron has written, “more and more communal organs, regional as well as local” issued detailed ordinances stipulating “articles of clothing that might be worn by various individuals on certain occasions, the number of guests and musicians who might be invited to certain functions, and the amount and type of food that might be served at such celebrations” (Baron, 1942, vol. 2, pp. 301–302). The fifteenth century was also the turning point for sumptuary legislation in Renaissance Italy, where in that century alone, 83 different sets of sumptuary laws were enacted.
(Moiseevich; party pseudonyms Andrei, Maks; 1885–1919), revolutionary and Soviet party figure. Born in Nizhnii Novrgorod to an artisan engraver who also owned a typographical and printing workshop, as a youth Iakov Sverdlov became a pharmacist’s apprentice and began to spread revolutionary propaganda among workers. He joined the Rossiiskaia Sotsial-Demokraticheskaia Rabochaia Partiia (Russian Social Democratic Workers Party; RSDRP) in 1901 and was arrested for participating in a demonstration against the expulsion of Maksim Gorky from Nizhnii Novgorod. Sverdlov worked as a professional revolutionary there as well as in Kostroma, Yaroslavl’, Kazan’, and other towns. When the RSDRP split, he joined the Bolsheviks.
(1857–1915), journalist and editor. Born Miksa Weinstein in [Nyír] Tura, Szabolcsi studied at yeshivas in Kemecse, Újfehértó, Érmihályfalva, Püspökladány, and Vác. Later he was a private tutor for children of prominent Jewish families (including Mór Wahrmann and Ignác Einhorn) and in 1877 he enrolled in the newly founded Rabbinical Seminary of Hungary. He left the seminary after one semester, however, and became a journalist. Szabolcsi first wrote for Debreczeni Ellenőr, where he covered the Tiszaeszlár blood libel trial (1882–1883) and received much acclaim. The proceedings had a major influence on his career. Szabolcsi wrote in Hungarian, Hebrew, and German.
Town and district center on the Dniester River, presently in the self-proclaimed Republic of Transnistria, which broke away from Moldova. Tighina (Rus., Bendery; Yid., Bender) was part of Romania from 1918 to 1940 and was in the Moldavian SSR from 1944 to 1991. Jews settled there in Ottoman times; the first record of a Jewish presence dates to 1769. In 1770, a synagogue was built within the town’s fortress but was dismantled 76 years later as the community grew. The oldest Jewish cemetery has not been preserved; the earliest tombstone in the new one is dated 1781. Aryeh-Leib Wertheim (d. 1854), who was the son of Hasidic leader Shim‘on Shelomoh of Savran, settled in Bendery in 1814 and founded a Hasidic dynasty. Local tradition dictated the leaving of notes (Yid., tsetlekh) with requests for Wertheim’s intervention at his crypt.
Male youth movement of Agudas Yisroel. As an Orthodox party, Agudas Yisroel viewed the thousands of young men who devoted years to the study of the Talmud and its commentaries not only as a source of future strength for the Aguda, but also as a key to the survival of the Jewish people. For those young people who had to stop their formal education, the party wished to establish a youth movement that would keep them within the ideological fold. In practice, however, a large part of the membership consisted of students still in yeshivas.
(Elias Tcherikower; 1881–1943), historian of Russian Jewish life and anti-Jewish violence. Elye Tsherikover was raised in a merchant-class, Zionist household in Poltava. After gymnasium in Odessa, where he joined socialist Zionist circles, he attended university in Saint Petersburg and was active in the Russian revolutionary movement. His university studies were interrupted by his arrest at a Menshevik meeting in 1905. After the 1905 Revolution, Tsherikover devoted himself to scholarship and legal public activism, first in the Russian Jewish circles of Saint Petersburg and then in the Yiddishist movement.
(1894–1943), literary scholar and fiction writer. Born in the town of Rezhitsa in Vitsebsk province (mod. Rēzekne, Latvia), Iurii Tynianov studied at the University of Petersburg from 1912 to 1918. From 1921 to 1930 he lectured on Russian poetry at the division of literary history of the Petrograd Institute of Art History. In 1918 he joined Obshchestvo Izucheniia Poeticheskogo Iazyka (Society for the Study of Poetic Language; Opoiaz), and soon became one of the most influential and articulate exponents of the Formalist position.
(1898–1980), painter, set designer, graphic artist, and sculptor. Born into a carpenter’s family in Melitopol’, Aleksandr Tyshler grew up among craft workers and from the time of his childhood assisted house painters. His early impressions were reflected later in his series of paintings Sosedi moego detstva (Neighbors of My Childhood, 1930–1968).
(Rus., Uzhgorod; Slov., Užhorod; Hun., Ungvár), city in Ukraine. Ungvár was the historical capital of Ung county in Subcarpathian Rus’, then a region of Hungary. In 1919, after the region became part of Czechoslovakia, the authorities chose the city as the region’s capital, partly, it has been alleged, because it had a smaller Jewish population than the larger Mukačevo (Hun., Munkács; now Ukr. Mukacheve) in Bereg county. By 1941, there were 9,576 Jews living there, representing 27.2 percent of the town’s population.
(1848–1907), Yiddish folk poet and composer. Mark Varshavski (Warshawski) was born in Odessa and as a child moved to Zhitomir, where he attended the state rabbinical school for four years and then studied jurisprudence for a year at Odessa University. He completed his studies in Kiev in 1875 and practiced law for many years, eking out a meager income. In 1903, he was engaged by a Belgian firm to serve as legal adviser but fell sick in 1905 and had to return to Kiev, where he died two years later.
(1884–1971), Hebrew author. Born in Praga (near Warsaw), Tsevi Weinberg was one of the most significant Hebrew writers in Poland during the interwar period. He taught Hebrew studies in Augustów and Warsaw, and was among the founders of the Association of Hebrew Authors and Journalists of Poland. With Eli‘ezer Steinman, Weinberg edited the monthly publication Kolot (Voices) in 1923–1924. He also assisted Malki’el Lusternik in founding the periodical Re’shit: Bamah le-‘inyane ha-ḥayim, sifrut u-mada‘ (Beginning: A Forum on Matters of Life, Literature, and Science), published between 1932 and 1934, and served on its editorial board. In 1934, he moved to Palestine and taught at a school in Tel Mond. Weinberg’s departure from Poland triggered a wave of reactions within his literary circle, as it had lost one of the most important voices of contemporary Hebrew literature.
(1903–1958), a leading figure in rescue efforts in Slovakia during the Holocaust and a staunch opponent of Zionism after the war. An acclaimed student in the Slovak yeshivas of Sered, Tirnoy, and Nitra, Mikha’el Dov Ber Weissmandel also examined Hebrew rabbinical manuscripts in the Bodleian Library in Oxford. In 1935 he participated in a delegation headed by his father-in-law, Rabbi Shemu’el David ha-Levi Ungar, leader of Slovak Orthodox Jews, to the Agudas Yisroel gathering in Palestine.
(1891–1962), writer, playwright, literary critic, and journalist. Felix Aderca (originally Froim Zeilic Adercu) was born in the village of Puieşti, Moldavia, to a family of merchants, and did not complete high school. He published several collections of poetry, independently and without success. Under the name Oliver Willy, he also issued an essay titled “Naționalism? Libertatea de a ucide” (Nationalism? The Freedom to Kill; 1910).
Town in the central western area of Romania, on the Mureş River. Alba Iulia (known in German as Karlsburg; Ladino as Carlisburg; Latin as Alba Carolina [or Apulum in ancient Roman times]; and Hungarian as Gyulafehérvár) served from 1542 to 1690 as the capital of the autonomous principality of Transylvania under Turkish suzerainty. It was then part of Hungary until it was annexed to Romania after World War I.
(1741–1810), Hasidic rabbi and leader. Avraham was a disciple of Dov Ber, the Magid of Mezritsh, and a follower and colleague of Rabbi Menaḥem Mendel of Vitebsk. It is said that before his attachment to Hasidism he had apparently studied with the Gaon of Vilna. Avraham assisted Menaḥem Mendel in leading a group of Hasidim to the Land of Israel in 1777 and then moved with him from Safed to Tiberias. Letters to their followers in Belorussia–Lithuania are signed by both rabbis, with Avraham occasionally adding his own words. When Menaḥem Mendel died in 1788, the Hasidim of Tiberias, as well as a portion of followers in Eastern Europe, deemed Avraham to be their leader.
Avraham ben Aleksander ha-Kohen of Kalisk
(1850–1913), Talmudic scholar, orientalist, and rector of the Rabbinical Seminary of Budapest. A descendant of the eighteenth-century German rabbi Ya’ir Ḥayim Bacharach, and a son of Hebrew poet Simon Bacher (Bacharach), Vilmos (Wilhelm) Bacher was born in Liptószentmiklós (now Liptovský Mikuláš, Slovakia), a region in which traditional rabbinic culture was relatively open to secular ideas.
In his autobiography, the philosopher Salomon Maimon (d. 1800) recalled that the concept of beards “especially gave me trouble.” In reading the Zohar and other kabbalistic works, Maimon explored the image of “God’s Beard, in which the hairs are divided into numerous classes with something peculiar to each, and every hair is a separate channel of divine grace.” Maimon later wrote that with all of his efforts, “I could find no rational meaning in these representations.”
(ca. 1758–1838), educator, historian, and religious reformer. Peter Beer was born in Nový Bydžov (Neu-Bidschow), Bohemia, to a middle-class family. He received a traditional Jewish education, attended yeshivas in Prague and Bratislava (Pressburg), but also studied German and Latin with a priest in his hometown. After serving as a private tutor in Hungary, Beer went to Vienna around 1781. He was one of the first Jews to attend a teaching seminary, opened to Jews by the Edicts of Toleration of Joseph II.
Town in southern Poland, from 1945 in the province of Silesia. The development of Biała was closely tied to that of neighboring Bielsko (situated in what was the Austrian part of Silesia), and was mainly related to textile production and cross-border trade. The presence of Jews in Biała was documented in 1697, when a robber from the nearby mountains confessed that about three years earlier he had sold stolen goods to a Jewish broker in Biała. A reference to a Jewish leaseholder is dated 1715.
The tradition of design and illustration in East European Hebrew and Yiddish printing is connected to the history of itinerant families of printers who wandered in Central and Eastern Europe, transporting their typographical knowledge. Their skills usually originated in the cradle of Jewish printing in northern Italy. The development of book design followed different trajectories in Prague and in printing centers farther east, although both were clearly influenced by the earlier, chiefly Italian, patterns. Prague ultimately was the location of five presses owned by families of Jewish printers.
(1844–1928), Hebrew novelist and poet. Mordekhai David Brandstetter was born in the town of Briegel, Galicia. When he was 14, his family arranged his marriage to the daughter of a wealthy family from Tarnów. In that city, Brandstetter became interested in Hebrew and secular literature, and began to publish his own poetry. In 1867–1868, he traveled frequently to Warsaw on business; there he became acquainted with the works of Avraham Mapu, Yitsḥak Ber Levinzon, Adam Ha-Kohen (Avraham Dov Lebensohn), and Yehudah Leib Gordon.
(1869–1949), rabbi, educator, Zionist leader, and parliamentarian. Born in Brest-Litovsk (Brisk), Markus Braude (Mordekhai Ze’ev Broda) was raised in Lwów (Lemberg) where his maternal grandfather had been the city’s rabbi. In 1890, he enrolled at the Hildesheimer Rabbinical Seminary in Berlin and at the University of Berlin, ultimately earning his doctorate in 1898 at the University of Freiburg.
(1858–1944), philologist and educator. Raised in Iaşi, Romania, Menaḥem Braunstein (also Braunstein-Mebaşan, the latter element being the Hebrew acronym of his name) studied philology, specializing in European languages. As a young man he was part of a group of maskilim, an informal set of people with headquarters at a coffee shop in Iaşi. In 1887 he set up Doresh le-Tsiyon, an organization whose objective was to encourage immigration to the land of Israel. That same year, he founded the Yiddish newspaper Der yudishe folksfraynd.
(1902–1956), writer, playwright, and journalist. Ion Călugăru (pseudonym of Ştrul Leiba Croitoru) was born in Dorohoi to an impoverished family; he was a top student at the Israelite-Romanian school, where the Jewish community supported him through elementary school. Although he failed to graduate from high school, his Latin teacher, the influential literary critic Eugen Lovinescu, hired him to serve on the editorial staff of the review Sburătorul, in which Călugăru used his pseudonym for the first time (he had published articles in the Jewish newspaper Mântuirea [The Redemption] as B. Croitoru).
Weekly Romanian newspaper founded in Bucharest on 25 December 1906 by I. Negureanu and M. Schweig. Curierul Israelit (The Israelite Courier) was issued with frequent interruptions until 25 March 1945; Schweig eventually appeared on its masthead as owner and director. The publication carried the subtitle “Organ septemânal pentru apărarea intereselor evreieşti” (Weekly Organ for the Defense of Jewish Interests); in 1944 this slogan was altered to “Organ al Uniunii Evreilor Români” (Organ of the Union of Romanian Jews).
The oldest examples of Czech Jewish writing are glosses in medieval Hebrew manuscripts; Jewish scholars in Prague explained unusual or difficult Hebrew terms using Hebrew transcriptions of “the language of Canaan,” which was, Roman Jakobson has argued, a variant of Old Czech. These glosses are most extensive in the work of two Prague scholars, Avraham ben ‘Azri’el of Bohemia (also known as Abraham Chladek), who wrote his commentary ‘Arugat ha-bosem (Bed of Spices) in the late 1230s, and his student Yitsḥak ben Mosheh, whose Or Zaru‘a (Light Sown) dates from the mid-thirteenth century. The glosses cannot really be said to constitute a literary work, but they are evidence that Jews in medieval Prague were thoroughly familiar with spoken Czech.
Town in Hungary, home to one of Hungary’s largest Jewish communities. Jews began settling legally in Debrecen, “the Calvinist Rome of Hungary,” after the Diet adopted Act Thirty-Nine of 1840, permitting Jews to settle in cities under royal authority. While only 118 Jews were living in Debrecen in 1848, in 1869 this number had grown to 1,920 and in 1900 it had reached 6,192.
Comedy team that performed in Yiddish theaters, cabarets, and films. Shimen (Szymon) Dzigan (1905–1980) and Yisroel Shumacher (or Szumacher; 1908–1961) were both born in Łódź. Dzigan was apprenticed as a teenager to a tailor, but when the well-known writer and poet Moyshe Broderzon noticed his improvised parodies of speakers at a banquet in 1927, he invited Dzigan to join the Ararat literary cabaret that he was founding in Łódź. The following year, Shumacher graduated from a Hebrew gymnasium and also joined the Ararat company. They began to perform together, first with Ararat and then in Warsaw with the troupe Yidishe Bande. In response to their growing popularity, in 1935 they founded their own cabaret company at the Nowości Theater in Warsaw. They also starred in the Yiddish films Al khet (I Have Sinned; 1936), Freylekhe kabtsonim (Jolly Paupers; 1937), and On a heym (Without a Home; 1938).
(1823/26–1883), Yiddish and Hebrew poet; maskil. Known as the singer and troubadour of the Jews of Romania, Benjamin Wolf Ehrenkranz was born in Zbaraż (in Austrian Galicia) and received a traditional education. Under the influence of friends from Tarnopol, he embraced the Haskalah movement. Although Ehrenkranz was married at age 18 to the daughter of a Hasid from his native town, his father-in-law took note of the poet’s irreverent behavior and satiric writings, and forced him to divorce his wife notwithstanding her opposition. Ehrenkranz left for Czernowitz, where he became quite well known among local Jews, and subsequently left for Moldova to work as a tutor. There he began to write Yiddish poetry, occasionally translating or recomposing his works into Hebrew.
Three-volume series published in Vilna by the Yiddish Scientific Institute (YIVO) in 1926, 1928, and 1929. Filologishe shriftn (Studies in Philology) was coedited by Zalmen Reyzen and Max Weinreich. The publication continued the tradition established by the pioneer Yiddish academic collection Der pinkes: Yorbukh fun der geshikhte fun der yidisher literatur un shprakh, far folklor, kritik un bibliografye (The Chronicle: Yearbook for the History of Yiddish Literature and Language, for Folklore, Criticism, and Bibliography; 1913), edited by Shmuel Niger, which had also been produced by the Kletskin Publishing House in Vilna.
(1899–1946), Yiddish poet and writer. Born in Uman, Ezra Fininberg “published” his first poems in a handwritten journal that he produced in the mid-1910s in his hometown with Leyb Kvitko and Moyshe Khashchevatski. Initially Fininberg supported the Zionist Socialist (Territorialist) Party, but joined the Communists in 1919. From 1920 he lived in Kiev, working at the editorial office of the daily Komunistishe fon (Communist Banner). Fininberg belonged to a group of young Yiddish literary talents called Vidervuks (New Growth), whose mentor was Dovid Hofshteyn. Fininberg married Eva Khenkin, whose sister, Mira Khenkin, was Nokhem Oyslender’s wife and a Yiddish writer in her own right.
City in Romania, near the Milcov River, the old border between Moldavia and Walachia. The Jewish community of Focşani dates back at least to the second half of the seventeenth century, when Natan Note Hannover, author of Yeven metsulah and Sha‘are tsiyon, was the town’s rabbi for a decade. The first Jewish cemetery reached its capacity and was closed in 1683, the second in 1874. A choral synagogue was built in 1896 on the location of a synagogue that had been destroyed in an earthquake two years earlier.
(1877–1942), Yiddish poet and songwriter. Mordkhe Gebirtig (Bertig) was a native of Kraków. Details given in various sources regarding the personal history of this poet in the first 20 years of his life—such as the year of his birth, his alleged studying at a heder until the age of 10, his alleged employment as a carpenter’s apprentice, and the claim that he subsequently made a living working as a carpenter—were refuted by the latest researcher of his work, Natan Gross; thus, information about his early life is practically unavailable.
(1884–1944), Yiddish writer. Born in Nikopol’, Ukraine, into a worker’s family, Khayim Gildin was 12 years old when he began working in a factory. He was then twice arrested for revolutionary activity. From 1908 to 1914, he lived and worked in Warsaw, where he published articles on labor issues and belonged to the circle of literati directly influenced by Y. L. Peretz. Gildin returned to Ukraine in 1915 and lived in Odessa. After the 1917 Revolution he was a member of the Fareynikte, the United Jewish Socialist Workers Party.
Town in the Wielkopolska province of Poland. In the eleventh century, Gniezno (known in Yiddish and German as Gnesen) was established as the first capital of the Polish state; since the year 1000 it has been the seat of an archbishop. Jews likely lived in the town as early as the twelfth century, where they managed the mint of a local prince. The oldest images of Jews in Polish lands are found on the bronze door of the Gniezno cathedral, dating from the second half of the twelfth century.
(Often spelled Peretz Hirschbein in English sources; 1880–1948), playwright, novelist, journalist, travel writer, and theater director. Perets Hirshbeyn’s father operated a rural water mill outside a small town in Grodno province, where Hirshbeyn was born. Educated initially by local tutors, Hirshbeyn eventually made his way to Grodno and then Vilna, where he joined a circle of yeshiva students who studied the Bible, Hebrew grammar, and Jewish history together. Hirshbeyn began giving Hebrew lessons to support himself while publishing Hebrew poetry and writing Yiddish stories. He also began to shift from writing lyrical poetry to naturalist drama, starting with Miryam (1905), which he first wrote in Hebrew, later translated into Yiddish, and later still revised in Yiddish under the title Barg arop (Downhill). Inspired by an encounter with a prostitute—and perhaps by Hirshbeyn’s own squalid living conditions in Vilna—the play was a harbinger of Hirshbeyn’s skill at characterization, dialogue, and atmosphere.
(1895–1984), plastic artist, architect, and art theorist. Marcel Iancu (Janco) was born in Bucharest. Even as a youth he contributed to the Simbolul review, and had occasion to meet Tristan Tzara and Ion Vinea. He also studied painting and drawing with Iosif Iser. A pioneer of the avant-garde movement, Iancu’s style evolved from expressionism during the interwar period to an abstract mode during his later years in Israel.
(1829–1903), rabbi, political activist, and academic. Born in Rogasen (Pol., Rogoźno) near Poznań, Markus (Mordekhai) Jastrow received a traditional Jewish education from the local rabbi, Moses Feilchenfeld, and a secular education at the town’s elementary school. He later attended the Friedrich-Wilhelm Gymnasium in Poznań. In 1852, he began his studies in philosophy at the University of Berlin and in 1856 earned a doctorate from the University of Halle. He received rabbinic ordination in 1853.
Pioneering Zionist newspaper of the Austrian Empire, published in Brno (Brünn), Moravia, from 1900 to 1934. Jüdische Volksstimme (Jewish People’s Voice) was founded by Max Hickl (1874–1924), who served as publisher and editor in chief until his death, with only a brief interruption from 1920 to 1922, when Arnold Steiner took his place. Jüdische Volksstimme began as a bimonthly in February 1900; it was issued three times a month from September 1907, and weekly from 1910.
(1795–1874), rabbi and the most prominent “harbinger of Zionism.” Tsevi Hirsh Kalischer was born in Leszno (Lissa) in western Poland. He was a disciple of Ya‘akov Lorbeerbaum of Lissa and of Akiva Eger, two of the leading halakhic authorities of his generation. Kalischer served his entire adult life as the unpaid rabbi of Thorn (Toruń), supported by his wife, who had a small shop.
(1898–1937), Soviet Yiddish poet. In his short life, Izi (Israel) Kharik was one of the most significant and powerful Soviet Yiddish writers, a poet whose work engaged aesthetic movements as varied as expressionism and socialist realism and who, despite his position of power, expressed deep ambivalence about the consequences of the Bolshevik Revolution.
(1896–1974), Yiddish fiction writer. Itsik Kipnis was born into a family of craftsmen in Sloveshne, Ukraine. As a child, he studied at heder and with private teachers; he later worked with his father as a tanner. In 1920, Kipnis went to study in Kiev, where he met Dovid Hofshteyn, who became his literary mentor. Kipnis’s first publications were children’s literature and a book of poems titled Oksn (Oxen; 1923) that celebrated modern, urban existence with an optimistic tone and minimalist poetic language. However, his real entry into the world of Soviet Yiddish literature was his first book of fiction, Khadoshim un teg: A khronik (Months and Days: A Chronicle), which was published with an introduction by Yitskhok Nusinov (1926).
Father and son; rabbis and scholars. Aharon Shemu’el Koidanover (Kaidanower; 1614–1676) was an eminent Talmudic and halakhic scholar and preacher; Tsevi Hirsh (d. 1712) is known primarily for his book of moral and ethical instruction, Kav ha-yashar.
Koidanover, Aharon Shemu’el and Tsevi Hirsh
Hebrew literary monthly, published in 1923–1924 in Poland. Kolot (Voices) was established by the writer Eli‘ezer Steinman in Warsaw, where he had arrived as a refugee from Ukraine in 1920. The journal represented one of the boldest attempts to renew Hebrew literary activity in Poland after World War I, and as was true of the majority of other attempts, it was short-lived. The journal reflected its editor’s rebellious, modernist outlook and sought to provide an opportunity for individualistic, nonconformist voices to be heard, as a way of protesting against both the Zionist and the Hebrew literary establishment.
(1600–1661), rabbi and writer of responsa. Menaḥem Mendel ben Avraham Krochmal was born in Kraków, where he studied with David ben Shemu’el ha-Levi (Taz) and Yo’el Sirkes. As a young man he served as a rabbinic judge in Kraków and directed a yeshiva there. In his capacity as a judge he participated in the deliberations of the rabbinic courts at the Lublin and Jarosław fairs.
To explore the principal languages of the Jews in Eastern Europe, this entry includes four articles. The first two treat Hebrew and Yiddish, respectively, from a linguistic perspective, including their historical development, dialects, and status. Planning and Standardization of Yiddish describes the attempts to elevate the status of Yiddish and to standardize its spelling, and the political context of these efforts. Finally, Multilingualism surveys this phenomenon among East European Jews, combining sociolinguistic data with an evaluation of its cultural consequences. For further discussion of Yiddish-language standardization, see Czernowitz Conference. For Hebrew and Yiddish as literary languages, see Hebrew Literature and Yiddish Literature.
(1857–1910), Hebrew writer. Elḥanan Leib Lewinsky was born in Podberez’ye (Pol., Podbrodzie; mod. Lith., Paberžė), on the outskirts of Vilna, though during his childhood his family moved to Gilwan in the Kovno region. He received an intensive Talmudic education under his father’s supervision, but at the same time was given the opportunity to read Haskalah literature in Hebrew. Lewinsky was especially impressed with the writings of Mosheh Leib Lilienblum and with the latter’s struggle against the Lithuanian rabbinate then taking place in the nearby town of Wilkomir (Ukmergė). As an adolescent, Lewinsky spent short periods of time studying in Wilkomir and Kovno, and from 1874 he taught in Vilna and in other towns in the provinces of Minsk, Chernigov, and Ekaterinoslav.
(1760–1832), rabbi and Talmudist. After his first marriage, Ya‘akov ben Ya‘akov Mosheh of Lissa (commonly known as Ḥavat Da‘at) worked in Stanisławów as a partner in a brewery. When the business failed, he supported himself by serving as a rabbi in various communities of Poland and Galicia. Until 1791, he served as rabbi in Monasterzyska, and from there he moved to Kałusz, both in Galicia. It was in Kałusz that Lorbeerbaum wrote his earliest works.
Lorbeerbaum, Ya‘akov ben Ya‘akov Mosheh of Lissa
(1894–1973), journalist and writer. Isac Iacovitz Ludo was born in Iaşi, Romania, where he published his first writings as a teenager in the literary review Absolutio. In 1919, he moved to Bucharest and joined Abraham Leib Zissu on the editorial board of the Jewish national newspaper Mântuirea (The Redemption). From 1923, Ludo served as editor of the magazine Ştiri din lumea evreiască (News from the Jewish World), focusing on issues agitating Romanian Jewish circles after World War I.
(1870–1919), political writer, activist, and economist. Born in Zamość to a maskilic family, Rosa Luxemburg was the daughter of Elia Luxemburg, a wood merchant, and Lina Loewenstein. In the mid-1870s, the family moved to Warsaw where in 1888 Luxemburg graduated from a Russian high school, in which she belonged to student underground groups that studied Polish literature and history. In 1888, she joined the Polish socialist underground organization Proletariat. Pursued by the police, she escaped to Zürich, where she studied first natural sciences, and, from 1892, political science and economics. There, in 1890, Luxemburg met Leo Jogiches, a Jewish Russian revolutionary from Vilna who became her partner. Although their liaison lasted only until 1907, he remained her political mentor for the rest of her life.
(1891–1938), Russian poet, prose writer, and literary essayist. Most of Osip Mandel’shtam’s new writings went unpublished in the Soviet Union during the Stalin era (1929–1953) and were almost unknown to generations of Russian readers until the mid-1960s. Mandel’shtam (also spelled Mandelstam) grew up in Saint Petersburg in a middle-class Jewish household. His father, a native of Riga, had abandoned rabbinical training for a secular education in Germany; Mandel’shtam’s mother, Flora Werblowsky, was a cultivated member of the Russian Jewish intelligentsia of Vilna.
(1859–1886), Hebrew poet. Mordekhai Tsevi Mane was born in Radochkovitchi (Radoshkovich), in the Vilna region. As a child he showed a talent for drawing and sketching, and his parents’ support enabled him to realize his goals and enroll in the Vilna Art School in 1876. He was then offered a place in the prestigious Saint Petersburg Royal Academy of Arts, where, thanks to the patronage of Jewish philanthropists, he studied from 1881 to 1884. After suffering a serious bout of tuberculosis, he was forced to return to his hometown, spending the remaining two years of his life in his parents’ house, surrounded by friends and admirers.
(1895–1971), painter, set designer, and teacher. Max Hermann Maxy was born in Brăila, Romania, but grew up in Bucharest, where he studied at the School of Fine Arts from 1913 to 1916. Among his teachers were Frederic Storck and Camil Ressu.
(Rymanów; 1745–1815), a founder of Hasidism in Galicia. Menaḥem Mendel studied at the yeshiva of Shemu’el Shmelke Horovitz of Nikolsburg (Mikulov) at Ryczywol and later became a disciple of Elimelekh of Lizhensk (Leżajsk). After marrying the daughter of a well-to-do Jew from Przytyk, he made his home there for a number of years, moving to Rymanów in 1807, where he remained until his death. In 1800, the inveterate Misnaged David of Makev (Maków) included Menaḥem Mendel in a list of Hasidic tsadikim in his anti-Hasidic polemic, Shever posh‘im.
Seat of Borsod county, Hungary. Founded by a steady stream of immigrants from Moravia from the 1720s on, the Jewish community of Miskolc grew slowly during the eighteenth century. Until the 1820s, its only functioning communal institutions were the burial society, founded in 1767, and a seven-man executive committee appointed in 1769 to collect the Toleration Tax on behalf of the royal crown. The community had no rabbi until the 1770s, and, until 1784, only a single school, which had been founded in 1734. A Josephinian Normalschule, established in 1784 and highly praised by Ferenc Kazinczy, superintendant of schools for the Habsburg government and a leading figure in the Magyar national revival, functioned for just three years.
Ultraconservative Hungarian Hasidic sect. The spiritual progenitor of Munkatsh Hasidism was Tsevi Elimelekh of Dinov (d. 1841), an outspoken opponent of the Haskalah and prolific author who served briefly as rabbi in Munkács (Hun., more properly Muncács; Cz., Mukačevo; Yid., Munkatsh; now Ukr. Mukacheve; the most commonly used transliteration by English-language scholars is the semi-Polonized spelling Munkacz) from 1824 to 1826 before returning to Galicia in the wake of conflicts with the town’s other rabbis.
To survey the traditional music of East European Jews along with the participation of Jews in majority musical culture, this entry includes six articles. The overview defines genres and provides historical context. Music for Sacred Texts describes liturgical music and recitation styles. Traditional and Instrumental Music focuses on what has become commonly known as klezmer music. Concert Music provides a historical analysis of Jewish participation in Western classical music, attending conservatories, becoming professional orchestra and solo performers or composers, and developing a genre of concert music using traditional Jewish themes. Communal Organizations and Social Movements treats the multiplicity of nonprofessional musical organizations that especially arose in urban settings, many of which were closely or even directly associated with political organizations. Study of Jewish Music details the collecting of folk songs and other ethnomusicological activities. For further and related discussion, see Hasidism: Music; Holocaust: Music and the Holocaust; Songs and Songwriters; and Theater.
(1864–1943), writer, sculptor, musician, and public activist. Alfred Nossig came from a wealthy family in Lemberg (Lwów), where his father served as secretary of the Jewish community and was an activist for Jewish rights in Galicia. Exposed to German culture by his father, Nossig was in favor of Polish-Jewish assimilation and gravitated toward Polish romanticism, which inspired him in the early 1880s to formulate ideas about liberating Jewish culture from the constraints of tradition. He expressed these ideas in the periodical Ojczyzna (The Fatherland) and in an organization that he himself founded, called Przymierze Braci (Union of Brothers).
The history of Jewish political parties in Eastern Europe was short, stretching as it did only from the 1880s until 1949, when what little remained of them after World War II was liquidated by the then recently established Communist regimes. Even during that brief period, experience demonstrated that their ability to change the circumstances in which the Jewish populations lived was severely limited. With the Jewish people in the states and major historic regions of Eastern Europe only rarely exceeding 10 percent of the total population, the parties could not realistically have been expected to gain a significant share in government.
City in the Moldavian region of Romania, at the foot of the Carpathian Mountains and on the banks of the Bistrița River. Jewish settlement in Piatra Neamț dates back as far as the eighteenth century: a wooden synagogue was built in 1766; a burial society existed by 1771, and the cemetery includes tombstones from that period as well. At the end of the eighteenth century, Jewish professional guilds were established and continued to function until 1861.
(formerly Ploeşti), administrative and economic center in Romania, situated 60 kilometers north of Bucharest. The economic importance of Ploieşti resulted mainly from oil extraction and refining. Ploieşti experienced significant growth in the last decades of the nineteenth century, when oil began to be exploited in a systematic manner.
Jewish printing in Eastern Europe began in Prague in 1513, pioneered by a group of printers led by Gershom ben Shelomoh ha-Kohen (d. 1544). The chief cities for printing in Eastern Europe during the period under discussion—between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries—included Prague, Kraków (from 1534), and Lublin (from the late 1540s); Żółkiew became an important center in the eighteenth century (actually beginning in 1692). The main book dealers after the advent of printing were the owners of print shops; until the end of the eighteenth century, the term publisher was not applicable. Very little is known about the press runs of specific books; hence, historians generally rely on the number of editions printed in trying to gauge the popularity of a work.
Printing and Publishing before 1800 (Printing and Publishing)
(1845–1910), scholar, translator, and Zionist activist. Sha’ul (Saul) Pinḥas Rabbinowitz, known also by the acronym Shefer (after his initials), was born in Taurage, in the Kaunas (Kovno) district of Lithuania. He spent his childhood in Shnipishok (Lith., Šnipiškės), a suburb of Vilna, and in 1868 was ordained as a rabbi at Yisra’el Salanter’s yeshiva in Kovno. Rabbinowitz subsequently worked as a tutor in the homes of wealthy Jewish families.
The rhythm of Jewish life in Eastern Europe was governed substantially by the Jewish calendar, although the calendar of the majority culture impinged on Jewish lives as well. Merchants’ calendars published in Hebrew in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries indicated not only the Jewish months, with their associated astrological signs and holidays, but the Christian ones as well. In one calendar, for example, Easter is designated tselem tog: Cross Day. And particular social and business customs were observed by some Jews on Christmas. Still, the Jewish year served as the timeline and background for much of Jewish life in Eastern Europe. In the twentieth century, secular Jewish movements retained much of the calendar while reinterpreting the significance of some holidays.
Hasidic dynasty founded by Naftali Tsevi Horowitz of Ropshits (1760–1827), a leader of Hasidism in Galicia. Naftali Tsevi was a student of Menaḥem Mendel of Rimanov (1745–1815) and, to a lesser extent, of Ya‘akov Yitsḥak, the Seer of Lublin (1745–1815), and Yisra’el of Kozhenits (1737–1814). After the death of his teachers, Horowitz became the leading figure of the Hasidic movement in much of Galicia, though he never served as a leader of Polish Hasidism as a whole. He was also well known for his sense of humor.
(1912–1994), Romanian rabbi and community leader. Mozes Rosen was born in Moineşti, Moldavia, to an Orthodox rabbinical family from Galicia. His father, Avram Rosen, was the rabbi of the community of Fălticeni. Rosen studied at the yeshiva of Vienna but was forced to leave when the Nazis occupied Austria in 1938. He also studied law at the University of Bucharest.
Yiddish journal published in Kharkov between 1924 and 1933. Di royte velt (The Red World) was established at the initiative of Moisei Ravich-Cherkasskii, head of the press department of the Ukrainian Communist Party’s Central Committee, and Motl Kiper, head of the party’s Jewish section. Ravich-Cherkasskii and the experienced Yiddish journalist Henekh Kazakevich edited the periodical.
(Safran, Schafran, Shafran), rabbinical family. Originally from Galicia, Betsal’el Ze’ev Şafran (Rabaz; 1867–1929) settled in Romania in 1887 and became a rabbi in Sculeni; in 1889 he took a position in Ştefăneşti, and in 1905 he served as rabbi of Bacău, a position he held until the end of his life. Şafran’s sons were rabbis and educators, initially in Romania and later in Israel, Europe, and America.
(1837–1922), pioneer of ultra-Orthodoxy, early Jewish nationalist, and Yiddishist. Akiva Yosef Schlesinger’s father, Yeḥi’el (1814–1891), a close disciple of Rabbi Mosheh Sofer, was a minor rabbinical functionary in his hometown of Pressburg. As a child, Schlesinger was raised in an ascetic manner, wakened by his grandfather at midnight to mourn the destruction of the Temple. His first teacher was his father, whom he would recognize as his sole master and mentor. It was he who imbued the boy with the spirit of Orthodoxy and the conservative legacy of Sofer. Nevertheless, Schlesinger also attended four years of elementary school, learning to read and write German and mastering mathematics, at which he particularly excelled.
(1893–1984), literary critic and theorist, writer, and a founder of Obshchestvo Izucheniia Poeticheskogo Iazyka (Society for the Study of Poetic Language; Opoiaz). Shklovskii was born in Saint Petersburg and studied literary history there at the university. If one is to believe his retrospective miscellany Tret’ia fabrika (The Third Factory; 1926), academic philology had little to offer this irreverent and restless student. Brilliant, exuberant, versatile, he felt more at home amid the noise of literary cafés than in the calm atmosphere of the university classrooms. A close association with futurist poets and artists gave Shklovskii what his professors sadly lacked—awareness of literary form and of artistic construction. “With the aid of futurism and sculpture one could already understand a great deal. It was then that I grasped art as an independent system.” And it was then that Shklovskii became eligible for the role of a leading spokesman and a pungent phrasemaker of Russian formalism.
(1921–1997), historian of Yiddish literature and Ashkenazic Jewry. Khone Shmeruk was born and raised in Warsaw, where he studied in a modern heder and in the Krinski secondary school before beginning studies at the University of Warsaw and the YIVO Institute. In the latter part of his career, he was instrumental in renewing Jewish studies in Poland.
(1887–1947), Yiddish and Hebrew poet, short-story writer, essayist, critic, and translator. Ya‘akov Steinberg left his parents’ home in Belaya Tserkov’, Ukraine, for Odessa at the age of 14. He soon moved to Warsaw, the center of Hebrew belle lettres at the time, where he lived in poverty. His first poem, “Alon ha-dema‘ot” (The Wailing Oak; 1901), marked the beginning of a prolific literary career that was noted by Ḥayim Naḥman Bialik (in an article titled “Shiratenu ha-tse‘irah” [Our Young Poetry]) when Steinberg was just 20 years old. From 1903 to 1909, Steinberg widened his scope and wrote prose, publishing three stories in Ha-Tsofeh, followed by scores of poems and stories in a variety of Hebrew periodicals. In 1910, Steinberg published two small lyrical books of poetry and satire: Sefer ha-satirot (The Book of Satires; 1910) and Sefer ha-bedidut (The Book of Loneliness; 1910).
(1892–1970), writer and essayist. Eli‘ezer Steinman was born in Uvoduvka, in the Podolian region of Russia (now Ukraine). He studied at a yeshiva in Kishinev and at age 15 received rabbinic ordination. Steinman began writing in Hebrew and Yiddish, and in 1909 published his first Hebrew story in the journal Reshafim, edited by David Frishman. That same year he moved to Odessa and joined the circle of Hebrew writers in that city. In 1912 he went to Warsaw, published stories and essays in Ha-Tsefirah, and translated works by Strindberg, Maeterlinck, and Dostoevsky.
(1816–1907), bibliographer, historian, and linguist; a founder of modern Jewish studies. Born in Prossnitz (Prostějov, Moravia), Moritz Steinschneider received both a general and a Jewish education, including yeshiva studies in Nikolsburg (Mikulov). In Prague, he qualified for a Hebrew teacher’s diploma. In the course of his academic studies at the universities of Vienna, Leipzig, and Berlin, Steinschneider made the acquaintance of Leopold Dukes, Leopold Zunz, and Abraham Geiger, as well as Michael Sachs, who had formative influences on him. While working at a series of teaching jobs in Prague, Steinschneider obtained his rabbinical ordination in Prossnitz in 1843, and moved to Berlin in 1845 in search of employment.
(1885–1946), Hebrew publisher. Avraham Yosef Stybel was born in Zarki, southwestern Poland, to a Hasidic family with ties to the Kotsk and Radomsk dynasties. Despite his father’s attempts to provide him with a religious education that would qualify him to become a rabbi, he was attracted from childhood to secular Hebrew literature. At the same time, he was graced with a practical business sense, and studied bookkeeping through correspondence learning.
There has been neither uniformity nor consistency in the synagogue architecture of Eastern Europe. The constants are the ritual necessities—primarily the bimah and the ark containing the Torah scrolls—and illumination suitable for reading, adequate seating, and at least 10 adult Jewish men to perform the complete services. From the seventeenth century on, it became common practice to hang a perpetual lamp above the ark, a menorah near it, and a curtain over the ark. Male congregants sat on benches around the building’s perimeter and on the sides of the bimah, with elders perhaps seated on either side of the ark. The focal point was the ark–bimah axis and the bimah desk at which the officiants stood. Individual chairs and reading stands—and occasionally even pews in the nineteenth century—were added, to increase seating capacity.
(1903–1942), Polish and Yiddish poet, prose writer, translator, critic, and publicist. Maurycy (Mosheh) Szymel was born into an Orthodox family in Lwów, where he graduated from high school. He made his literary debut in Chwila in 1925, initially writing poetry for children. From the beginning of the 1930s, he participated in Warsaw’s Jewish literary life, publishing a manifesto on Polish Jewish poetry in the weekly Opinia (1933) and writing for the Jewish press in Yiddish and Polish. In 1939 he returned to Lwów and published Yiddish works in Sovetish literatur. During the Nazi occupation, Szymel worked as a clerk for the Judenrat in Lwów. He died at the Janów labor camp.
(Ger., Reval; Rus., Revel, later Tallin), historical capital of the Province of Estonia. Christianized in 1219 by Danish crusaders and then a member of the Hanseatic League, Tallinn was under Swedish rule from 1561 to 1710 and Russian from 1710 to 1918. Beginning in 1918, Tallin was the capital of the Republic of Estonia, including during the years of Soviet annexation (1940–1941, 1944–1991) and Nazi occupation (1941–1944). Its population in 2005 was 402,000, and it still serves as the industrial, logistical, and administrative center of Estonia.
Wealthy and prominent family that produced rabbis and community leaders in Bohemia, Poland, and Galicia from the end of the sixteenth century. Mosheh Aharon Te’omim of Prague (d. 1609?) was the first to bear the family name. His descendant, Aharon Te’omim (d. 1690), who wrote Mateh Aharon (1678), a commentary on the Haggadah, and Bigde Aharon (1710), a collection of homilies, was a preacher in Prague and a rabbi in Worms. In 1690 he began serving as rabbi in Kraków, but several months later, while on his way to a meeting of the Council of Four Lands, he was arrested on the orders of a Polish nobleman, and died soon thereafter.
Russian-language journal produced by the central board of OZET (Society for the Settlement of Jewish Toilers on the Land) between 1927 and 1937 in Moscow. Semen Dimanshtein, its editor in chief (1927–1934, 1936–1937), was chairman of OZET. Tribuna was published at times monthly (1927–1928, 1933–1935), biweekly (1928–1929, 1932–1933, 1936–1937), and at one point every 10 days (1930–1932). Circulation numbers averaged 13,900.
(Heshel Tsoref; 1633–ca. 1700), Sabbatian prophet. Yehoshu‘a Heshel Tsoref was born in Vilna and had little formal education, earning his living as a silversmith. During the Polish–Swedish war, he sought refuge in Amsterdam, where he learned of the advent of Shabetai Tsevi. After returning to Vilna in 1666, Tsoref became the most important personality of the Sabbatian movement in Lithuania; he particularly advocated urgent ascetic acts of penance. In contrast to other Sabbatian leaders, Tsoref’s claim to leadership was based not on personal learning or the development of novel theological doctrines, but on his personal charisma as expressed in prophecy. He had a number of visions, and was known to impart profound interpretations of the Torah despite his lack of rabbinic learning.
Founded in 1913, Yugnt-Bund Tsukunft (the Future) was the main Bundist youth organization in interwar Poland. Its predecessor, Der Kleyner Bund, was a network of youth organizations that spontaneously appeared throughout the Pale of Settlement at the time of the 1905 Revolution. A product of the idealism and enthusiasm of the times, Der Kleyner Bund declined in the years of reaction following the revolution. An attempt to recreate the youth organization on a more systematic basis immediately preceding World War I led to the creation in 1913 of the Sotsyal-Demokratishe Yugnt-Organizatsye Tsukunft.
(1898–1944), Yiddish writer, painter, and art critic. Born in Sochaczew, Poland, Oyzer Varshavski received a traditional Jewish education and settled in Warsaw with his family at the age of 14. He was encouraged to write during World War I by Itshe Meyer Vaysenberg, whose publishing house later produced Varshavski’s first novel, Shmuglars (Smugglers; 1920). The book was well received by critics and readers and went through several editions and reprints in Warsaw, Vilna, and Kiev before 1930. In the 1920s, he published stories in various—usually modernist—journals in Poland, the United States, and Western Europe.
(1887–1935), Yiddish poet, playwright, and critic. Born in Babiak, Poland, Avrom Vevyorke was trained to be a rabbi, but instead became a Labor Zionist and began writing in Yiddish. He made his literary debut with stories and poems in the Warsaw daily Der veg (The Way) in 1906 and the weekly Roman-tsaytung (Novel-Newspaper) in 1907. Vevyorke moved to Galicia in 1908, working for the Kraków Tog (Day) from 1911. His small collection Baladn (Ballads; 1912) was published in Kraków under the imprint of Dos Bukh (The Book). He edited the journal Dos bukh in Berlin, but soon went to Antwerp and then to London, working as a Yiddish journalist and editor until 1916, when he moved to Russia.
(1910–1943), Yiddish poet. Leyzer Volf (born Mekler), a founding member of the literary group Yung-Vilne, was one of the great parodists in Yiddish poetry. Beloved by local audiences for his outrageous artistic gestures, including an attempt to break the world record in poetry writing with 1,001 untitled lyrics in June 1930, he bridged popular and elite impulses within Yung-Vilne, making him the group’s first local star. Volf is best remembered for his lack of composure, his bizarre parodies of European and Yiddish writers, his dramatic sketches and grotesque portrayals that took on contemporary political and material concerns, his literary adaptation of folk materials from Vilna’s cultural fabric, and his endless fascination with himself as a poetic subject.
(Varshever Yidisher Kunst-teater; VYKT), critically acclaimed Yiddish dramatic company active in interwar Poland in 1924–1925, 1926–1928, and 1938–1939. After the extraordinary success of S. An-ski’s Der dibek (The Dybbuk; Warsaw, 1920), it became clear that a considerable audience existed in Poland for Yiddish theater with artistic aspirations. But was this new theater to confine itself specifically to Jewish subjects and style? The Warsaw Yiddish Art Theater was founded by two of the leading young representatives of Yiddish dramatic theater, Ida Kaminska and Zygmunt Turkow, who believed that the new theater should open itself to the themes and styles of contemporary European theater. Kaminska and Turkow had already assembled a company that performed at the Tsentral Theater in Warsaw in 1922–1923. The VYKT began to perform as such in 1924.
(1843–1901), banker and philanthropist. Hipolit Wawelberg was born in Warsaw to a banking family and graduated from the Institute of Agronomy in Marymont. In 1863, he joined the January insurgents, but after his father, Tsevi Hirsh Wawelberg, intervened he was sent to study in Berlin. When Wawelberg returned to Warsaw, he married Ludwika Bersohn (1852–1927), the daughter of industrialist Me’ir and sister of the banker and art patron Mathias Bersohn. Continuing his father’s financial activities, Wawelberg established a bank in Saint Petersburg, becoming one of the wealthiest people in the Kingdom of Poland. His financial institution, known from 1913 as Bank Zachodni, existed until 1939.
(1874–1936), publisher, editor, and publicist. Born in Vobol’niki (Vabalninkas), Lithuania, Shmuel Yankev Yatskan received a traditional Jewish education at the Ponevezh yeshiva, and rabbinical ordination in 1892. He moved to Saint Petersburg in 1895, where he contributed to the Hebrew-language newspaper Ha-Melits. He lived in Warsaw from 1902, became a member of the Zionist movement, and was a leading contributor to Ha-Tsefirah. For some time (in 1903) Yatskan supported the Uganda project and was among the founders of the territorialist faction.
(1891–1956), Yiddish linguist, lexicologist, and educator. Born in Pinsk into the family of a Jewish schoolteacher and compiler of a Russian mathematics textbook, Ayzik Zaretski received a Talmudic education and graduated from a Russian secondary school. He then studied mathematics at Dorpat (mod. Tartu, Estonia) University from 1913 to 1917. Active in the student historical and literary society, he was enthusiastic about Yiddish philology and Esperanto.
(1889–1970), artist. From 1914 to 1924, Natan Al’tman was the chief rival of Marc Chagall in the Russian Jewish art renaissance. Born in Vinnitsa (Vinnytsya, Ukr.), he attended art school in Odessa from 1903 to 1907 and moved to Paris in 1910, where he studied the works of old masters as well as cubism. His first famous work, Evreiskie pokhorony (Jewish Funeral), appeared in 1911.
(1920?–1943), Zionist youth leader and commander of the Jewish Fighting Organization (Żydowska Organizacja Bojowa; ŻOB) in the Warsaw ghetto. Born in Wyszków, Poland, Mordekhai Anielewicz was initially a member of the Revisionist youth movement Betar but shifted allegiance to the left-wing Ha-Shomer ha-Tsa‘ir, where his powerful personality, rhetorical skills, and sports prowess marked him as a leader.
(1887–1956), Hebrew writer. Born in Uzda, a shtetl near Minsk, Devorah Baron received the type of religious education generally offered only to boys, in the heder of her father, Rabbi Shabetai (Shepsl) Eli‘ezer Baron. Growing up in a rabbinic home, she was exposed to halakhic decisions as they applied both to the community as a whole and to her own family. This experience marked her creative worldview throughout her life.
Royal town in southern Poland, since 1945 in the province of Silesia. Będzin (Yid., Bendin) traces Jewish settlement back to the thirteenth century. In 1583, King Stefan Batory granted a charter to Jews of Będzin, giving them the right to own prayer houses and a cemetery, to sell and buy municipal real estate, to carry out unlimited trade, to slaughter animals and sell meat, and to manufacture and distribute alcoholic beverages. The privilege was confirmed by subsequent rulers.
(1883–1975), philosopher and early Zionist. Hugo Bergmann (also Shemu’el Hugo Bergman) was a member of the German-speaking Jewish minority of Prague in the generation most closely associated with his classmate and friend Franz Kafka. As a young student of philosophy and natural science, Bergmann was an active participant in the Prague philosophical salon of Berta Fanta, along with other Prague Jewish intellectuals of his generation including Felix Weltsch, Emil Utitz, Max Brod, and, more occasionally, Kafka.
(1876–1886), Hebrew literary monthly. Ha-Boker or (The Morning Light) was founded in Lwów by the writer Avraham Ber Gottlober as a counterpoint to Perets Smolenskin’s monthly, Ha-Shaḥar (The Dawn). Between 1874 and 1875, Smolenskin had used his monthly to publish sections of his collection of essays ‘Et lata‘at (A Time to Plant), which was devoted, in the main, to attacking the Berlin Haskalah founded by Moses Mendelssohn. Gottlober, a moderate maskil of the older generation, saw it as his duty to defend Mendelssohn’s honor, and in 1876 and 1877 Ha-Boker or provided a platform for Gottlober’s supporters. They were not opposed to Smolenskin’s maskilic, nationalist goals, and therefore concentrated their efforts on refuting claims that Mendelssohn was antinationalist, or that he was responsible for assimilationist trends among Jews.
Town in Moravia in today’s Czech Republic. Boskovice (Ger., Boskowitz) is one of the oldest Jewish communities in Moravia; a Hebrew tombstone from 1069 and a court document dated 1243 attest to the early presence of Jews. The Jewish cemetery dates to at least the sixteenth century. Boskovice’s first synagogue was built in 1698 and was followed by a second synagogue in the next century. A third synagogue, financed by the Löw-Beer family, was built in 1884.
(1825–1879), a notorious Russian convert from Judaism and author of the most successful and influential work of Judeophobia in Russian history. Iakov Brafman was born to a poor Jewish family, grew up almost uneducated and rebellious, and clashed with the kahal (the Jewish self-governing community) in his native Kletsk. When faced with the draft, he chose to convert, becoming first Lutheran and later Russian Orthodox.
Prominent Jewish family in the Russian Empire. The Brodskiis originated in Brody, Galicia, with the family name Schor; the name Brodskii was taken by Me’ir (Mark) Schor when he moved to the small town of Zlatopol’ in Kiev province in the early nineteenth century. The family had a pedigree of some distinction, as Me’ir’s grandfather had been Rabbi Aleksander Schor, author of a work on Jewish law entitled Simlah ḥadashah. One of Me’ir’s five businessmen sons, Izrail’ (Yisra’el; 1823–1888), began to invest in the nascent sugar industry in the 1840s, eventually leasing, managing, and finally owning his own plants. Izrail’ Brodskii moved his family and base of operations to Kiev in 1876; his refinery was one of the largest factories in the city, and he built a sugar empire that eventually came to control a quarter of the sugar production in the Russian Empire. His brothers Iosif, Solomon, and Isaak also became prominent entrepreneurs in Kiev.
(1897–1937), Yiddish literary critic. Born in Belsk, Belorussia, Yashe Bronshteyn lived in Warsaw from 1914 to 1918 and went to Russia in 1919 to fight as a Red Army soldier. In 1921 he lived in Orel and worked for the local Russian newspaper Orlovskaia pravda. In the early 1920s he studied in Kiev, where he headed a commune of young Jewish workers and wrote some unremarkable poems.
(1869–1943), journalist, writer, translator, and politician. Horia Carp was born in Hârlău, Romania, where he received his elementary education; he then attended high school in Botoşani. After pursuing studies at the faculty of medicine in Iaşi, he left this program in his last year to become a journalist.
The name of two different youth organizations, disconnected geographically, but related to each other ideologically and politically. The term dror means “freedom.” The Zionist Socialist Federation “Dror” originated in Kiev, where a group of Jewish youth began to evolve into an organization on the eve of World War I. The group chose the name ‘Et Livnot (A Time to Build) in 1914; among its leaders were Ze’ev Zelikin and Yesha‘yah Pisarevski.
(Ger., Ostpreussen), former Prussian province on the Baltic Sea. With its capital at Königsberg (today Kaliningrad, Rus.), East Prussia was bordered to the east by Lithuania, to the south by Poland, and to the west by the province of West Prussia. Teutonic knights forbade the settlement of Jews in the territory in the fifteenth century. This ban, promoted by the province’s constitutionally strong estates, was circumvented in Königsberg from the seventeenth century on. In the province’s next-largest cities, Tilsit (Sovetsk, Rus.) and Memel (Klaipėda, Lith.), only certain “protected Jews” were admitted on the basis of the Generaljudenprivileg (general Jewish privilege) of 1750. A few cities (such as Lyck [Ełk, Pol.]) tolerated the founding of small Jewish communities; others permitted entry to Jewish merchants from Poland and Lithuania only during trade fairs.
Weekly publication issued in Bucharest from 1890 to 1916, and again from 1919 to 1940. The longest-enduring Jewish periodical in Romania, Egalitatea (Equality) started out as an emancipationist newspaper, “dedicated exclusively to Israelite interests within the country,” as was stated in its platform article. Over the extensive era in which it was issued, Egalitatea analyzed the political, cultural, social, and economic situations of Romanian Jews, as had its predecessor and model publication, Fraternitatea (Fraternity).
(1791–1852), director of the Warsaw Rabbinical School and leader of the radical integrationist movement in the Kingdom of Poland. Born in Warsaw, Antoni Eisenbaum was orphaned at an early age and received an incomplete secular secondary education. As a young man he was fluent in Polish, German, English, French, and Italian but never mastered Hebrew. He first earned his living as a private teacher and bookkeeper.
(1882–1942), Bundist leader and major Jewish politician in interwar Poland. Henryk (Hersh Wolf) Erlich was born in Lublin; his father was a lapsed Hasid who had become a follower of the Ḥoveve Tsiyon (Lovers of Zion) movement. Erlich received a traditional Jewish education as well as secular instruction. A significant turning point in Erlich’s political career came when he befriended Bronisław Grosser, a Bundist activist and prominent young theorist in the movement.
An independent state in Scandinavia since 1917, Finland was under Swedish rule until 1809, during which time Jews were banned from living there. When Finland became a grand duchy of the Russian Empire in 1809, Jews who had served in the Russian army and been stationed in Finnish territory were allowed to settle with their families in the place of their service. Thus a small Jewish community was established in Finland, consisting in 1870 of about 400 Jews originating from areas that today are part of Russia and Lithuania. The means by which they could earn a living in Finland were severely restricted. Starting in 1872 the Finnish Diet discussed the legal status of Jews several times.
(1898–1944), poet and philosopher. Born in Iaşi, Romania, Beniamin Fundoianu was the son of Isac Wechsler, a small tradesman from Herța (in Bucovina), and of Adela, sister of Jewish scholars Elias, Wilhelm, and Moses Schwarzfeld. The name of the Fundoaia estate, near Herța, inspired Beniamin to choose his literary pseudonym Fundoianu, which he eventually turned into Fondane in France.
The literary, folkloristic tale of the creation of a golem; the most famous formation of which was said to have been effected by Yehudah Leib ben Betsal’el (Maharal; d. 1609) of Prague. The notion in Jewish culture that a particularly righteous person, possessed of esoteric wisdom, could create an artificial human being out of inorganic matter—and thus imitate the Divine—has literary roots in the Talmud and early kabbalistic ideas. Some medieval readers of Sefer yetsirah (The Book of Creation), one of Judaism’s earliest mystical texts, understood the work to have practical as well as theoretical implications. In a commentary to that text, Rabbi El‘azar of Worms (ca. 1165–ca. 1230), an exemplar of German Jewish pietism, enumerated instructions for the actual creation of a golem. The kabbalistic writings of Avraham Abulafia (b. 1240) of Spain and the so-called Pseudo-Sa‘adyah—a thirteenth-century text of French Jewish origin—similarly testify to the interest of medieval Jewish mystics in the “practical” arts of creation.
The approach of the East European Jewish population to health care made no distinction between what would now be considered “scientific” medicine and “folk” medicine. This openness to combining folk remedies and magical cures with modern medical techniques was typical of Hasidim and Misnagdim alike, of both the learned and the illiterate. From the late seventeenth century on, physicians with “Western” training together with health care reformers emerging from the developing Jewish bourgeoisie attempted to reshape the popular attitude toward health care.
Since the Talmudic period, Jewish tradition and law have regarded the denunciation of Jews to non-Jewish rulers, even for deplorable or sinful behavior, as a grave offense, to be condemned and combated. This attitude is already evident in one of the 18 benedictions in the daily Amidah prayer. Informers, referred to in Hebrew and Yiddish as moserim (or moysrim in Ashkenazic pronunciation) or malshinim, were considered not only traitors to their people, but a danger to other Jews’ lives and property. Denouncers were excommunicated, disqualified from giving testimony or swearing an oath, barred from participation in public prayer services, and even denied religious burial. Some informers were defined as rodfim (pursuers), a category of persons who according to Jewish law could be executed even before committing the offense. In some places, particularly pre-Expulsion Spain and Poland, government authorities permitted Jewish courts to imprison informers and even condemn them to death. In modern Eastern Europe, informing was used as a weapon in ideological and religious struggles. Hasidim, Misnagdim, and maskilim, mainly in tsarist Russia and Galicia, slandered one another, ostensibly revealing “secrets,” “crimes,” or other illegal acts that their opponents were trying to conceal.
Prominent Bohemian family, principally associated with Prague. The main branch of the Jeitteles (Jeiteles, Geidels, Geitler) family descended from David Jeitteles in the seventeenth century. David’s son Leib was a physician; David’s grandson, Mishl Leib (d. 1760) bought the existing Jewish pharmacy in Prague, together with its pertinent privileges, from his cousin David Kisch (d. 1742) in July 1725.
(1908–1954), Yiddish writer and cultural activist. Born in Vilna to a poor family and educated at that city’s Talmud Torah, Shmerke (Pol., Szmerke) Kaczerginski lost both his parents during World War I. As a youth, he was involved with outlawed Communist groups and was arrested several times, serving a lengthy prison term. In the 1930s, two of his revolutionary poems became popular in Poland. He wrote short stories with a radical bent and was a correspondent and reporter for literary publications, including the semilegal leftist press in Poland and the New York Communist daily Morgn-frayhayt.
(1849–1915), editor and author; acclaimed for developing the feuilleton as a genre in the Jewish press. Yehudah Leib Kantor was born in Vilna, where his father Yosef served as a cantor in the main synagogue. A promising student at his yeshiva, Kantor soon grew interested in the Haskalah. In 1869, he entered the government-sponsored rabbinical seminary in Vilna and, in the same year, launched his literary career with an article in the Hebrew periodical Ha-Karmel, criticizing the state of education and other aspects of Jewish life.
(1785–1869), Orthodox leader, rabbi, dayan (religious court judge), magid (preacher), and halakhic decisor. Shelomoh ben Yehudah Kluger was born in Komarów, Poland, and studied in nearby Zamość. Orphaned in 1801, he moved to Rawa Ruska in Galicia, where he married the daughter of one of the lay leaders of the community. From 1810 to 1820, Kluger officiated as rabbi in Kulików, Galicia, and in Józefów, Poland. In 1820 he was appointed dayan in the Galician community of Brody, where he then served as chief judge and magid for almost 50 years, until his death.
(1878/79–1942), physician, educator, and writer. Janusz Korczak (originally Henryk Goldszmit) was born in Warsaw to a secular family strongly acculturated into Polish culture and imbued with a tradition of social activism. He was trained as a physician in Poland from 1898 to 1905, continuing his medical training until 1912 in Germany, France, and England.
(1918–1987), partisan and poet, leader and intellectual, and a central figure in twentieth-century Jewish and Israeli history and cultural life. Born in Sebastopol, Abba Kovner moved to Vilna as a child; the Jewish community of the city at that time was a thriving, vibrant cultural center, characterized by political, ideological, and religious diversity. He studied in the Tarbut Hebrew gymnasium and became a member, guide, and admired leader of the 1,000-member local branch of the Ha-Shomer ha-Tsa‘ir youth movement.
(Arkadii Grigor’evich Kovner; 1841/42–1909), Lithuanian maskil and pioneer of modern Hebrew literary criticism. A native of Vilna, Avraham Kovner studied at several yeshivas in the Minsk region, and after reaching adulthood discovered Hebrew maskilic literature. After a personal and intellectual crisis, he abandoned his wife and daughter and resettled in Kiev. There he was exposed to the radical strains of Russian and West European culture and began to write in Hebrew, taking the name Albert Kovner. From 1862 to 1868, his essays on social and literary topics were published primarily in Ha-Melits, but also in Ha-Magid and Ha-Karmel. Some of these essays were later reprinted in Ḥeker davar (An Inquiry; 1865) and Tseror peraḥim (A Bouquet of Flowers; 1868).
(1886–1938), Hungarian Communist leader. Béla Kun (originally Kohn) was born to a poor Transylvanian family in the village of Lele. His father, then a village official, was later fired and struggled to find work, but nevertheless managed to educate his son at the best gymnasiums of the region. In 1904, Kun began to study law at Kolozsvár (now Cluj, Romania) University and at the same time changed his name (as did many assimilated Jews). Even though he abandoned Judaism, he was never baptized.
(1883–1947), literary historian, Hebrew critic, and editor. Yeruḥam Fishel Lachower was born in Horzel, western Poland. As a child and adolescent he received both a Jewish and a general education. Following his marriage in 1904, he settled in Ciechanów, where he worked in commerce (his father had tried unsuccessfully to introduce him to the business world). That same year, he published his first article in the newspaper Ha-Tsefirah, analyzing the poetry of Sha’ul Tchernichowsky. From 1906 to1907, Lachower contributed review essays on Ḥayim Naḥman Bialik and Ahad Ha-Am to Yosef Ḥayim Brenner’s monthly Ha-Me‘orer, and published other criticism on the burgeoning Hebrew literature.
(1788–1852), Prague communal leader, Hebrew printer, and influential maskil. A scion of the illustrious Polish Landau family, Mosheh Landau was the grandson of Prague’s distinguished chief rabbi, Yeḥezkel Landau (1713–1793). Son of the traditional maskil Yisra’el Landau, Mosheh received both a Jewish and a secular education in Prague. In 1824, he followed his father and began to work as a Hebrew printer for a Christian printing house. In 1827, he bought the press and ran it for 25 years.
(ca. 1879–1902), bootmaker and revolutionary activist. Born into a poor family in the northeastern Lithuanian town of Onuskis (Anushishok), Hirsh Lekert was an apprentice bootmaker as a boy. In 1895, he moved to Vilna, where he worked in a shoemaking workshop and joined a group of Jewish revolutionaries. His dedication and stormy personality gained him early notoriety. In May 1900, Lekert took an active part in attacking the city’s police station in an effort to free a group of political prisoners; he himself was later arrested for attempting to free another prisoner. Lekert was sentenced to 15 months in prison, followed by two years of exile in Ekaterinoslav (Dnipropetrovs’k).
Hebrew literary annual, published in Warsaw in 1893–1904 and 1923. Founded by the Aḥi’asaf publishing company, Luaḥ Aḥi’asaf (Aḥi’asaf Calendar [Almanac]) was under the patronage and influence of Ahad Ha-Am. Produced each year shortly before the beginning of the Jewish New Year, the publication was a cross between a journal and a literary anthology. Along with its practical sections (calendars, useful information, advertisements, etc.), most of each volume was taken up by a diverse literary section that included fiction, poetry, discussions of current affairs, reviews, literary essays, and biographies.
(1899–1977), historian. Born in Nowy Sącz, Raphael Mahler received a traditional yeshiva education until age 15. He completed secondary school in Kraków before matriculating at the University of Vienna in history and philosophy and continued his Talmudic studies at the modern rabbinical seminary in Vienna. After earning his doctorate in 1922 with a dissertation on the sociological problems of progress, Mahler returned to Poland. There he taught history at Jewish secondary schools while participating in the Left Po‘ale Tsiyon and promoting modern Jewish historical research. With Emanuel Ringelblum, Mahler cofounded the Jewish Young Historians Circle that eventually affiliated with YIVO’s Historical Section, where he was actively involved both as a researcher and an editor.
(Iulii Osipovich Tsederbaum; 1873–1923), leader and ideologue of the Menshevik wing of the Russian Social Democratic Workers Party (RSDWP). While attending university in Saint Petersburg (1891–1892), Martov became a “propagandist,” conducting political educational work among small circles of workers. Arrested and sent to Vilna (1893–1895), he joined Jewish Social Democrats in developing and practicing the strategy of “agitation,” seeking to use the workers’ own grievances to foment strikes and draw their attention to capitalist exploitation and tsarist repression. Next, he joined Vladimir Lenin and Aleksandr Potresov in founding the Union for the Emancipation of Labor and, after another arrest and three years in Siberian exile, in publishing the journal Iskra (1900), which advocated the creation of a unified, politically disciplined social democratic party. Disagreements among Iskra’s editors over the organization of the party and its role in revolution led to an open confrontation between Lenin and Martov at the Second Congress of the RSDWP (July 1903), which ushered in the historic split between Bolsheviks and Mensheviks.
Educational and clinical facility for children and young adults at risk for tuberculosis. This sanatorium, which functioned in Międzeszyn near Warsaw between 1926 and 1942, was named after Bundist leader Vladimir Medem (1879–1923), and was the best-known establishment of the Bund and of TSYSHO (the Central Yiddish School Organization) in Poland. Until World War II, it was recognized internationally for its reformist pedagogical approach and its left laicist orientation.
(1885–1945), philologist and journalist. Born in Przemyśl, Galicia, to a maskil family, Matthias Mieses had studied 10 languages by the age of 18. He published a Hebrew poem in the weekly Ha-Magid at 15, followed by hundreds of articles dealing with science and politics; these appeared in the Hebrew, German, and Jewish Polish press.
(1798–1831), Galician maskil. Yehudah Leib Mieses was born in Lemberg (Lwów) to a wealthy family of rabbinical lineage; he received a broad Jewish and secular education. From his early years, Mieses was acknowledged as a forceful champion of Haskalah and an opponent of Hasidism. He supported yeshiva students who wished to receive a university education, supplying them with books from his large personal library and providing generous financial assistance. With his help, many young men were able to attend universities in Germany and Austria.
Town in Bohemia, 60 kilometers north of Prague. The presence of Jews in Mladá Boleslav (Ger., Jungbunzlau; known to Jews as Bumsla) was documented by the second half of the fifteenth century. Until the nineteenth century, Jews comprised roughly 10 percent of all inhabitants. The Jewish quarter there—together with those of Prague and Kolín—was among the most important in all of Bohemia.
Hebrew publishing house, founded in 1901–1902 in Odessa. Moriah was established by the poet Ḥayim Naḥman Bialik, Hebrew-Zionist activist Y. H. Ravnitski, writer Simḥah Alter Gutmann (known as S. Ben-Zion), and others in Ahad Ha-Am’s circle. Under Bialik and Ravnitski, Moriah became the premiere Hebrew publishing house in the period before World War I; a brief revival in 1917–1918 ended amid economic crisis and Bolshevik suppression.
(1808–1875), rabbi, halakhic decisor, and Orthodox educator. Yosef Sha’ul Natanson was born in the Galician town of Brzeżany (Ukr., Berezhany; Yid. Berezhan) to a distinguished and wealthy family. In 1825, after he married his cousin, Sara Idel (of the Ettinger family), he moved to Lwów. Most of Natanson’s time in subsequent years was devoted to study and to writing Talmudic and halakhic works in collaboration with his brother-in-law, Mordekhai Ze’ev Ettinger. In 1848, Natanson established a small yeshiva in a Lwów bet midrash, and he was soon widely recognized as an Orthodox educator. In 1857, he was appointed district rabbi in Lwów, after the post had been unoccupied for some 10 years; he held that position until his death.
(Pol., Niemirów; Rus., Nemirov), town on the Ustia River, a tributary of the Southern Bug, the district center of the Vinnytsya region of Ukraine. From 1569, the town belonged to the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, from 1649 it was within the region of Cossack autonomy, and from 1678 to 1699 it was under the rule of the Turkish governor-general, who resided in the city in 1678–1681 and 1683–1685. From 1793, it belonged to Russia and from 1920 to the Soviet Union.
(1872–1939), rabbi and philosopher of Judaism. Born in Lemberg (Lwów), Iacob Isac (Ya‘akov Yitsḥak) Niemirower received a traditional Jewish education. His parents moved to Iaşi, Romania, when he was a child. Initially influenced by Hasidism, Niemirower later followed the rationalist current characteristic of the Haskalah. In 1890, he went to Berlin to study philosophy, receiving his Ph.D. from the University of Bern in Switzerland in 1895. In Berlin he also studied at the Neo-Orthodox rabbinical seminary and was ordained by Rabbi Ernest Biberfeld. Niemirower also decided to become a Reform rabbi, and was ordained in 1896 by Rabbi Michael Hamburger of Strolitz. Niemirower was additionally influenced by the philosophy of Moritz Lazarus.
(1889–1950), Soviet Yiddish and Russian literary critic and scholar. Yitskhok Nusinov was born in the Volhynian town of Chernigov, where his father, a maskil, held a lease on a glass factory. Involved in Bundist revolutionary activity from 1905, Nusinov graduated as an external student from a Warsaw secondary school in 1910, and two years later helped organize one of the first Yiddish schools in Ukraine. Subsequently, he traveled to Italy and Switzerland for medical treatment, also studying literature and philosophy at Lausanne University and participating actively in the cultural life of the Russian émigré colony.
(1770?–1810), folk figure. Although what we know about Hershele Ostropolyer is based mostly on oral tradition and folklore, he was also a real person. Hershele is thought to have come from Balta, Ukraine, and his name is based on the small town of Ostropolye (Ostropol) in Poland, where he served the community as a shoḥet (ritual slaughterer). According to legend, Hershele lost his job because of his constant joking that offended some leaders of the community. He then wandered through Ukraine, and was a familiar personality at inns and restaurants, which explains why such institutions figure so prominently in the stories about him. Eventually he found his calling—at the court of Barukh of Mezhbizh, the grandson of the Ba‘al Shem Tov, the founder of Hasidism. Barukh was plagued by depression, and Hershele served as a court jester, frequently mocking the rabbi and his cronies and delighting the common folk.
(also commonly Rachel Auerbach; 1903–1976), writer and essayist in Yiddish and Polish. Rokhl Oyerbakh was born in Lanowitz (mod Ukr., Lanovitsy), a small village in Podolia. Although the family later moved to Lwów, her rural childhood left her with a lifelong love of Yiddish and a deep interest in Jewish folklore. Auerbach studied psychology and philosophy at Lwów University and also collaborated in Tsushtayer, a journal founded by Melech Ravitch to foster Yiddish culture in Galicia, a region where most of the Jewish intelligentsia spoke Polish.
(1890–1960), poet, prose writer, and translator. Boris Pasternak was raised in a highly cultured Moscow family. His mother Rozaliia (née Kaufman) was a pianist; his father, Leonid Osipovich, was a prominent artist and art professor. As a child, Pasternak first studied art and then music (Alexander Scriabin considered him a talented composer); he went on to study philosophy in Moscow and Marburg.
(1854–1937), painter, graphic artist, teacher, and founder of the “Vitebsk school.” Yehudah (Yudel, Iurii; patronymic Moiseevich, Movshevich) Pen was born in the shtetl Novo-Aleksandrovsk, Kovno guberniia (now Zarasai, Lith.), to an impoverished family. He attended a local heder but did not show much interest in his studies. Instead he devoted most of his time to drawing, for which he showed great talent. According to Pen himself, his talent found its application in the sphere of traditional Jewish art. He drew ornamental letters and captions in books, decorated Purim gragers (noisemakers), and created mizraḥ (Eastern wall) plaques. He painted portraits of shtetl dwellers and various imaginary characters, an activity that brought him great satisfaction, but made his mother very angry. At her insistence Yehudah was sent to Dinaburg (Dvinsk; now Daugavpils, Latvia) at the end of 1867, to become an apprentice house painter.
Invented in Western Europe in 1839, the new technology of photography soon migrated to Eastern Europe and Russia. Beginning in the 1840s, East European Jews were leading figures in developing photography as a new art form, a tool of documentation, and a medium of social criticism. Although initially an expensive and rarified technology, as photography became less costly, easier, and therefore more popular at the end of the nineteenth century, Jews rushed into this new burgeoning field.
Preaching in the synagogue dates to late antiquity, when the tradition of weekly sermons given on the Sabbath and based on the reading from the Torah of that week, began. This tradition continued in Eastern Europe. There were also special occasions when the rabbi was particularly called upon to preach, notably Shabat Shuvah (the Sabbath between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur), and Shabat ha-Gadol (the Sabbath before Passover). From the eighteenth century, the communal burial society would gather annually on the 7th of Adar, the traditional birth and death date of Moses in the Hebrew calendar, to hear a sermon from the rabbi. In larger communities, the weekly sermon would be delivered by the darshan (preacher), an appointed member of the communal establishment.
(1817–1869), writer and editor. Osip Rabinovich, who came from a Russified family, studied at Kharkov University before becoming a notary in Odessa. In the latter city, he published a Russian translation of a Hebrew poem (1847), as well as articles in which he alternately criticized Jewish traditionalism and Russian society for its prejudices about Jews.
(1879–1929), Zionist leader in Galicia and independent Poland. Leon Reich completed his law degree at the University of Lwów and then studied at the École des Sciences Politiques in Paris. He became committed to the Zionist movement as a student and was one of the founders of the Union of Jewish Students (Ognisko) and of the Zionist student organization in Galicia (Emunah). He made a name for himself as an effective journalist and publicist and was editor of the Almanach żydowski in Lwów, to which he contributed many articles, and of the Polish-language Zionist weekly Wschód. He was also active in the struggle to democratize Jewish life in Galicia and campaigned unsuccessfully to be elected to the Austrian Reichsrat in 1911. During World War I, he served in the legal department of the Austrian Army.
Riddles have been described (by the American folklorist Roger Abrahams) as a traditional form of licensed aggression, since the aim of the riddler is to confuse the listener by giving hints that point to the right answer only in hindsight. The answer to a puzzling and seemingly unanswerable question is arbitrary, surprising, and traditional. That is, with all possible answers, the questioner, in keeping with tradition, has the power to insist which choice is the right answer. The puzzle arises from the skillful use of speech-play, metaphor, and other techniques of obfuscation and misdirection. Yet the riddle can serve various functions: as entertainment, as a means of teaching values, and as a way of socializing the child into the poetics of Yiddish speech, including speech-play, metaphor, puns, and proverbs.
Family of printers and publishers in Vilna. The Romm family’s printing house, the largest in Eastern Europe in the nineteenth century, operated continuously for more than 120 years. In the central period of its activity, beginning at the end of the 1860s, the printing house underwent a process of modernization—overseen by Shemu’el Shraga Feigenzohn, a rabbi, entrepreneur, and administrator—that was a key to its success. Feigenzohn directed the firm for two decades beginning in 1867; he also wrote a history of the Romm printing house under the pseudonym Shafan ha-Sofer.
(1894–1939), novelist, short-story writer, and journalist. Born in Brody (in Austrian Galicia) and raised without a father, Joseph Roth volunteered during World War I and in 1917 was sent as a reporter to the Galician front. This experience had an enormous impact on him. In 1918, he returned to Vienna and began working as a journalist for leftist newspapers such as Arbeiterzeitung and Der Neue Freie Tag. In 1920, he moved to Berlin, where he contributed to the Neue Berliner Zeitung,Berliner Börsen-Courier, and the Vorwärts, among others. From 1923 to 1932 Roth was a feuilletonist for the liberal Frankfurter Zeitung, as well as its foreign correspondent in France, Czechoslovakia, the Soviet Union, Albania, Italy, and Poland. Beginning in 1923, he published novels as well.
(1895–1976), poet, writer, playwright, publicist, and theater and film critic. Antoni Słonimski was the grandson of Ḥayim Zelig Słonimski, a prominent Warsaw maskil, mathematician, astronomer, inventor, and publisher of Ha-Tsefirah; and the great-grandson of Abraham Stern, a mathematician, inventor, and member of the Warsaw Society of Friends of Science.
Town in the Świętokrzyskie province on the Vistula River, and one of the oldest Jewish communities in Little Poland. In the period of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, Sandomierz (Yid., Tsuzmir) played an important role as a trade center on a river route to Gdańsk and on a trade route from Kraków to Vilna. The town lost its importance after the partitions of Poland at the end of the eighteenth century.
(1794–1857), Moravian and Hungarian rabbi; pioneer of moderate reforms in the Habsburg Empire. The son of a peddler in Moravský-Krumlov, Löw (later he would occasionally employ the archaic Hungarian equivalent, Arszlán) Schwab was a gifted child who mastered rabbinic literature under private tutelage. At age 11, he enrolled in the Nikolsburg yeshiva of the chief rabbi of Moravia, Mordekhai Banet, and upon bar mitzvah he briefly attended the Pressburg yeshiva, led by Mosheh Sofer. For the next four years, Schwab continued his studies at Nikolsburg and Trebitsch, where he also acquired a secular education independently and worked his way through the classics of medieval Jewish philosophy. In the new rabbi of Gewitsch (mod. Jevíčko, Czech Rep.), Joachim Deutschmann, Schwab found the mentor he had been seeking: a brilliant Talmudist who had also been part of the circle of Prague maskilim surrounding Baruch Jeitteles.
(1894–1942), poet and journalist. Born in Ostrołęka, Białystok district, Yisroel Shtern grew up in an economically deprived family. His father, a melamed, died young, leaving his mother—who sold homemade baked goods—and grandfather to support the family. Shtern studied in a heder and continued his religious education in the prestigious yeshivas of Slobodka and Łomża. At the outbreak of World War I, Shtern was living in Vienna, where he was imprisoned as a Russian national. During this period, he became acquainted with contemporary European literature and philosophy.
(1880–1920), Socialist Zionist leader; war hero. Yosef Trumpeldor was born in Piatigorsk, Russia, the son of a cantonist (a Jewish soldier inducted as a child into the army of Tsar Nicholas I). Trumpeldor grew up outside the Pale of Settlement, in Rostov-on-Don, and attended dentistry school but soon became active in the nascent Zionist movement. He was particularly attracted to its socialist camp, which was inspired by the ideas of Leo Tolstoy to “return to the land” and establish Jewish agricultural communes in Palestine.
(1873–1939), historian of Jewish literature; chemist. Yisroel Tsinberg, also known as Sergei Lazarevich Tsinberg (often spelled Zinberg in English sources), received a traditional and a secular education, first from private teachers in his father’s home in Volhynia and then at a secondary school in Rovno (Ukr., Rivne). He studied chemistry at the Karlsruhe Polytechnic Institute from 1891 to 1895, received a doctorate in philosophy from Basel University, and settled in Saint Petersburg in 1898.
(1881–1949), Yiddish humorist. The son of a melamed, Yoysef Tunkel (also known by his pseudonym Der Tunkeler, the Dark One), was born in Bobruisk, Belorussia, and died in New York. Between 1896 and 1899, he studied drawing in Vilna, and then moved to Odessa where he worked as an artist and caricaturist. However, he was quickly forced to limit his art production due to poor eyesight. He then turned to writing “serious” literary works in Yiddish.
Yiddish actors, theater and film directors, and communal activists. Notable members of the Turkow (Turkov) family included Zygmunt (Zigmunt, Shloyme Zalmen; 1896–1970); Jonas (Yonas; 1898–1988); Mark (Marek; 1904–1983); and Yitskhok Ber (who also used the pseudonym Grudberg; 1906–1970).
(1918–1999), Yiddish poet, novelist, and editor. Born in Lubar, Ukraine, Arn (or Aron) Vergelis received a secondary Yiddish education in Birobidzhan, where his family lived from 1932. He was noted as a local talent in 1934 when his poems began to appear in the newspaper Birobidzhaner shtern (Birobidzhan Star) and the almanac Forpost (Outpost). Upon graduating from a Yiddish school in 1936, he was sent to Moscow to continue his education at the Yiddish department of the Pedagogical Institute. Vergelis graduated in 1940—the same year in which his first book was published. That year, he also joined the Writers Union, and was drafted into the Russian army.
Line of Polish rabbinic leaders. The Vurke (Pol., Warka) Hasidic dynasty was established by Yitsḥak Kalish (1779–1848), whose activities as an intercessor (shtadlan) with the government signaled the predominance of Hasidism among Jews in the Kingdom of Poland.
(1884–1964), philosopher and journalist. Born in Prague, Felix Weltsch obtained doctorates in both law and philosophy, and in his books concentrated on social philosophy and political ethics. He belonged to what his lifelong friend Max Brod, the writer and biographer of Franz Kafka, called the Prague Circle of young Jewish intellectuals, of which Kafka was the most famous member (Weltsch himself was a friend of Kafka). Weltsch was a Zionist from an early age, and in the interwar period he was editor in chief and the moving spirit of the main Zionist weekly in Czechoslovakia, Selbstwehr (Self-Defense). He also worked as an academic librarian.
(1824–1904), businessman, Zionist activist, and philanthropist. Kalonymus Wissotzky was born in a town near Kovno (mod. Kaunas) into the family of a small merchant. At 18, he married and his wife’s parents agreed to support his Talmud studies for three years. He attended the Volozhin yeshiva but had to leave because of illness.
(Young Theater; 1932–1939), Yiddish avant-garde theater company. Yung-teater emerged out of the Yiddish Theater Studio, founded by Michał Weichert in Warsaw in 1929; it was supported by the Yiddish cultural organization Kultur-lige. Weichert, a highly educated theater director, historian, and critic, was influenced by the avant-garde, politically activist work of Max Reinhardt in Berlin and the Moscow State Yiddish Theater.
(1918–1921), artistic and literary avant-garde group in Łódź. The founding of Yung-yidish, the first Yiddish artistic avant-garde group in Poland, grew out of a meeting in 1918 between poet Moyshe Broderzon and a group of visual artists centered around Yitskhok Broyner, Yankl Adler, and Marek Szwarc. Eventually, the group included some 20-odd members including Yitsḥak Katzenelson, Yekhezkl-Moyshe Nayman, and Hershele, as well as younger people discovered by the group, such as the artist Henekh Bartshinski and the writers Elimelekh Shmulevitsh, Khayim Leyb Fuks, and Yisroel Shtern. In 1919, the group published a journal, also called Yung-yidish.
(d. 1801), merchant and court supplier; ancestor of the Bergson (Berekson) family. In 1756 or 1757, Shmul Zbytkower (also known as Shemu’el ben Ya‘akov Avigdor; Szmul Jakubowicz) arrived in Warsaw from the nearby village of Zbytki, where he was a leaseholder. He worked in commerce and by 1766 had received the title of purveyor to the court of the Polish king, Stanisław August Poniatowski, and from 1771 performed similar services for the Prussian monarch Frederick II.
(1915–1981), Polish Zionist youth leader who was prominent in the Warsaw ghetto uprising. Born in Vilna, Yitsḥak (Antek) Zuckerman studied at Tarbut schools and joined the Zionist youth movement He-Ḥaluts ha-Tsa‘ir. In 1936 he went to a hakhsharah (agricultural training) farm in Grochów near Warsaw and worked at the central office of He-Ḥaluts ha-Tsa‘ir. In 1938 he was appointed secretary general of the movement.
(1843–1902), sculptor. Born near Vilna, the youngest son in a family of a Jewish tavernkeeper, Mark Antokol’skii went on to distinguish himself as the founder of the realist school in Russian sculpture and as the Russian Jewish artist par excellence.
(1916–1939; Yid., Fareyn fun Yidishe Literatn un Zhurnalistn in Varshe; Pol., Związek Literatów i Dziennikarzy Żydowskich w Warszawie), a trade union, advocacy group, and social meeting venue for writers. In March 1916—less then a year after Y. L. Peretz’s death—60 Jewish writers and journalists gathered at Hazomir Hall in Warsaw to establish a trade union. The first chair of the group was the Yiddish writer Yankev Dinezon and its initial location was at 13 Tłomackie Street, an address associated with the Jewish secular cultural movement. The premises functioned as a social meeting place not only for members, but also for actors, artists, teachers, guests from abroad, and others who were interested in Jewish secular culture. In addition, the association offered a large variety of literary and other activities, both for its members and for the general public.
Association of Jewish Writers and Journalists in Warsaw
Association of Jewish Writers and Journalists
Association of Yiddish Writers and Journalists
Jewish Writers and Journalists Association
Professional Association of Writers and Journalists
A clandestine, Zionist-organized mass movement of about 250,000 Jews from Eastern and Central Europe following the Holocaust. The goal of Beriḥah (Heb., flight or escape) was to bring the Jews to Palestine. The term refers to both the migration itself and the organization that assisted it. The immigrants were mainly Polish, though Slovak, Romanian, and other Jews participated. Austria and Czechoslovakia served as transit countries from which Jews moved first either to Germany or Italy.
Yiddish-language social and political newspaper established in 30 October 1930 in the future city of Birobidzhan. When Birobidzhan was formally declared a Jewish Autonomous Region (JAR) in 1934, the approximate circulation of Birobidzhaner shtern (Birobidzhan Star) was 500 copies. These numbers rose to 1,500 in 1939, but fell to less than 1,000 in 1950. In 1970 circulation numbered 12,000 (according to official data), and in 1991, after the newspaper’s partial shift to Russian (in September 1990), the maximum totals were 4,000.
Account of Nazi atrocities against Jews in the Soviet Union. The first plenary session of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee (JAC) in May 1942 set up a subcommittee to collect material on Nazi crimes against the Jewish population of the occupied territories. Once the tide of the war turned in early 1943, the JAC indicated its intention to systematize the accumulation of this material and began receiving relevant testimonies.
Jewish calendars (Heb., luḥot; Yid., kalendarn) use rabbinic chronology for determining the year “to the Creation of the World,” and have presented the months and Jewish holidays in remarkably stable form over the centuries. At least through the eighteenth century, knowledgeable Jews learned how to calculate the Jewish calendar, and luḥot were among the earliest printed Jewish works, both broadsides and pocket calendars. Calendars usually contained brief chronographs, time lines that counted the important events from creation, through the biblical period, until contemporary times. Some Jewish calendars served as full almanacs by including astronomical, medical, weather, market, and other information.
(Ukr., Chernobyl; later, Twersky Hasidic Dynasty), one of the leading Hasidic communities in nineteenth-century Ukraine. The Chernobil dynasty was founded by Rabbi Menaḥem Naḥum of Chernobil (1730?–1797), a student of Yisra’el Ba‘al Shem Tov and Dov Ber, the Magid of Mezritsh. In addition to serving as the magid (preacher) of Chernobil, Reb Naḥum apparently traveled around Ukraine, mediating, advising, and spreading his teachings.
There is a shared foundation in all of Jewish culture with respect to death, the primary and most influential principle of which concerns the impurity of the dead. From this belief derives the need to distance the dead from places of human habitation and to confine them to separate areas set aside for them: cemeteries. The dead were buried with a ceremony—the funeral—and their relatives, the mourners, practiced customs of mourning anchored in halakhah.
(1856?–1919), Yiddish author, editor, and literary activist. Yankev Dinezon was born in the Kovno region of Lithuania; the date of his birth is uncertain and may have been as late as 1862. He received a traditional education and showed a passion for writing at an early age. Dinezon’s father died before the writer was 12, and he was subsequently raised in Mohilev (mod. Mogilev-Podol’skiy) by an uncle. In Mohilev, Dinezon studied at a yeshiva until he was 16. Hired by Bodona Horowitz, a rich Mohilev merchant’s wife, to tutor her children in Hebrew, Dinezon received his first secular education in their home, and grew familiar with German and Russian. Dinezon ultimately became a family confidant and business agent, traveling on behalf of their interests.
Bankers and industrialists in Warsaw. Jakub Epstein (1771–1843) was a merchant, Polish army officer, and Freemason. His sons Josef (1795–1876), Adam (1799–1870), Jan (1805–1885), and Herman (1806–1867) all played leading roles in the economic and social life of the Polish Kingdom. Herman’s sons Mikołaj (1831–1902) and Mieczysław (1833–1914) continued in these roles as well.
(1886–1973), poet and publicist. Dovid Eynhorn was born in Karelitsh and educated in Wołkowysk (now Volkovysk, Belarus) in part by his father Binyomin, a military physician who had “returned to the faith” and become a government-appointed rabbi. In his younger years, Eynhorn wrote in Hebrew. His first Yiddish poems were published mainly in the Bundist press. The failure of the 1905 Revolution was a pivotal point in his life, since he came to perceive literature as a reply to politics.
Yiddish newspaper published in Poland from April 1945 until December 1991. Folks-shtime (Voice of the People) was the main newspaper of Polish Jews after World War II. It began in Łódź and from October 1949 it came out in Warsaw. Until 8 December 1956 it was published under the auspices of the Polish United Workers Party. Thereafter it became the organ of the Social and Cultural Association of Jews in Poland. In its last period, from 1989 to 1991, the Ministry of Culture and Art financed its publication. Beginning in 1969, the newspaper added a section in Polish. From 1950 to 1968 Folks-shtime appeared four times a week; from 1968 to 1991 it was issued weekly. In Yiddish, it used standard rather than Soviet orthography.
(1910–1982), Yiddish poet and novelist. Chaim Grade ranks among the most important Yiddish writers of the post-Holocaust period. His unsentimental depictions of rabbinic high culture and life on the Jewish streets of Vilna both describe memorable characters drawn from different strata of society, and dramatize the contest of ideas and moral impulses that defined his community in the interwar period. Though today Grade is best remembered for the richness of his prose, he is also the author of nine volumes of poetry.
(1890–1937), director of the Moscow State Yiddish Theater (Gosudarstvennyi Evreiskii Teatr; GOSET). Aleksandr Granovskii (Yid., Aleksander Granovski) was born into a wealthy merchant family in Moscow that moved to Riga while he was an infant. There he was raised in an assimilated environment. Beginning in 1910, he studied theater in Saint Petersburg, where he was influenced by the avant-garde and experimental theater of the Russian Silver Age. He continued his studies under the tutelage of Max Reinhardt in Germany, and developed an appreciation for theater as spectacle. In 1914, he returned to Saint Petersburg and began directing theatrical productions, including Macbeth, Faust, and Rimsky-Korsakov’s Sadko.
(Often Grodzinski; 1863–1940), religious scholar and community leader. “Reb Khayim Oyzer” (as he was widely known, using the Yiddish form of his name) was a major twentieth-century Jewish rabbinic authority and one of the most prominent leaders of Lithuanian Orthodox Jewry. Even in his childhood, Grodzenski exhibited superlative memory and Talmudic pilpul (casuistry) skills. He studied at the yeshivas of Eishishok (Pol., Ejszyszki; now Eisiskes, Lith.) and Volozhin (now Valozhyn, Bel.) and became known as the “prodigy of Ivya,” after his birthplace in Lithuania (Pol., Iwje). In Volozhin, he befriended Ḥayim Soloveichik of Brisk (Brest Litovsk), but was not influenced by the latter’s innovative methods of study.
(1875–1958), journalist and editor. Bentsiyon Katz was born in Doyg (Lith., Daugai) in Lithuania to a prestigious rabbinical family. At the age of 16, he began to send articles on contemporary problems to Ha-Melits and Ha-Tsefirah, frequently dealing with the need to adapt halakhah to modern times. From 1893 he lived in turn in Vilna, Kovno, and Saint Petersburg, received a university education, and by the end of that decade had published studies on halakhah (Mi-Zekenim etbonen [From the Elders I Shall Gain Wisdom]; 1894), on the Talmud (Or nogah: ‘Al sheme ha-Talmud [A Shining Light upon the Heavens of the Talmud]; 1895), and on Jewish history (Le-Korot ha-yehudim be-Rusyah, Polin, ve-Lita’ bi-shenot me’ot ha-shesh ‘esreh veha-sheva‘ ‘esreh [History of the Jews of Russia, Poland, and Lithuania in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries]; 1899).
(1843–1921), poet and editor. József Kiss was born in Mezőcsát; both his grandfathers had moved to Hungary from Lithuania. His father, István Klein, was a poor merchant who sent his son to study in a yeshiva. Kiss, however, left that school when he was 13 to attend a gymnasium. For five years he was a melamed (itinerant teacher), wandering from village to village, “for all but nothing, some food, tobacco and a new shoe sole.”
(or Kolomyya; Pol., Kołomyja; Ger., Kolomea), city on the Prut River in Ukraine. Jews first settled in Kołomyja, then part of Poland, at about the turn of the sixteenth century. Although many were murdered and the community was destroyed during the Khmel’nyts’kyi massacres of 1648–1649, the Jewish population quickly reestablished itself and numbered more than 1,000 residents by 1772, when Austria wrested the city from Polish control and made it part of the new province of Galicia.
(1828–1852), Hebrew poet and translator. Mikhah Yosef Lebensohn (Mikhal), son of Avraham Dov Lebensohn (Adam ha-Kohen), was born in Vilna. In addition to receiving a traditional Jewish education, he was encouraged by his father to study Russian, Polish, German, and French, and began writing and translating at an early age. In 1845, he was diagnosed with tuberculosis and subsequently traveled to sanatoria in Germany (Reinerz, Salzbrunn, and Berlin) in search of a cure. In Berlin, he was introduced to German culture, including the philosophy of Friedrich Schelling, and befriended the prominent Jewish scholar Shneur Sachs. In 1850, Lebensohn returned to Vilna. Attempts to cure his disease failed and he died at age 24.
(1814–1891), rabbi; pioneer of ultra-Orthodoxy; Yiddishist. Hillel Lichtenstein was born in the small community of Vécs, not far from Pressburg in what today is Slovakia (hence his alternate appellation as Hillel Vécs; he was also known as Hillel Lesh, an abbreviated form of his family name, and later as Hillel Kolomea). His father, Barukh Bendit (d. 1839), served as the town’s dayan. Lichtenstein gloried in his distinguished rabbinic lineage: he was a descendant of both Mordekhai Yafeh and Yesha‘yahu Horowitz (known as Shlah). That the latter was one of only a handful of rabbis ever to be called kadosh (saint) had a decisive impact on young Hillel, who in time himself came to be regarded as a holy man.
(Hungarian Jewish Review), the foremost Jewish studies periodical in the Hungarian language. Magyar Zsidó Szemle, which was published in 65 volumes between 1884 and 1948, was founded at the initiative of József Simon, a key communal leader of Hungarian Jewry, against the background of the Tiszaeszlár blood libel. In autumn 1883, Simon urged the staff of the newly founded Budapest Rabbinical Seminary to publish a Hungarian-language Jewish studies periodical. Vilmos (Wilhelm) Bacher and József Bánóczi, two young scholars, undertook the editorship; the first volume of about 700 pages appeared in 1884.
Daily newspaper published in Bucharest in two series: 1919–1922 and 1944–1948. The director and founder of Mântuirea (Redemption) was Abraham Leib Zissu, and its editor in chief was Abraham Feller. The publication was regarded as the most influential Romanian Jewish newspaper of the interwar period. It had a strong Zionist bent, implied by its subtitle, “Cotidian național evreiesc” (Jewish National Daily).
(1824–1898), rabbi, halakhic authority, and a leader of the Ḥibat Tsiyon movement. Born in Głębokie, near Vilna, Shemu’el Mohilewer was ordained at the Volozhin yeshiva. He served as rabbi in a number of communities in Poland and Lithuania, including Suwałki (1860–1868), Radom (1868–1883), and Białystok (1883–1898).
(Past and Future), literary, artistic, social, and critical periodical, published in Hungary between 1911 and 1944 and renewed in 1988. Founded by József Patai, Múlt és Jövő first appeared in 1911 as a stylish almanac, becoming a monthly from 1912 until March 1919, when the Hungarian Soviet Republic shut it down. In the first years of the counterrevolutionary regime, between 1919 and 1923, it was published as a political weekly. Beginning in October 1921, it reverted to monthly publication, continuing until March 1944. When Patai immigrated to Palestine in 1939, Ernő Molnár—his brother-in-law and the editor of the periodical’s youth supplement, Remény (Hope)—became editor in chief, though the masthead continued to list Patai’s name in that position. Molnár died in the Holocaust.
The most appropriate way of considering names used by Jews in Eastern Europe is to separate the discussion of personal names from that of family names. Indeed, personal names represent an organic part of Jewish culture. Their corpus developed over the centuries in a natural way, inside the community. Their history is closely related to that of Yiddish. On the other hand, but for a very few exceptions, the family names were invented during a short period of time, around the turn of the nineteenth century. Their adoption was forced by state authorities. Until the beginning of the twentieth century, in numerous communities they were marginal for Jewish self-consciousness.
(1780–1844), disciple of Naḥman of Bratslav and disseminator of his teachings. Natan Sternhartz served as informal leader of the Bratslav Hasidic sect following his master’s death. He was never considered to be the rebbe of the community, however, and Bratslav Hasidim thus remain faithful to the group’s founder.
Wealthy and prominent rabbinic family. Many members of the Orenstein family filled major rabbinic posts in the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth and Galicia, especially from the middle of the eighteenth century. The first to bear the family name was Mordekhai Ze’ev Orenstein (1745–1787), who by an early age had served as rabbi in several Polish communities. Following the First Partition of Poland, he held the position of assistant district rabbi in Galicia (1776–1778), and later as rabbi of Lwów until his death.
Nineteenth-century Russian entrepreneurs whose activities included railway construction, banking, commerce, and philanthropy. The family included three brothers, Ya‘akov (Yakov), Shemu’el (Samuil), and Eli‘ezer (Lazar); they came from a merchant family in Dubrovna (near Vitebsk) and received traditional Jewish as well as modern educations.
To survey the history of Jewish publishing activity in Eastern Europe, this entry is divided chronologically into two articles, the first covering the period up to 1800 and the second from 1800 until 2000. For further discussion, see also Book Design and Illustration.
About this Article (Printing and Publishing)
Przytyk, a small town several kilometers from Radom, was the scene of a riot on 9 March 1936 in which two Jews and a non-Jewish Pole were killed, several dozen Jewish apartments and shops were destroyed, and more than 20 people were severely beaten. At that time, 90 percent of Przytyk’s 3,000 inhabitants were Jews and the town served as a market for neighboring hamlets.
Town in northeastern Hungary and the seat of Zemplén county before World War I. Sátoraljaújhely (also known as Újhely) was a market town that became a commercial center in the second half of the eighteenth century. Its Jewish community was founded in 1771; a burial society was formed a year later. Its first Jewish public school was established in 1785; it was closed at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Even though in 1807 the town expelled 30 Jewish families (citing immigration from Galicia, which increased the number of poor), the number of Jewish inhabitants reached 1,217 in 1825, 3,253 in 1869 and 5,730 in 1910, making up 18.6, 32.7, and 28.7 percent of the total populations in those years.
(1814–1895), Hebrew poet, editor, and author. Yehoshu‘a Heshel Schorr (also known by the acronym Yahash) was born in Brody, Galicia to a wealthy family. As a young boy, he was introduced to Haskalah literature and, in 1828, he visited Naḥman Krochmal. Schorr was influenced by the writings of Yitsḥak Erter, who lived in Brody and with whom he developed a lasting friendship.
Romanian intellectuals active in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Beniamin Schwarzfeld (1822–1897) was a Hebrew-language writer and educator. His sons Elias (1855–1915), Wilhelm (1856–1894), and Moses (1857–1943) were writers and historians, and his daughter Adela Schwarzfeld-Wechsler (1859–1953) was the mother of the poet Beniamin Fundoianu (Fondane).
(1893–1956), historian and librarian. A native of Warsaw, Yankev Shatzky spent most of his career in the United States, closely associated with the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research. His published works number more than a thousand, including hundreds of scholarly articles, scores of major book reviews, monographs, and book-length studies, in addition numerous anthologies and annuals that he edited. Writing primarily in Yiddish, but also in Polish and Hebrew, Shatzky ranged over the length and breadth of modern Jewish history and thought. He also wrote extensively on the history of Yiddish theater and popular Jewish culture. His best and most important works focused on the Jews of Poland, Lithuania, and Ukraine—the constituent parts of Old Poland.
The Workers’ Society for Physical Education “Shtern” traced its roots to a sports group known as Spartakus, which was established in Warsaw by the Labor Zionist youth organization Yugnt in 1920. In 1923, Spartakus united with a group known as Gwiazda (Star), composed of middle-school students; this new entity then began to refer to itself as the Shtern (Star) Workers’ Sport Club. The club’s formation in the Polish capital provided impetus for the establishment of similar groups elsewhere in the country. A Shtern group formed in Łódź around 1925, and in Kraków in 1928. In 1937—when there were 190 branches of Maccabi and 107 branches of Morgnshtern (the Bundist movement for physical education) in Poland—the Shtern movement was made up of 44 local organizations.
(1880–1932), Yiddish writer and educator. Born in Lipkany, Bessarabia, Eliezer Shteynbarg (originally Shteynberg) received a traditional Jewish education but independently mastered German and Russian classics. Like his cousin Yehudah Steinberg (Shteynberg; a pioneer of modern Hebrew education), Eliezer directed a private, secular school, with Hebrew as the language of instruction. From 1919 on, he lived in Czernowitz (Chernivtsi) where he ran, among other things, a Yiddish children’s theater.
(Przysucha; 1765–1827), important Hasidic leader in Poland. Simḥah Bunem was born in Wodzisław, where his father was a magid. Simḥah Bunem studied in the yeshivas of Mattersdorf (in Hungary; now Mattersberg, Austria) and Nikolsburg (Mikulov, Moravia), and his first Hasidic mentors were Mosheh Leib of Sasov (1745–1807) and Yisra’el the Magid of Kozhenits (Kozienice; ca. 1737–1814).
Town in northeastern Romania, in the current county of Suceava. As early as the seventeenth century, Jews had settled in Siret (Ger., Sereth), a medieval Moldavian town that had been the former capital of the principality. When Bucovina was occupied by Austrian troops in 1774, eight Jewish families (with 43 people) were recorded as living there.
(1561–1640), one of the foremost Talmudic scholars and halakhists of Poland, better known by the acronym Baḥ, after the abbreviation of his Bayit ḥadash commentary. Sirkes was born in Lublin to a distinguished rabbinic family and served as rabbi in the prominent communities of Brest Litovsk and Kraków, where he also headed a yeshiva. He was an active participant in the Council of Four Lands and attended numerous fairs where he was involved in halakhic deliberations.
(1815–1871), rabbi, halakhist, exegete, and Orthodox leader. Known as Ketav Sofer, Avraham Sofer (Schreiber) was the eldest son of the chief rabbi of Pressburg (Bratislava), Mosheh Sofer (known as Ḥatam Sofer), and the grandson of Akiva Eger of Posen. Upon the death of Ḥatam Sofer in 1839, his supporters overcame considerable opposition and fulfilled their master’s deathbed wish that his son succeed him. Thus, the 24-year-old scholar was catapulted into the coveted role of Pressburg rabbi and head of its famed yeshiva.
The notion of a Yiddish popular song is clearest in an example such as the 1947 hit “Rumenye” [listen to a recording] popularized on stage and through recordings and sheet music by a professional singer, with a text by a professional lyricist and music by a professional composer—in this case all three in the person of Aaron Lebedeff (although here the music was reworked rather than composed by him). Before all these elements of a mass musical culture were present, however, the second half of the nineteenth century brought the appearance of something different from the traditional East European Yiddish folk song. Although folk songs presumably originate as products of individual creativity, as they spread, they lose connections with their creators and become anonymous. What was new in Austrian Galicia, Romania, and Russia was the development of a group of professional or semiprofessional songwriters and performers who produced songs that began to be identified with their authors or performers. Also new was the context of performance, no longer limited to the family circle or to ceremonial occasions such as weddings. Now songs began to be performed to entertain customers—in taverns, wine cellars, and restaurant gardens.
During World War I, politically progressive elements among Polish Jewish refugees in Russia, together with local leaders, established a number of schools in which Yiddish was the language of instruction. In 1914, Russian law, which had previously prohibited Yiddish-language schools, was changed to legalize such institutions. The number of schools increased rapidly, and textbooks and pedagogical manuals began to appear.
(1585–1633), rabbi, preacher, and kabbalist. Natan Note Spira (also Natan Nata Shapira) was born to a rabbinical family and was named after his grandfather, a rabbi in Grodno who was the author of Mavo she‘arim (1575) and Imre shefer (1597). Natan Note, a rabbi and head of the yeshiva in Kraków, became a famous kabbalist after composing Megaleh ‘amukot (published posthumously in 1637), in which he interpreted the prayer of Moses in the weekly Torah portion “Va-Etḥanan” (Deut. 3:23–25) in 252 different ways, some based on numerology (gimatriyah) or complex mathematical calculations and others on kabbalistic interpretations from various traditions.
(1863–1908), Hebrew and Yiddish writer. Yehudah Steinberg was born in Lipkany, Bessarabia, to a fervently religious Hasidic family. When he began to show signs of rebelliousness, he feuded bitterly with his father; still, when Yehudah reached age 17, his father insisted he marry a young woman so that he would “return to the fold.” After his marriage, he went to live at his father-in-law’s home in a village adjacent to the Romanian town of Shtepaneshty, a center of Hasidism. He became close to the local rebbe—a descendant of Yisra’el of Ruzhin—and absorbed the Hasidic experience in its populist rural form. Steinberg simultaneously became friendly with a local maskil who supplied him with literature that opened him up to new worlds but did not wean him away from Hasidism.
(1887–1961), Yiddish and Hebrew writer. On his paternal side, Yekhiel Yeshaye Trunk was descended from an important Hasidic family; his great-grandfather was the tsadik Shayele Kutner, and his grandfather the rabbi of Kutno. Trunk’s father inherited a fortune from his own father-in-law, and Trunk himself married a grandchild of Y. Prywes, the “iron king” of Poland, from one of the country’s richest Jewish families. Trunk grew up in Łódź and studied with private tutors.
(also Waiter; pseudonym of Ayzik Meyer Devenishski; ca. 1878–1919); Yiddish writer, political activist, and cultural figure. Born in a shtetl in the Vilna region to a strictly observant family that operated a tavern, Ayzik Meyer Devenishski received a traditional Jewish education. In his youth, he became familiar with Haskalah literature, and later studied Russian and Polish literature and the works of radical and revolutionary thinkers. Devenishski left the traditional world and joined the Bund at the time of its inception. He was active in Kovno, Minsk, and Vilna under his party pseudonym “Comrade Aron,” and endeavored to strengthen the national elements of the Bund platform. Devenishski was arrested several times and exiled to Siberia.
(Moritz; 1831–1892), merchant banker, communal leader, and member of parliament. The son of a Jewish trader, and grandson of Yisra’el Wahrmann, the first rabbi of Pest, Mór Wahrmann became one of that city’s most successful merchant bankers during the Gründerzeit, the great economic boom of the 1860s. He also played an important role in Jewish communal affairs and served as the first professing Jew in Hungary’s parliament.
(ca. 1650–1700), popular mystical preacher. Yehudah Ḥasid ha-Levi was born in Dubno (according to other sources, in Siedlce), and went to Italy to study Kabbalah around 1678. Returning to Poland, he became the rabbi of Szydłów. In 1696, he and Ḥayim Malakh became leaders of a group of ascetics who intended to immigrate to the Land of Israel in order to await the messiah’s coming in Jerusalem.
(Jewish Social Democratic Party; ŻPS) was a political party that operated in Galicia from 1905 until 1920. Often called the “Galician Bund,” its foundation capped more than a dozen years of Jewish socialist activity in the province. Activists had formed the first Jewish Workers Party in Galicia in 1892, which though short-lived was followed by other local Jewish workers’ organizations throughout the decade, most calling themselves Brotherhood. By the time the Galician socialist party was renamed the Polish Social Democratic Party of Galicia and Silesia (PPSD) in 1897, the group (especially its assimilationist Jewish members such as Herman Diamand) had begun to oppose all forms of Jewish “separatism.” Other Jewish voices within the PPSD favoring the establishment of an autonomous Jewish division to meet the particular needs of Jewish workers were persistently defeated.
Town in northeastern Poland in the Mazovia region. By the fourteenth century, Jews had settled in Lomza, engaging mainly in trade in timber, salt, raw materials and in various crafts. In 1566 the town received the right de non tolerandis Judaeis (nontoleration of Jews), and so Jews resettled in suburbs and villages nearby. Only at the beginning of the eighteenth century did Jews return to Lomza itself, but their numbers were small, reaching 157 in 1808.
(Old-New Synagogue), the oldest building in Prague’s Jewish Quarter and the oldest preserved synagogue in Europe. Originally called the New or Great Shul, it became known as Altneuschul after the establishment of other synagogues in the late sixteenth century. Today it is the oldest surviving Gothic medieval double-nave synagogue. The other examples of this type were the late twelfth-century synagogue in Worms (destroyed in 1938), the early thirteenth-century synagogue in Regensburg (destroyed in 1519), and the fourteenth-century Old Synagogue in Vienna (destroyed in 1420). Similar in layout is the early fifteenth-century Gothic Old Synagogue in Kraków.
Hasidic dynasty of the Heshel family, originating in the nineteenth century. Its main influence was in Podolia, Bucovina, Moldavia, and Bessarabia. The founder of the Apt dynasty was Avraham Yehoshu‘a Heshel (ca. 1748–1825), a disciple of Elimelekh of Lizhensk. Heshel was born in Żmigród Nowy in Galicia to a distinguished rabbinical family. By about 1786 he was rabbi of Kolbuszowa, where he first became acquainted with Hasidism and began to function as a rebbe. In 1800, Heshel went to serve as the rabbi of Apt (Opatów), and, as the “Apter Rebbe,” was known by the name of that town for the rest of his life, even when he became rabbi of Jassy (Iaşi; 1809) and, later, of Mezhbizh (Międzyboż, Medzhibizh; from 1814 until his death).
(ca. 1879–1943), Yiddish and Polish playwright and theater director. Mark Arnshteyn (Arnsztejn) was born in Warsaw. In the Polish world, he used the pseudonym Andrzej Marek. His extended family included a Yiddish actress, Roze Arnshteyn, and a Polish poet, Franciszka Arnsztajnowa. He was educated in both Jewish and Polish schools and at an early age began publishing literature and criticism in both the Yiddish and Polish press.
Town in northern Moldavia, at the confluence of the Bistrița and Siret Rivers. Oral tradition claims that the first synagogue was erected in the late fifteenth century, but the oldest documentary reference to the existence of a Jewish community is a tombstone from 1703. In 1742, the Moldavian prince Constantin Mavrocordat granted two Jewish merchants from Hotin (in Bessarabia) the right to settle in the town and exempted them from taxes. Prince Ioniță Sandu Sturza, who encouraged the settlement of Jewish merchants, adopted a similar policy in 1823.
(1815–1863), physician, philosopher, writer, and popularizer of science. Born in Brody, Galicia, Iuliu (Julius; Yehudah) Barasch received a traditional education and prepared for a rabbinical career. However, he came under the influence of the Hebrew writers Hirsh Mendel Pineles and Yitsḥak Erter and turned his attention to secular reading. He studied philosophy beginning in 1836 at the University of Leipzig. In 1839 he transferred to the University of Berlin and earned a degree in medicine in 1841.
(1874–1934), chief protagonist of the 1911–1913 Kiev blood libel case, referred to as the Beilis Affair. Little is known about Mendel Beilis beyond the fact of his association with the case. Raised in a village, he served in the Russian military and settled in Kiev around 1897. Though he was thrust into the limelight after he was indicted for the ritual murder of 12-year-old Andrei Iushchinskii, Beilis himself did not feature centrally in the affair.
(1836–1902), financier and economist. Born in Radom, Jan (Ivan) Bloch converted to Protestantism in 1851 and to Roman Catholicism in 1856. He began his career in Warsaw as a financier in the banking firm of Szymon Toeplitz. Between 1856 and 1864, Bloch lived in Saint Petersburg where he helped to establish the Warsaw–Petersburg railway; this project set the base for his substantial fortune.
Romanian town on the border between Moldavia and Bucovina. An important entrepôt for trade with Poland, Dorohoi attracted Jews as early as the fifteenth century, but the oldest documented reference to their presence is a gravestone dating to 1656. Among the Jews who were called upon to establish or to populate towns in Moldavia, a few settled in Dorohoi. A charter (hrisov) issued by prince Constantin Şuțu in 1795 includes a list of duties and taxes payable by Jews.
(Pol., Drohobycz), medium-sized city in the district of L’viv in western Ukraine. In early modern times, Drogobych belonged to the Polish Commonwealth, but in 1772, as a result of the first partition of Poland, it was awarded to Austria (later Austria-Hungary) and became part of the province of Galicia. In 1919, after an unsuccessful effort by Ukrainians to establish an independent state, Drogobych was incorporated into the newly independent Polish state. From 1939 to 1941 it was annexed to the Soviet Union, to which it was returned after World War II (as part of the Ukrainian Socialist Republic). In 1991 it became part of the now wholly independent state of Ukraine.
(1761–1837), rabbi and halakhist. Born in Eisenstadt (Burgenland) and educated in Breslau, Akiva Eger was considered one of the nimblest halakhic minds of his generation, as well as a particularly humane individual. He was also known for his bitter opposition to the liberal elements within his own community and beyond.
(1874–1899), Hebrew writer; pioneer of psychological realism, neoromanticism, and symbolism. Mordekhai Feierberg was born in Novograd Volynsk (now Ukr., Novohrad Volyns’kyi) and was first taught by his father, who was a shoḥet (kosher slaughterer). Although Feierberg then studied at the Chernobil yeshiva, he grew impressed with the ideas of Jewish philosophy and the Haskalah, and subsequently led a group of maskilim. He was persecuted for his activities by traditional Jews, including his own father.
(1882–1963), lawyer and communal leader. Wilhelm Filderman is considered by many to have been Romanian Jewry’s foremost leader between 1919 and 1947, as he headed virtually every major non-Zionist Romanian Jewish organization. After World War I, he represented the Union of Native-Born Jews at the Paris Peace Conference in the campaign for Romanian Jewry’s civil rights, leaving his mark on the final draft of the Romanian Minorities Treaty. From 1923 until 1947 he served as chair of the Union of Romanian Jews and the Federation of Jewish Communities in Romania, which included communities in the territories that had been added to Romania in the peace settlement. He also represented the union in the Romanian parliament.
(1754–1826), rabbi. El‘azar Fleckeles was born to a well-off, patrician family in Prague; his father served as an elder of the Jewish community. Fleckeles studied in the yeshivas of Mosheh Kohen Rofe and Me’ir Fischels and then, for a decade, with his prime mentor, Yeḥezkel Landau, the rabbi of Prague, becoming his favorite disciple. Fleckeles’s wife, Esther, also belonged to one of the oldest and most prestigious Prague families, the Bondys.
(1795–1846), Hebrew writer, translator, and educator; a leader of the Haskalah movement in Lithuania. Born in the provincial town of Salantai (near Kovno), Lithuania, Gintsburg was first educated at his parents’ home. His father, who wrote articles on Hebrew grammar and mathematics, influenced his predilection for the Hebrew language and the Bible. When he was 14, Gintsburg married a considerably older woman and moved into his father-in-law’s home in the town of Shavli, north of Kovno. There he broadened his general education, studied German, and developed a keen interest in classical and contemporary German literature.
(1850–1921), orientalist. Ignác Goldziher’s ancestors settled in the western Hungarian community of Kittsee (Köpcsény). His father, Adolf, moved to Székesfehérvár in 1842, where Goldziher was born. By the age of eight, Goldziher was studying the Talmud, and he published his first essay, on the origins and time of prayer (“Síhat Jizhaq. Abhandlung über Ursprung, Eintheilung und Zeit der Gebete” [Isaac’s Discourse: A Contribution to the Origin, Arrangement, and Timing of Prayers]; 1862) while still a child.
A Zionist youth movement, Gordonia was established in 1923 in Galicia. By 1925, local youth organizations merged to form a regional movement. From the time of its founding, its acknowledged leader and ideologue was Pinḥas Lubianniker (Lavon; 1904–1976), who established Gordonia after he left Ha-Shomer Ha-Tsa‘ir in disagreement with its ideological developments.
(Ben-Tsiyon Gutmann; 1870–1932), Hebrew writer and educator. Known by his nom de plume S. Ben-Tsiyon (S. Ben-Zion in English sources), Simḥah Gutmann was born in Teleneshty, Bessarabia. Though he received a traditional heder education, Ben-Tsiyon was also exposed to Hebrew maskilic literature. His first story, “Mayn khaver” (My Friend), appeared in Yiddish (1899); he later translated it into Hebrew and published it under the title “Meshi” (Silk; 1902). His subsequent Hebrew stories appeared in prominent journals.
(Żydowski Instytut Historyczny; ŻIH), research institute, archive, library, and museum in Warsaw. The Jewish Historical Institute grew out of the Jewish Historical Committee (Żydowska Komisja Historyczna), a Holocaust research body organized in Lublin in August 1944. Among the founders were Filip Friedman, Nachman Blumental, Józef Kermisz, and Abba Kovner. In December 1944, the commission became an agency of the Central Committee of Jews in Poland (CKŻP) and was renamed the Central Jewish Historical Commission (Centralna Żydowska Komisja Historyczna).
Periodical issued in Warsaw from July 1861 to October 1863 under the editorial direction of Daniel Neufeld. Its full title was Jutrzenka: Tygodnik dla Izraelitów polskich (The Dawn: A Weekly for Polish Israelites). Like its short-lived predecessors Dostrzegacz Nadwiślański (1823–1824) and Izraelita Polski (1830–1831), Jutrzenka envisioned a new “dawn” for Polish Jewry by promoting modernization in the spirit of the Enlightenment. It used the concept of “Poles of Mosaic persuasion” as a model for Polish Jews to follow, and encouraged integration into the larger society based on equal rights.
(1881–1944), Yiddish linguist and translator. Born in Goldingen, Courland, Zelig Kalmanovitch (Yid., Kalmanovitsh) received a traditional education until the age of 15. In 1901, he passed the external examinations for a certificate of Russian secondary school education and subsequently studied humanities, primarily Semitic philology, in Germany. He was in Berlin from 1902 to 1905 and in Königsberg in 1909 and 1910. He then defended his doctorate in Petrograd in 1919.
(Lev Borisovich Rosenfel’d; 1883–1936), a principal leader of the Bolshevik party and the early Soviet government. Apprenticed in radical politics during his high school and truncated university careers, Kamenev was an early recruit to the Bolshevik wing of the Russian Social Democrats (1904), growing close to Lenin during the revolutionary period 1905–1907. He spent the years of political reaction in emigration (1908–1914), where he and Grigorii Zinov’ev became Lenin’s most trusted lieutenants. As the more analytically and literarily inclined of the two, Kamenev collaborated with Lenin, editing a series of Bolshevik periodicals. A man of mild temperament, he avoided personal invectives and maintained good relations with political opponents.
(Also known as Rudolf Kasztner; his Hebrew name was Yisra’el; 1906–1957), Zionist activist in Hungary during the Holocaust; later accused of collaborating with the Nazis. Born in Cluj (Kolozsvár), Kasztner worked for the leading Zionist newspaper of Transylvania, the Új Kelet (New East), between 1925 and 1940. A leader of the Zionist youth movement Aviva-Barissia during the 1930s when Transylvania was under Romanian rule, he became the secretary of the National Jewish Party in the Romanian Parliament. The president of this party was his father-in-law, Dr. József Fischer, head of the Neolog Jewish Community in Cluj. Kasztner moved to Budapest in 1940 after Hungary, an independent ally of Nazi Germany, annexed northern Transylvania. There he worked in the office of Keren Hayesod, and in 1943 became the deputy chairman of the Hungarian Zionist Association.
Town in the Czech Republic, located 55 kilometers east of Prague. The earliest record of Jewish settlement in Kolín (earlier Nový Kolín; Ger., Kolin or Neu Kollin) dates from the beginning of the fourteenth century; a religious community and synagogue were probably active in the early fifteenth century. During the years 1541–1549 and 1561–1564, Jews were expelled from the town, but by 1574 some 33 Jewish men (and possibly families) lived there again. A communal record book, dating from 1598, has been preserved.
(1847–1921), Yiddish memoir writer and public activist. Yekhezkl Kotik was born in Kamenets Litovsk (Grodno [Hrodna] province; now in Belarus), to a well-to-do family of communal officials and leaseholders who had been town leaders for several generations. His father was a Hasid who had rebelled against his family’s Misnaged lifestyle. Kotik received a traditional education but in time also rebelled against his father’s legacy and rejected Hasidism. This intergenerational tension shaped and influenced the course of his life.
(1890–1949), Yiddish writer. Arn Kushnirov was born in Boyarka (known as Boyberik in Sholem Aleichem’s works), near Kiev, and worked in Kiev as a sales assistant in a grocer’s shop. Starting his writing career in 1909, Kushnirov and his friends Osher Shvartsman and Nokhem Oyslender planned to publish a poetry collection, but the project failed. After serving in the Russian army during World War I, Kushnirov joined the Red Army in 1920. That same year he met with success in publishing. In 1921, he edited Yugnt (Youth), which included the work of young Ukrainian Yiddish poets.
Town in the Wielkopolska province of Poland. Established by the Leszczyński family, Leszno (known as Lissa in Yiddish and German) granted its population civic rights in 1547. Jews were living in Leszno as early as the beginning of the sixteenth century; records indicate that they paid a coronation tax in 1507. Many Protestants, including Czech Brethren, settled there as well.
(1798–1870), Talmudic scholar and rabbi of the Jewish communities of Kraków and Warsaw. Hailing from a prominent family of Galician rabbis, Dov Berush Meisels grew up in Kam’ianets’-Podil’s’kyi (Ukraine) before moving to Kraków in 1820, where he married Freydl Bornstein, the daughter of wealthy leaseholder Zalman Bornstein. With his father-in-law, Meisels founded a successful bank. However, his support for the failed Polish uprising of 1830 brought the business to the brink of financial ruin.
(1787–1859), original and controversial Hasidic thinker and leader. Menaḥem Mendel (originally surnamed Morgenstern) studied in the yeshiva of Zamość, where his academic talents impressed his teachers and fellow students. He was attracted to Hasidism and found his way to the court of Ya‘akov Yitsḥak Horowitz (the Seer of Lublin; 1745–1815). There he also discovered a kindred spirit and mentor in Ya‘akov Yitsḥak Rabinowitz (the Holy Jew; 1766–1813) of Pshiskhe (Przysucha), and after the latter’s death he became a disciple of Simḥah Bunem of Pshiskhe (1765–1827).
(1730?–1788), Hasidic leader and prominent disciple of Dov Ber, the Magid of Mezritsh. Considered an outstanding mystical figure in the world of Hasidism, he served as a spiritual leader in Lithuania and Belorussia and founded the Hasidic community in Safed and Tiberias. The writings of the Misnagdim associate him with Minsk, and Ḥabad sources call him Menaḥem Mendel of Horodok, but he is known primarily as Menaḥem Mendel of Vitebsk.
Polish family of bankers, philanthropists, industrialists and scholars.
(1664–1736), chief rabbi of Prague; bibliophile. Oppenheim was born in Worms, where his father, Abraham, was a communal leader. Samuel Oppenheim, financier and war contractor to Habsburg Emperor Leopold I, was his uncle. David Oppenheim’s teachers included, among others, Gershon (Ulif) Ashkenazi and Ya‘akov Sack (father of Tsevi Ashenazi, the Ḥakham Tsevi). In 1681 he married Gnendl, daughter of the court Jew Leffmann Behrens (Lipmann Cohen) of Hanover.
(1893–1962), Soviet Yiddish author, critic, and literary scholar. Born into a timber merchant’s family in Khodorkov, Volhynia, Nokhem Oyslender received his secondary education in Kiev and studied medicine at universities in Berlin and Kiev. He served as a doctor in the Red Army between 1919 and 1922 while also publishing articles and short stories in Russian in army newspapers. His revolutionary enthusiasm found its expression in three collections of Yiddish poetry (1917–1922) and a collection of his civil war stories, Af lodemirer veg (On the Way to Ludmir; 1930).
[This entry focuses on artists in Russian lands. For discussion of visual artists of other regions, see the biographical entries on those listed in the "Visual and Performing Arts" section of the Synoptic Outline.]
City roughly 16 miles (25 km) southeast of Łódź in central Poland, Piotrków was the capital of the Piotrków guberniia from 1867 to 1915. Founded in the twelfth century, the town was the site of the Polish Crown Tribunal between 1578 and 1792. Although Piotrków was granted the privilege de non tolerandis Judaeis (1487, 1569, 1628, 1673, and 1720), Jews settled with royal permission in its suburbs during the sixteenth century.
The Ponevezh yeshiva was founded by Yitsḥak Ya‘akov Rabinovich (Reb Itsele Ponevezher; 1854–1919) in 1908 in the Lithuanian town of Panevėžys (Rus., Ponevich). As a youth, Rabinovich had been a study partner of Ḥayim Soloveichik, later a rosh yeshivah in the Volozhin yeshiva. Rabinovich himself began his teaching career in 1889 at the Slobodka yeshiva. He remained there for five years but was not a firm believer in the importance of formal study of musar (ethics) and was uncomfortable with the school’s intense dedication to that area.
Line of Polish rabbinic leaders. The Pshiskhe Hasidic dynasty emerged from the town of Przysucha (Yid., Pshiskhe), which along with Kozienice (Kozhenits) and Lublin became a major center of Polish Hasidism. Pshiskhe was a school as well as a dynasty. Its founder, Ya‘akov Yitsḥak Rabinowitz (or Rabinowicz; 1766–1814; known as the Holy Jew), introduced an elitist, rationalistic Hasidism that centered on Talmudic study and formed a counterpoint to the miracle-centered Hasidism of Lublin.
(1877–1944), Jewish leader in Łódź, Poland, during World War II. The German occupiers appointed Khayim Rumkowski Judenälteste (or Älteste der Juden; Eldest of the Jews) with total authority and responsibility over Łódź’s Jewish population. All contacts between Germans and the Jews were to be through him and him alone. The occupiers thus diverted Jewish rage from themselves onto the Jewish leader.
(1897–1935), painter, graphic artist, and sculptor; active in the Jewish art renaissance in Russia. Yisakhar Ber Rybak was born in Elisavetgrad, Ukraine. He attended art school beginning in 1907 and then studied at the Art Academy of Kiev from 1911 to 1916. In the summers of 1915 and 1916, he accompanied El Lissitzky on expeditions for the Jewish Historical and Ethnographic Society, copying tombstones in Orsha and culling folk-inspired prints, ceremonial silver objects, and synagogue wood carvings in Podolia and Volhynia.
(1892–1942), prose writer, literary critic, and artist. Born in Drohobycz, Galicia, to an assimilated, impoverished merchant family, Bruno Schulz studied architecture at the Lwów Polytechnic (1910–1914). During World War I, his family took refuge in Vienna, where Bruno briefly resumed his studies. In 1924, he began teaching handicrafts and drawing in a Drohobycz school. Schulz made his debut as an artist in the 1920s and as a prose writer in the 1930s.
As an aspect of Jewish life, sexuality is considered to be a male religious obligation (concerning ‘onah [sexual relations], procreation, and sexual satisfaction of one’s wife) and source of human intimacy and pleasure; as a metaphor it has even been applied to fulfillment of divine–human relations in mystical thought. In the modern era, the Jewish legal system and society began to compete with the free professions and the state to define terms of sexual legitimacy and deviance.
(Guardian of Israel), political and ideological society founded in Lemberg (Lwów) at the end of 1868 following the granting of freedom of organization in the Austrian Constitution of 1867. Among its founders were Filip Mansch, Ruben Bierer, Emil Bik, and Joseph Kohn; Salomon Buber was also a member.
Yiddish literary journal published in Moscow from 1922 to 1924. The Moscow School for Yiddish Printers, founded in 1922, issued all but the first February issue of Der shtrom (The Stream), which featured a cover designed by Marc Chagall. The journal’s motto cited the Kiev poet Osher Shvartsman, killed in action as a Red Army soldier: “but I can hear that under the cliff / a stream is running and flowing.” Although it was not an official organ of a Soviet organization, Der shtrom became the first Soviet Yiddish literary periodical. Its ideology was marked by the iconoclastic orthography introduced by Communist language planners, such as Ayzik Zaretski, in 1920.
Hungarian Orthodox rabbinical family. Upon the death of Mosheh Sofer (Ḥatam Sofer, 1762–1839) of Pressburg (Bratislava), the community fulfilled his deathbed wish to have his eldest son, the 24-year-old Avraham Shemu’el Binyamin Sofer (also known by the German translation of his surname, Schreiber [“scribe”] and called Ketav Sofer; 1815–1871) appointed to fill his positions as rabbi and rosh yeshivah. Although Avraham’s mother was the daughter of the renowned Rabbi Akiva Eger of Posen, Ḥatam Sofer himself was quite the self-made leader, having stemmed from pious but not particularly distinguished Frankfurt lineage.
(1858–1925), writer and editor. Born to a prominent family in Uman, Ukraine, Mordkhe Spektor received a traditional education, although according to his own account he preferred the outdoors over home and heder. As a teenager, Spektor met writers Yitskhok Yoyel Linetski and Avrom Goldfadn and began to read contemporary Yiddish Haskalah literature. At the age of 19, he moved to Odessa and became acquainted with the Jewish writers of that city.
Theater historians have often characterized the modern Yiddish theater as an entertainment form that has relied heavily on spectacular visual scenic design and grotesque renderings of the Jewish past. This characterization applies to many of the best-known Yiddish-language performances during what might be called its Silver Age (1918–1940) but does not accurately describe productions presented in its Golden Age (1876–1918) or the decades that preceded it.
Town in northeastern Poland. Jewish residence apparently began in the nineteenth century when Suwałki experienced a period of substantial development. In 1808, there were 44 Jews living in the town, a number that had risen to 1,209 by 1827. In 1856, the community had grown to 6,407, and in 1897 to 7,165 (representing 40% of the total population). From the 1890s through the first decade of the twentieth century, the Jewish population increased again, reaching 13,002 in 1908 (56%). From 1897 to 1914, the town was the site of a substantial Russian garrison of some 10,000 soldiers.
(Ger., Dorpat; Rus., Derpt, also Yurev [1893–1917]), Estonian city in the province of Livonia (Ger., Livland; Rus., Lifliandiia). Tartu has traditionally been an educational and cultural center, and after 1917 it was the second largest city in the Republic of Estonia. The city had a population of 100,800 in 2005.
Jewish entrepreneurs and workers were concerned with various modes of transportation that navigated the great expanses of Eastern Europe began before the advent of the modern era. Widespread activity by Jews in domestic and interstate commerce led to an intimate knowledge of the passages and highways of Eastern Europe. The first Jewish merchants operated in groups and traveled in convoys, while simultaneously establishing inns, managing refreshment stations, and providing fodder for horses of other Jewish travelers. From this familiarity with travelers’ needs, the Jewish teamster was born. That Jews dominated this profession may be seen from the fact that the Hebrew word for coachman, ba‘al ‘agalah (Yid., balagole), was absorbed into a number of East European dialects.
Hebrew-language publishing house that was established in 1896 in Warsaw by Avraham Leib Shalkovich; it produced secular and cultural books until 1928. From its inception, Tushiyah (which may be translated into English as “insight”) had two main priorities. On the one hand it was ideologically committed to revamping the Hebrew bookshelf, and on the other, it hoped to run a self-sufficient commercial venture that could provide a livelihood for its owners and workers. Shalkovich, who was known by the pseudonym Ben-Avigdor, had brought changes to Hebrew publishing as early as 1891. In 1896, he gave up his managerial position at the Aḥi’asaf Press to set up Tushiyah, the first privately owned, modern secular Hebrew printing press.
(1862–1926), lawyer, politician, and communal activist. Maksim Vinaver (also Vinawer) was born in Warsaw, and in 1886 he graduated with a law degree from Warsaw University. However, in 1889, the Russian government decided to prohibit Jews from becoming “legally registered” lawyers, which forced Vinaver to work for the next decade and a half as an assistant attorney in Saint Petersburg, where he became involved in the struggle for Jewish emancipation. With Baron Horace Gintsburg acting as a sponsor, Vinaver set up a defense bureau (with Oskar Gruzenberg and the Russian lawyers Vladimir D. Spasovich and Mironov), to represent Jews falsely accused of crimes.
(1893–1941), Yiddish and German writer, critic, and literary scholar. Born into a middle-class family in Kraków, Meir Wiener (also known as Meyer Viner) grew up speaking Polish, Yiddish, and German. He attended a German gymnasium and was tutored at home in Judaism and Hebrew culture by Tsevi ha-Kohen Rapoport. Before the outbreak of World War I, the family moved to Vienna. Discharged from military service on health grounds, Wiener went to Basel and Zurich to study philosophy in 1915 but did not complete his degree. He returned to Vienna in 1919, and subsequently traveled intermittently between his family in Vienna and his editorial job in Berlin until 1925, when he joined the Communist Party of Austria and moved to Paris.
(d. 1783), rabbi and author of the first published Hasidic book. Ya‘akov Yosef of Polnoye (Pol., Połonne) served as rabbi of Shargorod, the second largest community in the Podolia region. In 1741, after coming under the influence of Aryeh Leib, the preacher of Polnoye, Ya‘akov Yosef began to adopt a pietistic, ascetic path of Hasidism, including seclusion for long periods and particular stringency with regard to the laws of Jewish ritual slaughter.
(1838–1933), prominent halakhic authority and Orthodox Jewish leader. Yisra’el Me’ir ha-Kohen (Kagan; original surname Poupko), who became known as Ḥafets Ḥayim after the title of his first book, was one of the major rabbinical authorities of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries and has been regarded as a paragon of piety.
(1787–1866), Yiddish playwright, novelist, and exponent of the Haskalah. Born in Nemirov (Nemyriv), western Ukraine, to an important Hasidic family, Yisroel Aksenfeld was brought up as a Bratslaver Hasid (he was personally acquainted with Reb Nosn, the Bratslav tsadik’s famous secretary) and was married at an early age into another family of Bratslav followers. The marriage ended quickly in divorce, a circumstance that changed the trajectory of Aksenfeld’s life and beliefs. He became a maskil and an enemy of Hasidism who studied foreign languages, mainly Russian and German.
The Aleksander dynasty, the second most important Hasidic dynasty in Poland after Ger, was based in the small town of Aleksandrów Łódzki, near Łódź. The founder of the dynasty was Shraga Feivel of Gritsa (Grójec), who moved to Aleksander after his teacher, Yitsḥak of Vurke (1779–1848), died at the end of Passover, 1848. Shraga Feivel died six months later on Shemini Atseret of 1848. His son, Yeḥi’el (1828–1894), did not wish to succeed him as rebbe, but became a close disciple of Menaḥem Mendel of Vurke (1819–1868), the son and successor of Yitsḥak of Vurke. After Menaḥem Mendel’s death, Yeḥi’el became a disciple of Berish of Biała (d. 1876) and was finally persuaded to become a rebbe in Aleksander only after Berish’s death, living on the stipend he received as rabbi of the town. Yeḥi’el’s teachings followed the Vurke emphasis on concern for the Jewish community, love of Torah, joy, and simple faith. He wrote no books, but his sayings were preserved in his son’s book, Yismaḥ Yisra’el (1911).
(1885–1967), Hebrew and Yiddish writer. Born to a working-class family in Slutsk, in the Minsk region, Yitsḥak Dov Berkowitz was an avid reader of Hebrew, Russian, and Yiddish literature. When he was about 15 years old, he began to write stories and recorded impressions for a private newspaper that he produced with his friends. His real literary career, however, began in 1903 when he was appointed to a teaching position in Łódź, and befriended the young poet, Yitsḥak Katzenelson. With Katzenelson’s encouragement, Berkowitz published his first Hebrew stories in the daily Ha-Tsofeh, and at the end of 1903 he won first place in a story competition held by that newspaper—an award that brought him overnight fame.
(1864–1937), author and publicist. Born in Vienna to moderately Orthodox parents, Nathan Birnbaum (who adopted the pseudonym Mathias Acher) grew estranged from observant Judaism in secondary school, but unlike his peers who felt themselves thoroughly German, Birnbaum declared that the Jews themselves constituted a distinct nation destined to reclaim Palestine as its national homeland. In 1883, with Reuven Bierer (1837–1931) and Moritz Schnirer (1860–1942), he cofounded the academic fraternity Kadimah, an early Jewish nationalist society whose first members consisted mostly of Galician Jewish students studying in Vienna.
Port on the lower Danube, in Walachia (Romania); the town was called Braillago in the fourteenth century and was known as Ibraila while under Turkish rule from 1542 to 1828. The presence of Jewish merchants in Brăila was first documented in the seventeenth century. In 1828, there were 105 Sephardic Jews in the town. A cemetery opened in 1819, and a synagogue was built in 1820. After the town was annexed to Walachia in 1829, Ashkenazic Jews also settled in Brăila and their synagogue was founded in 1836.
Town in the Moldavian region of Romania. Jewish settlement in Buhuşi (known in Yiddish as Bohush) dates from 1823; in 1831, the Jewish population was 32. The numbers continued to grow, totaling 537 in 1858 and 1,732 in 1899, representing 48 percent of the town’s population. Later, the numbers of Jews decreased (to 892 in 1910, due to emigration) but grew again: there were 1,419 in 1915; 1,972 in 1930; and 1,876 in 1941.
Region of the federal state of Austria. Burgenland is bordered by the provinces of Lower Austria and Styria (west), Slovakia (northeast), Hungary (east), and Slovenia (south). The name Burgenland is a post–World War I invention that was officially adopted in 1922. Jews experienced a long, continuous history in the region, characterized by their adherence to religion and tradition.
European Jews knew of and played chess long before their arrival in Eastern Europe in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Leading Polish rabbis, Mosheh Isserles in the sixteenth century and Avraham Gombiner in the seventeenth, explicitly permitted playing chess, including on the Sabbath, as long as money was not wagered on the outcome (Shulḥan ‘arukh, Oraḥ ḥayim, 338:5). There were also condemnations of chess, notably in Shevet musar, a very popular work of the eighteenth century that took a negative stance influenced by kabbalistic sources (chap. 42). Nevertheless, and particularly in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, chess was widely played in Jewish households of various levels of observance and, often enough, by both sexes.
Polish-language Zionist daily. Published in Lwów from January 1919 until September 1939, Chwila (Moment) was devoted to political, social, and cultural affairs. Initially edited by members of parliament Henryk Rosmarin and David Schreiber, the paper was later taken over by the Chwila Publishing Company. Its circulation reached 35,000 copies. An evening edition was launched in 1934, edited initially by Henryk Hescheles and later by Szymon Szpund.
Hebrew weekly. Ha-Dor (The Generation) was published beginning in 1901 by the Aḥi’asaf publishing house in Warsaw to address the growing needs of its Hebrew readership. It was also offered as an alternative to the monthly Ha-Shiloaḥ (also published by Aḥi’asaf), which at that time focused exclusively on Jewish matters in the spirit of its founder, Ahad Ha-Am.
(1550–1619), rabbi, preacher, exegete, and moralist. Efrayim Shelomoh ben Aharon of Luntshits (Pol., Łęczyca) was a student of Shelomoh Luria. As a young man, Efrayim developed a reputation as an outstanding preacher. He lived for a considerable time in Lwów, where he served as rosh yeshivah, but also preached frequently in other towns, including Jarosław and Lublin (at meetings of the Council of the Four Lands). In 1604 he was appointed chief rabbi of Prague, where he served until a year before his death.
Efrayim Shelomoh ben Aharon of Luntshits
(1868–1927), composer, music critic, musicologist, and ethnographer. Born to a middle-class family in Berdyansk, Crimea, Yo’el (Joel; in Russian, Iulii Dmitrevich) Engel received a law degree from the University of Kharkov in 1890, but at the urging of Russian composer Pyotr Tchaikovsky enrolled at the Moscow Conservatory, where he studied with the composer Sergei Taneyev (1856–1915). Upon graduation, Engel was offered a position as a music critic and editor at Moscow’s leading liberal newspaper, Russkie vedomosti, a position he held until 1918.
(1898–1937), Yiddish literary scholar and critic. Maks Erik (Zalmen Merkin) was born in Sosnowiec to a well-to-do family and received a Jewish and general education in Russian and Polish schools. In 1921, he completed Polish military service and began studying law. In the years 1922–1923 and 1925–1926, he taught Yiddish literature and Polish studies at Yiddish high schools in Vilna.
(1803–1856), Yiddish poet and dramatist. Shloyme Ettinger was born in Warsaw into a distinguished rabbinical family. His father died young, and Ettinger was raised by his uncle Mendel Ettinger, a rabbi who knew German and who was uncommonly flexible about enabling his nephew to explore features of the Enlightenment.
Legislation enacted in 1726 in Bohemia and in 1727 in Moravia and Silesia in order to limit the number of Jewish males permitted to live and marry in those jurisdictions. The maximum number of Jewish families was set at 8,541 for Bohemia, 5,106 for Moravia, and 119 for Silesia. Originally intended as a temporary measure, the Familiants Laws remained in force until 1848.
(1905–1964), Russian writer. Vasilii (Iosif Solomonovich) Grossman was born and raised in Berdichev, where his parents belonged to the assimilated Jewish intelligentsia. After graduating as a chemist from Moscow University, he worked in the Donbass (1929–1933), and then returned to Moscow. Beginning in 1934, he devoted himself to literature, becoming a member of the Writers Union in 1937.
The accession of Holy Roman Emperor Joseph II (1741–1790) as sole ruler of the Habsburg lands in 1780 ushered in a tumultuous decade of change. The enlightened absolutist emperor intervened in the internal affairs of his Jewish subjects on an unprecedented scale, with the intent of altering the contours of Jewish culture and society.
(1885–1941), Yiddish writer and critic; photographer. Born in Vilna to a working-class family, Alter-Sholem Kacyzne (Yid., Katsizne) attended heder and also a Russian-language Jewish elementary school. At 14, after his father’s death, he stopped his formal studies. Kacyzne was an autodidact and remained an avid reader not only of literature in Russian, Yiddish, and Hebrew, but also of Polish, German, and French works. For about 11 years, he lived in Ekaterinoslav, where he learned to be a photographer and was married.
The major Yiddish cultural avant-garde movement in Poland between 1919 and 1924. Di Khalyastre (The Gang) brought together mainly poets, novelists, and artists who consciously participated in European expressionism as modern secular Jews but were also determined to construct a new lay culture in Yiddish. Its expressionist stylistics and themes distinguished it both from contemporary Soviet Yiddish culture and the New York Inzikhistn (“Inwardists”), yet placed it close to Central European aesthetics and cultural concerns. While shared aesthetic innovations distinguished the Khalyastre, ideological conflicts within the group eventually led to its dissolution.
The Khazar Empire (ca. 650–ca. 965/68), one of the largest states of medieval Eurasia, dominated a region from the Ukrainian steppes to lands approaching the Ural River and from the Middle Volga region to the North Caucasus and Crimea. Important segments of its population converted to Judaism in the mid-to-late eighth century. Khazaria’s ruling core of Turkic tribes stemmed from the Türk Qaghanate (qaghan “emperor”) centered in Mongolia and ruling a domain stretching from Manchuria to the Black Sea. The Türk Empire divided into eastern (552–630, 682–742) and western (552–659, ca. 690–ca. 766) halves for administrative purposes. The Khazar Qaghanate, apparently led by a breakaway branch of the Türk ruling clan, the Ashina, seceded from the fragmenting Western Türk realm around 630–650.
Polish bankers and industrialists, active in Warsaw in the nineteenth century. Samuel Eleazar Kronenberg (Lejzor Hirszowicz Kronenberg; 1773–1826), the patriarch of the family, had 13 children and founded the S. L. Kronenberg Bank. Originally from Wyszogród, Kronenberg was influenced by the Haskalah and attended the “German” synagogue on Warsaw’s Daniłowiczowska Street. In 1808, however, he broke with Jewish tradition, shaved his beard, and began to wear European-style clothing. On friendly terms with Poles from aristocratic families, he was allowed to live outside the Jewish district and belonged to the Masonic lodge, Bouclier du Nord. Eight of Kronenberg’s children survived, including five sons, but only the eldest, Ludwik (1783–1882), remained Jewish and was committed to his father’s synagogue. Ludwik Kronenberg worked as a banker and agent for the stock exchange.
(1800?–1871), Hebrew poet; editor and translator of poetry and dramatic works. Me’ir (Max) ha-Levi Letteris was born in Żółkiew, eastern Galicia, into a family of Hebrew publishers. His father also served as head of the town’s Jewish community for many years. After receiving a traditional education, Me’ir Letteris pursued general studies with a tutor, and in 1820 traveled to Vienna where he studied at the Academy of Natural Sciences for two years. Between 1826 and 1830, he was at the University of Lwów, and later attended the University of Vienna. Letteris earned his living in those years as a journalist, writing literary and dramatic criticism. At an older age (in 1844), he received a Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Prague.
(1844–1925), Hebrew and Yiddish poet and essayist. Yehudah Leib Levin (also known by the literary acronym Yehalel) was born in Minsk; his grandfather was a Hasidic rabbi. In 1862, Levin married and moved to the town of Puchowitz, where he resumed his religious studies and was drawn to Lubavitch Hasidism. However, he soon rejected his traditional upbringing.
(1815–1882), German rabbi, born and educated in Munich; famous for establishing modern schools for Jews in the Russian Empire. In 1839, Ludwig Phillipson, a moderate reforming rabbi and editor of the Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums, recommended Lilienthal to serve as rabbi and teacher in the largely German-speaking Jewish community of Riga. Lilienthal’s role in establishing a modern school for Jewish children there came to the attention of the minister of education of the Russian Empire, Count Sergei S. Uvarov, who hired him in 1841 to serve as special adviser for Jewish affairs. Lilienthal’s mission was to replicate his Riga school throughout the Pale of Settlement, as part of Uvarov’s plan to “enlighten” the Jews of Russia by weaning them away from conventional Talmudic learning, introducing them to secular studies, and training them to become artisans. Although viewed traditionally as a malignant scheme aimed at converting Jews to Russian Orthodoxy, recent scholarship has argued that Uvarov’s plan was not, in fact, aimed at proselytizing, but was a small part of his overall goal to introduce Western-style and classical education throughout the Russian Empire. This plan, however, faced severe opposition from some top governmental authorities in Russia, and in many ways contradicted the basic ideology of Tsar Nicholas I, for whose regime Uvarov was a major theoretician, and which emphasized autocracy, Russian Orthodoxy, and Russian nationalism.
Emphasizing the role of literary journals in the development of Jewish literature in Eastern Europe, this entry includes two articles, on Hebrew and Yiddish literary journals respectively. For further discussion, see Hebrew Literature; Yiddish Literature; and Literary Criticism and Scholarship.
(1811–1875), rabbi, historian, and Judaic scholar. Leopold (Lipót) Löw was the outstanding Reform rabbi of nineteenth-century Hungary. One of the first rabbis in Hungary to combine rigorous traditional training with a university education, he advocated religious, educational, and communal reforms in his manifold roles as preacher, polemicist, editor, scholar, and historian. He played an important part in the fight for Jewish emancipation and the Magyarization of Hungarian Jewry.
(1879–1923), political leader; Marxist theorist; Bundist. Vladimir Davidovich Medem was the main theorist of the Jewish Labor Bund, in Russia and in the Bund’s early years in Poland, and arguably the party’s most famous and celebrated leader. Born in Libau (Liepāja, Latvia; then part of tsarist Russia), he spent most of his childhood and youth in Minsk. Medem’s parents had converted to the Lutheran Church, and his father, David Medem (1836–1893), was one of the first graduates of Jewish origin of the Russian Military Academy of Medicine. The young Medem grew up as a Christian surrounded by Christian people. Despite his later prominence in Jewish politics, as an adult Medem never found it necessary to convert to Judaism, as Jewish culture, not religion, was at the basis of his choice to join the Jewish nation.
City in the Podolian region of Ukraine. Medzhibizh (Rus., Medzhibozh; Pol., Międzyboż; Yid., Mezhbizh) documents its history from the twelfth century, and the Jewish community’s from 1511. Located at the convergence of the Boh and Buzek Rivers and at the intersection of several trade routes, Medzhibizh, with its multiethnic population, was an important regional military, commercial, and administrative center from the sixteenth century through the early Soviet period.
Informal designation for a series of international agreements concluded following World War I. The Minorities Treaties were drawn up between the Principal Allied and Associated Powers (the United States, the British Empire, France, Italy, and Japan), on the one hand, and 14 newly created or expanded states in Europe and the Middle East (Albania, Austria, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Estonia, Greece, Hungary, Iraq, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Turkey, and Yugoslavia), on the other hand, governing eligibility for citizenship in the latter states and granting citizens belonging to racial, religious, or linguistic minorities certain collective rights. Among the provisions granted by the treaties were the right to equal treatment and protection by the state for their members; to use minority languages for specified public purposes, including in courts and elementary schools; to establish and control educational, religious, and social welfare institutions for their groups; and to receive a proportional share of state expenditures for educational, religious, and welfare services.
The Mir yeshiva was founded in 1815 by a wealthy householder, Shemu’el Tiktinski. It shared many of the characteristics of the Volozhin yeshiva, but there is no evidence of direct links between the two institutions. Granting subsidies to students so that they would not be dependent on the charity of householders, Tiktinski raised funds not only in Mir but also in the entire region. In directing the yeshiva, he was assisted by another rosh yeshivah, and a daily lesson in Talmud was the highlight of a student’s day.
Accompanying the classical version of charity—direct assistance provided by a person of means to a person in need, and the traditional and fraternal associations that addressed the various needs of the poor—there developed in East European Jewish society an extensive and far-reaching network of philanthropy. In this context, the term philanthropy refers to assistance provided to individuals, communities, or social and educational institutions by wealthy individuals above and beyond traditional communal frameworks.
(Noyekh Prilutski; 1882–1941), Yiddish scholar, journalist, and political leader. Noah Pryłucki was born into an affluent merchant family in Berdichev, Ukraine, but spent most of his childhood in Kremenets. Under the guidance of his father Tsevi, who was active in the Ḥibat Tsiyon movement and the Jewish press, he received both a general education in Russian state schools and a Jewish education at home. While still an adolescent, he began to write for Hebrew-, Yiddish-, and Russian-language Jewish periodicals.
City in Ukraine; capital of the Rivne region. Before 1793 and between 1920 and 1939, Rivne (Pol., Równe; Rus., Rovno) belonged to Poland. Its first Jews, and probably the town’s earliest organized Jewish community, appeared there in the mid-sixteenth century.
Town on the Don River; administrative center of the Rostov province of Russia. In 1761, the Rostov fortress and settlement were founded, and the town gained official status in 1796.
(1874–1941), historian, Semitic-language scholar, and rabbi. Born in Przemyśl, Galicia, Mojżesz (Mosheh) Schorr studied philosophy and history between 1893 and 1898 in Vienna at the University of Vienna and the Israelitisch-Theologische Lehranstalt. In 1897, he transferred to the University of Lwów and received his Ph.D. in history in 1898. Two years later he was ordained as a rabbi.
(ca. 1621–ca. 1662), author of Sifte Kohen (1646–1647); an important and influential halakhic authority known as Shakh. Shabetai was born in Amstibovo, Lithuania, to a well-known rabbinical family. His father and grandfather served as rabbis in important communities; his father-in-law was a wealthy grandson of Mosheh Isserles. Though he quotes his father, and less frequently his teachers—Yehoshu‘a Heshel ben Yosef of Kraków and Yehoshu‘a Heshel ben Ya‘akov of Lublin—it appears that most of his scholarship was independently acquired.
Hasidic leaders active in the field of publishing. Pinḥas ben Avraham Abba Shapira of Korets (Korzec; 1726/28–1790) was a charismatic Hasidic leader and a member of the Ba‘al Shem Tov’s (Besht’s) circle. Mosheh Shapira (1762–1838) established a publishing house, an enterprise that he shared with his sons Shemu’el Avraham Abba (1784–1863) and Pinḥas (1792–1872).
An antisemitic show trial in 1952, involving high-ranking politicians of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia. Political terror was an inherent component of the Stalinist reign in Eastern Europe following World War II. While the first trials focused on political opponents of the Communists, the schism with Tito’s Yugoslavia (i.e., inside the Communist bloc), which started in 1948, led to a hunt for alleged enemies within the Communist parties and produced a series of trials involving Communist politicians in East European countries. The campaign was designed to demonstrate a widespread “imperialist” conspiracy within the Communist movements and to prevent any further disobedience in the Soviet bloc.
Known by the acronym GOSET (Gosudarstvennyi Evreiskii Teatr), the Soviet State Yiddish Theaters were part of a network of state-subsidized theaters in the Soviet Union. At its height in the 1930s, the network included four major theaters in Ukraine, Belorussia, Birobidzhan, and Moscow, as well as some 15 minor theaters in smaller Jewish population centers.
(1779–1842), rabbi and Talmudic scholar. Born in Prague, Neḥemyah Naḥum Trebitsch was the only child of Seligmann Trebitsch, the prayer leader at Prague’s Altneuschul. After his father’s death, Trebitsch was brought up in the house of Ya‘akov Günsburg, who headed a yeshiva in Prague and sat on the city’s rabbinical court. Trebitsch received rabbinical ordination from Günsburg in 1811 and from Moravia’s chief rabbi, Mordekhai Banet (1753–1829), in 1816.
An extremely influential literary journal, Wiadomości Literackie (Literary News) appeared in Warsaw between January 1924 and September 1939 under the editorship of its founder, Mieczysław Grydzewski. Quickly outgrowing its French prototype Les Nouvelles littéraires, and evolving from a narrowly literary journal into a periodical covering a wide range of cultural, social, and political issues, both domestic and international, Wiadomości Literackie established itself as one of the most prestigious cultural institutions of interwar Poland. Although its circulation never exceeded 15,000 copies, its impact on the country’s literary, artistic, and intellectual elites can hardly be overestimated. Its standing was also enhanced by its annual literary awards, which successfully competed with state-sponsored prizes.
(1555–1614), rabbinical scholar and halakhic authority. Yehoshu‘a ben Aleksander ha-Kohen, also known as Sema‘ (an acronym of the title of his Sefer me’irat ‘enayim, which is a commentary to the Ḥoshen mishpat portion of the Shulḥan ‘arukh) and by the name Falk, was born in Kraków, where he studied under his cousin, Mosheh Isserles. Subsequently, he moved to Lublin to study under Shelomoh Luria. For a while, he served as a rabbi in Ludmir. He married Beila, a learned daughter of Yisra’el Edels, one of the leaders of the Jewish community in Lwów. (Beila Falk introduced two new rules regarding the lighting of candles on holidays; several prominent rabbis, including Yeḥezkel Segal-Landau, Ḥayim Yosef David Azulay, and the Ḥatam Sofer, endorsed her opinion as halakhah. After being widowed, she immigrated to Jerusalem.)
Ya`akov Yehoshu‘a ben Aleksander ha-Kohen Falk
(Young Vilna) was a dynamic Yiddish literary group of writers, poets, and artists who came of age creatively in Vilna in the 1930s. The group was officially established on 11 October 1929 by Zalmen Reyzen, editor of the Vilner tog, under the headline “Young Vilna Marches into Yiddish Literature,” although a number of aspiring writers and artists had already begun gathering informally a few years earlier.
(1883–1936), revolutionary and Soviet political figure. Grigorii Zinov’ev, known earlier as Ovsei-Gersh Aronovich Apfel’baum or Radomysl’skii, was born in Elisavetgrad, Kherson province, to the assimilated family of an owner of a small dairy farm. Zinov’ev joined the Rossiiskaia Sotsial-Demokraticheskaia Rabochaia Partiia (Russian Social Democratic Workers Party; RSDWP) in 1901. While studying at Bern University, he continued his involvement in revolutionary activities.
(1888–1956), writer and journalist; Zionist political leader. Abraham Leib Zissu was born in Piatra Neamț, Moldavia, to a Hasidic family, and was familiar with traditional Talmudic and biblical literature. He made his debut as a journalist in the newspaper Egalitatea (Equality; 1914), and eventually edited, with M. Braunstein-Mebashan (Menaḥem Mendel Braunstein), the Hebrew review Ha-Mekits (1912). He contributed as well to the Yiddish language review Likht (1914) before turning to Romanian-language Jewish journalism.
(1815–1888), moderate maskil, Jewish studies researcher, Talmud teacher at the Zhitomir Rabbinical Seminary, and a prolific writer in Hebrew and Yiddish. Born in 1815 in Mogilev, Zweifel’s early marriage was a failure and for many years he wandered from community to community, earning a living alternately as a rabbi, melamed (Talmud teacher), and private tutor to students from wealthy homes. At the same time, he was caught up in a frenzy of reading and studying, particularly Hebrew and German works of intellectuals from Central and Western Europe. During his travels, Zweifel established contact with a variety of maskilim: while in Kremenets he met Yitsḥak Ber Levinzon, a leader of the Russian Haskalah movement in the second quarter of the nineteenth century, and in Odessa he met Betsal’el Stern, the principal of one of the first maskilic schools in the Russian Empire.
Hebraist-Zionist publishing house. Aḥi’asaf was founded in Warsaw in 1893 by Hebrew writer and publisher Avraham Leib Shalkovich (known as Ben-Avigdor, who soon left to found the rival publishing house Tushiyah), Eli‘ezer Kaplan, and other activists of Bene Mosheh, a secret society within the Ḥibat Tsiyon movement devoted to the national-cultural revival ideals of Ahad Ha-Am. Ahad Ha-Am himself served as editor and exerted substantial ideological influence on the press. Aḥi’asaf is considered the first modern Hebrew publishing house—the first to solicit, publish, and distribute works of individual authors. Early successes gave way to relative inactivity after 1904, with a brief attempted revival by Zionist leader Ozjasz Thon in 1923.
Annual Hebrew publication, issued between 1884 and 1889, and again in 1893. Ha-Asif (The Harvest) was published in Warsaw and edited by Naḥum Sokolow. The yearly journal focused on discussions and reviews of Jewish studies while attempting to avoid complete identification with the Ḥibat Tsiyon movement. Although Sokolow felt a certain ideological affinity with that movement, he stressed, in his introduction to the 1884 edition, that Ha-Asif was not established to fulfill the needs of any single party or the needs of the hour, but was aimed at the Jewish nation as a whole. Throughout its existence, the publication focused on Jewish history and historiosophy as the basis of nationalism, an approach emphasized by Sokolow in his major essays.
(1753–1829), chief rabbi of Moravia. Mordekhai ben Avraham Banet (Markus Benedikt) achieved great fame during his 40-year tenure (1789–1829) as rabbi of Nikolsburg (Mikulov), head of its large yeshiva, and chief rabbi of Moravia. Throughout his career, he dealt extensively with the revolutionary political, social, and cultural changes that were transforming the lives of his Central European Jewish constituency. Yet unlike the confrontational Orthodoxy initiated by his younger colleague, Mosheh Sofer (Ḥatam Sofer) of Pressburg (Bratislava), Banet’s religious philosophy reflected a more pragmatic traditionalism that rejected certain manifestations of modernity while acquiescing to others.
(1862–1939), Hebrew critic, biographer, short-story writer, and feuilletonist. Born in Liady, Mohilev province, Re’uven Brainin was part of a learned Jewish family, and he first intensely followed the route of traditional text study. At age 17, however, he was profoundly influenced by Haskalah texts, including Avraham Mapu’s Ahavat Tsiyon (The Love of Zion).
A controversial Hasidic school, focused on the personality and teachings of Naḥman ben Simḥah (1772–1810), and named after the Podolian town of Bratslav, where he resided from 1802 until the last few months of his life.
Between the Enlightenment and the Shoah, Jews living in Eastern Europe made contributions to German-language literature that by any measure must be considered significant to that tradition. Yet it is difficult to classify this contribution with a unified definition pertinent to the exercise.
(1856–1879), artist. Among the founders of modern Jewish art, Maurycy Gottlieb is prized in Poland as one of the most talented students of the great national artist Jan Matejko. Born in Drohobycz, Galicia (mod. Drogobych, Ukraine), Gottlieb was sent by his father to a German-language elementary school and to the Polish high school in his native city. Throughout his life German was Gottlieb’s chief language. His Jewish education was not extensive, though he attended heder.
An extensive line of tsadikim of the Hager family, active from the end of the eighteenth century in Galicia, in Bucovina, and especially in Transylvania and Subcarpathian Rus’. Its descendants serve as rebbes to this day in Israel, the United States, and Britain.
(1880–1943), Bundist and Communist leader. Khaye Malke Lifshits (known variously as Ester; Ester Frumkin; Maria Iakovlevna Frumkina; and Ester Aronova) was the most prominent female leader of the Jewish Labor Bund in Russia (until 1921) and then a leader in the Evsektsiia (Jewish section) of the Russian Communist Party (RCP). In contrast to most other members of the Jewish revolutionary intelligentsia in Russia, Ester Frumkin receiveda strong Jewish education at home and was fluent in both Yiddish and Hebrew. Originally from Minsk, after graduating from high school in her hometown Frumkin continued her studies in philology and Russian literature at the Pedagogical University in Saint Petersburg.
When on 26 August 1827 Nicholas I (r. 1825–1855) issued his Ustav rekrutskoi povinnosti (Statute on Conscription Duty) making Jews in Russia liable to personal army service and canceling their prior privilege of providing money ransom instead of conscripts, he followed a policy consistent with European enlightened monarchies, which sought to transform “their” Jews from a medieval corporate entity into useful subjects integrated into the society with which Jews shared rights and obligations. Such was the pattern found in Austria under the reign of Joseph II (r. 1780–1790), who subjected Jews to the state bureaucracy; imposed upon them an obligatory German-based education; significantly expanded their residential, trade, and economic rights; and drafted them into the army.
Town in northeastern Lithuania, on the Nevėžys River; the town served as a district capital. From 1843, Panevėžys (in Jewish usage, variously Ponevezh, Ponivezh, or Ponevich) was included in Kovno guberniia. Jews began to settle in Panevėžys at the beginning of the seventeenth century and engaged mainly in trade and services to local residents. In 1857, approximately 3,500 Jews (60% of the total population) lived there; by the end of the nineteenth century the numbers had reached about 6,600.
City in Veszprém county, Hungary. In the first half of the nineteenth century, Pápa was home to one of the largest and most important Jewish communities in Hungary. Situated favorably at the crossroads between north and south in Transdanubia, Pápa was designated as a “privileged market town” that belonged to a branch of the Esterházy family. Since before 1840 Jews were excluded from most of the “royal free or privileged cities,” it was in noble-owned, large market towns such as Pápa that they flourished. The population was primarily Hungarian with a sizable Calvinist and Lutheran minority alongside the Roman Catholic majority. The Pápa fair attracted merchants from the mercantile centers to the north and west—Pressburg, Györ, and Sopron—who bought up agricultural produce from the southern counties.
(lit., self-publication), the publication and circulation of uncensored materials in the Soviet Union. Samizdat was not exclusively a Jewish phenomenon: Soviet dissidents of all nationalities had recourse to this mode of expressing nonconformity and disseminating ideas from the late 1950s until glasnost. Jewish samizdat—uncensored works on Jewish subjects, produced by Jews for a Jewish readership, and disseminated among Jews—included periodicals, pamphlets, and even books.
(1819–1899), maskil and Hebrew writer whose work was significant in the development of modern Hebrew literature. Kalman Schulman was born to a Hasidic family in Stary Bykhov, in the Mogilev district of Belorussia. He studied at the Volozhin yeshiva for about six years, subsequently learning German and developing an interest in Haskalah literature. In 1843, Schulman settled in Vilna, joining that city’s circle of maskilic authors, especially Mikhah Yosef Lebensohn (Mikhal), with whom he shared a close friendship. From 1849 to 1861, Schulman taught Hebrew at the secondary school connected to the state rabbinical seminary. Later he devoted himself entirely to literary activity, receiving encouragement and support from Saint Petersburg’s Society for the Promotion of Culture among the Jews of Russia.
(ca. 1495–1558), rosh yeshivah and rabbi in Lublin; chief rabbi of Poland. Shalom Shakhnah ben Yosef was born into one of the richest Jewish families of Poland. His father Yosef (Yoska) and grandfather Shakhnah were successful farmers of customs duties in Poland. After Yosef’s property was plundered, he moved from Lwów to Lublin in about 1504 and opened a moneylending business. After Yosef’s death in 1507, Shakhnah maintained the business, but subsequently turned to Torah study and a rabbinical career. Although he studied in Poznań and may also have spent some time in Ashkenazic yeshivas in northern Italy, his main teacher was Ya‘akov Pollak of Kraków. Shakhnah, who eventually directed a yeshiva in Lublin, was considered to be Pollak’s heir and successor and was a central figure among rashe yeshivot (heads of yeshivas) of Poland in the generation following his teacher, beginning in about 1522.
(1817–1896), rabbi, leader of traditional Jewry in Russia, halakhic authority, and supporter of the Ḥibat Tsiyon (Love of Zion) movement. Yitsḥak Elḥanan Spektor served as rabbi in various communities in the Russia Empire, the most important of which was Kovno in Lithuania (1864–1896). He was considered a moderate in his halakhic rulings, devoting much of his decision making to finding dispensations that would permit ‘agunot (literally, “chained” women—the wives of missing or disappeared husbands) to remarry. Many of his responsa were widely regarded as authoritative.
Town in southern Poland, 72 kilometers east of Kraków. Tarnów was founded in 1330, and in the century that followed, Jews were allowed to settle there by its owner, the nobleman Jan Amor. The first privilege authorizing the establishment of a Jewish community was granted in 1582 by the town’s new owner, Konstanty Ostrogski, and was renewed by his successor, Władysław Dominik Ostrogski, in 1637. This privilege exempted the Jews of Tarnów from municipal jurisdiction, entitling them to engage in trade in their own buildings and shops and to distill and deal in alcoholic beverages. They were permitted to have 12 dwelling places on the “Jewish street” (ulica Żydowska). Jews were to pay taxes directly to the magnate and could establish a cemetery near the city. The municipality was responsible for securing the synagogue and cemetery from attack.
Jews in Poland began leasing taverns and village breweries in the sixteenth century. This line of work developed rapidly, and by the second half of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, there was a significantly greater proportion of Jews involved in activities related to the production and sale of beer and vodka than in other Jewish communities in Europe. According to the census of Jews in 1764–1765, about 80 percent of the Jews living in villages and about 14 percent of those living in towns and cities were involved in these activities. In Podlasie, Podolia, and Mazovia, innkeepers made up some 55 percent of the total Jewish population.
An accusation of Jewish ritual murder in the Hungarian village of Tiszaeszlár (before 1918, in Szabolcs county) led to the arrest, imprisonment, interrogation, and eventual trial of 13 Jewish defendants, April 1882–August 1883. The Tiszaeszlár affair began with the disappearance of a 14-year-old Christian girl named Eszter Solymosi on 1 April 1882. Over the next few days—partly in response to an ambiguous conversation that they had with one of the eventual defendants and partly inspired by their own preconceived notions—the girl’s mother and aunt came to the conclusion that she had been kidnapped and murdered by local Jews. At first, officials responded with incredulity to the women’s claims, advising them instead to “put such thoughts out of [their] mind[s].” Indeed, for several weeks the Tiszaeszlár affair was nothing more than a case of a missing person. Eventually, though, a series of factors led to a serious accusation of Jewish ritual murder.
(1881–1938), Yiddish prose writer. Itshe Meyer Vaysenberg (Isaac Meir Weissenberg), was born in Żelechów, Poland, into a working-class family. He attended heder and in his youth was a craftsman. In 1904, Vaysenberg published his first two short stories in Di yudishe bibliotek, edited by Y. L. Peretz. One of these stories, “Dor hoylekh vedor bo” (A Generation Comes and a Generation Goes), already heralded the place that Vaysenberg was about to occupy within Yiddish literature. He became a master of realistic descriptions of social tensions in the shtetl, even as he avoided open ideological commitment.
A city on the Luga River (a tributary of the West Bug), Volodymyr Volyns’kyi (Pol., Włodzimierz; Yid., Ludmir; Latinized as Lodomeria) is the district center of Ukraine’s Volyn’ oblast. An important regional center of Volhynia since the tenth century, it passed in 1319 to the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, in 1569 to the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, and in 1795 to the Russian Empire. Between 1921 and 1939 it belonged to independent Poland.
Jewish tradition considers angels to be messengers of God, but holds that they must not be substituted for God. Isaiah 63:9 speaks of the angel of God’s divine countenance—an important designation in Jewish mysticism that has variously been taken to mean the archangel Metatron, the Shekhinah (or immanent divine presence), or the redeeming angel and was understood by some to be an extension of God and a manifestation of the Holy Spirit. The Talmud (Ḥagigah 13b) declares that each divine angelic legion is formed of a million members, but that the legions themselves are numberless.
(1816–1893), head of the Volozhin yeshiva and one of the great Torah scholars of the nineteenth century. Naftali Tsevi Yehudah Berlin (known as Netsiv) was born in Mir (Minsk district) into a distinguished family of merchants based in Shklov. His father, Ya‘akov, was a wealthy textile merchant, who at the end of his life sold all his property and settled in Jerusalem. At the age of 14, Berlin married Rayna Batyah, the daughter of Yitsḥak, son of Ḥayim of Volozhin, founder of the Volozhin yeshiva. For many years Berlin studied on his own with great diligence, but his father-in-law’s family remained unaware of his promise as a scholar.
(1881–1960), Hebrew poet and playwright. Born in Slutsk, Ya‘akov Cahan moved with his family to the vicinity of Łódź, where he was educated at a progressive Jewish school. Largely self-taught in world literature and Hebrew, he wrote poetry and criticism in that language at a young age, and also translated poems from German. Acclaimed for his style by Ḥayim Naḥman Bialik, Cahan earned his reputation as the most purely lyrical of modern Hebrew poets.
The most prominent official Jewish institution in Poland following the Holocaust, the Central Committee of Jews in Poland (Centralny Komitet Żydów w Polsce, CKŻP) attended to the needs of Jews from fall 1944 until 1950. It sponsored a variety of programs, providing food, shelter, education, medical assistance, cultural activities, and employment services and vocational training. The CKŻP also supervised the repatriation of Jews from the Soviet Union and assisted with legal emigration. A government-funded body, it was supported financially by the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee.
In East European Jewish culture, the demon—variously referred to as ruaḥ (spirit), mazik (evildoer), ḥitson (the external one), and shed (demonic spirit)—embodied forces of evil. Jews imagined demons as various sorts of evil forces seeking to intrude into the Jewish realm to destroy the well-being of individuals. The early eighteenth-century medical doctor Tobias Cohen reported a widespread belief in demons among East European Jews, which he found unparalleled elsewhere.
(1717–1786/87), Hasidic leader; founder of Hasidism in Galicia and Poland. The son of a wealthy village Jew in the district of Tykocin, Elimelekh was first drawn to Hasidism by his brother Meshulam Zusya (d. 1800), later of Hanipoli. The two were among the best known disciples of Dov Ber, the Magid of Mezritsh. During their early years they were said to wander together in self-imposed poverty, in order to partake in the exile of the shekhinah. Elimelekh was known for other extremes of ascetic practice as well, in contrast to some others of the Magid’s followers.
The distinctiveness of East European Jewish foodways arises from local understandings of ritual requirements, the historical legacy of early Western Ashkenazic traditions, a symbiotic relationship with local culinary practices, regional variations specific to Eastern Europe, and the central role of Jews in the food and beverage economy of the region.
(1860–1916), Russian and Yiddish poet and essayist. Once considered a shining star of Russian Jewish literature, Shimen Frug is remembered now mostly as a Zionist sympathizer and an inspiration for the Hebrew-language writers Ḥayim Naḥman Bialik, Leib Jaffe (Leyb Yaffe), and Yosef Klausner. By contrast, Simon Dubnow viewed Frug as a singer of negativism and despair. Frug, in fact, was a loner who, in an age of ideologies, had no ideology, belonged to no group, and was deeply contradictory. While often seen as a sympathizer of Zionism, Frug held an equally powerful passion for Diaspora Jewry. Lauded as a great friend of Yiddish, in truth Frug was ambivalent at best, launching a cruel attack against the language in 1899. Finally, although he served Jewish causes with his pen, he ultimately sullied his own reputation by selling out his muse and writing for Saint Petersburg’s gutter papers, including some that were mildly antisemitic. In short, the image of the monochromatic lover of Zion, master of Yiddish, and even melancholic singer of the Jewish people needs revision.
Port city on the Danube River, located in the Moldavian region of Romania. Written records of Jewish settlement in Galați (Galatz) include information from the seventeenth century. The town’s oldest standing Jewish cemetery dates back to 1774, though earlier cemeteries apparently existed in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The Great Synagogue, mentioned in documents in 1780, was rebuilt in 1813. Galați’s communal register dates back to 1812.
(1866–1940), founder and editor of Der fraynd; political and cultural historian of Russian Jewry. Sha’ul (Saul Moiseevich) Ginsburg was born to a wealthy merchant and industrialist family in Minsk. He received a Jewish education from private tutors and a general education at gymnasium and the law faculty of the University of Saint Petersburg, graduating in 1892. Ginsburg began his journalism career quite young as a correspondent for the moderate maskilic and proto-nationalist Hebrew newspaper Ha-Magid.
(1897–1960), Soviet Yiddish poet. Born in Rogachev, eastern Belorussia, Shmuel Halkin was a cousin of the brothers Shim‘on Halkin, a Hebrew poet, and Abraham Halkin, a historian and Arabist. Shmuel Halkin later remembered his own father, an employee in a timber business, as a “man of solid Jewish knowledge, of clear sober mind, and of broad dreamy heart.” The youngest of nine children, Shmuel was educated by his elder brother, an enthusiast of Hebrew and Russian literature.
Based in Warsaw and published between 1866 and 1915, Izraelita was the longest-lasting Polish Jewish journal. Published in the Polish language by Jewish reformers, the weekly initially described itself as a journal “for the study of Judaism”; later it broadened its self-definition to include “religious and educational” as well as “scientific, social, and literary matters.” Izraelita is recognized as an outstanding source on Jewish thought and modernization during a crucial period of Polish Jewish history. Established at the time of increased hopes for integration, Izraelita’s final years on the Polish cultural scene confronted a rising tide of nationalism and antisemitism, representing a crisis for integrationist Jewish circles.
Camps created by the Nazis (at Auschwitz-Birkenau, Bełżec, Sobibór, Treblinka, Majdanek, and Chełmno) to murder Jews. As the slaughter of Jews in the Soviet Union got underway in the summer of 1941, primarily by firing squads, Nazi officials began to entertain different methods of murder for Polish Jewry and the remainder of European Jews. Firing squads were too slow, public, and costly, and took an emotional toll on some of the shooters. The initial planning of elements of Aktion Reinhard—a scheme to murder most of Polish Jewry—began during the summer of 1941, and construction of the Bełżec installations began in late October.
(1896–1937), Yiddish poet, novelist, and dramatist. Born in Smorgon near Vilna, Moyshe Kulbak was educated in a modern heder, in a Jewish Russian elementary school, and later in yeshivas. As a result, he acquired a deeper understanding of traditional Jewish culture than had most of his subsequent contemporaries in Yiddish poetry. During World War I, he lived in Kovno, where he began to write Hebrew poetry. He made his Yiddish debut in 1916 with a poem that was set to music and that became popular.
(pl., Litvakes), Yiddish term for a Jew of historical, or “greater,” Lithuania. The Litvaks’ territory of origin is significantly larger than the borders of both the independent Lithuanian Republic of the interwar period (1918–1940)—which did not include the center of Litvak culture, Vilna (Vilnius)—and the contemporary state of Lithuania. From a Jewish cultural and historical perspective, Lite (Yiddish for Lithuania; Heb., Lita) includes large swaths of northeastern Poland (notably the Białystok and Suwałki regions), northern and western Belarus (notably the Grodno [Hrodna], Minsk, Slutsk, Pinsk, Brisk [Brest Litovsk], Shklov, Mogilev [Mohilev], Gomel [Homel’], and Vitebsk [Vitsyebsk] regions), southern Latvia (notably the Dvinsk [Daugavpils] region), and northeastern Prussia (notably the region of the Baltic port city Memel [Klaipėda]). This expansive definition of Lithuania in Jewish historiography and culture corresponds roughly to the large territory under the jurisdiction of the Lithuanian Jewish Council (Va‘ad Medinot Lita), which governed Lithuanian Jewish communal affairs from 1623 to 1764.
The institution of marriage in East European Jewish society remained largely traditional until the early twentieth century but also reflected broader transformations in general society. In the absence of civil marriage in the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, and later in tsarist Russia, marriage belonged to the competence of the rabbi, who supervised wedding ceremonies and adjudicated divorce according to Jewish law. In contrast, following the Polish Partitions, the Habsburg Empire maintained an ambiguous separation of church and state in matters of family law. While the new marriage edict (16 January 1783) mandated civil unions and a German exam for all married couples, it allowed clergy to regulate divorces based on their own confessional laws. In the case of Jews, the rabbinic court upheld the requirement of a formal get (writ of divorce) even in cases involving male converts to Christianity. Despite the extension of the Toleranzpatent to Galicia in 1789, the majority of Jews evaded civil marriages and maintained traditional religious ceremonies for many decades thereafter.
(1887–1966), editor, critic, and cultural activist. Born in a village estate near Kiev, Nakhmen Mayzel received a traditional education in his father’s home from private tutors until he was 17. His first story in Hebrew was published in 1905, and in the following years he contributed literary pieces and criticism to a variety of Hebrew periodicals in Eastern Europe. He considered moving to Palestine and taking up agricultural work.
Organization devoted to the promotion of health, hygiene, and childcare among Jews. Founded on 7 August 1912 in Saint Petersburg as the Society for the Protection of the Health of the Jewish Population, OZE (Obshchestvo okhraneniia zdorov’ia evreiskogo naseleniia; later, Obschestvo zdravookhraneniia evreev; OZE), is now based in Paris and is known as OSE (Oeuvre de Secours aux Enfants) World Union. Its first chair was the physician and rear admiral Semyon A. Kaufmann. Among the committee's early members were prominent Saint Petersburg physicians, including Naum R. Botvinnik, Abram M. Bramson, Moisei M. Gran, Grigori I. Dembo, and Iakov B. Eiger. Other members were attorney Grigori A. Goldberg and transportation engineer Stanislav E. Weisblat.
A term referring to Jews who as of the early 1970s applied to leave the Soviet Union for Israel and were refused permission to emigrate. Often remaining refused for long periods—in some cases, nearly 20 years—the Jewish activists who were denied exit permits inevitably tended to have great impact on the broader Jewish national movement in the USSR. At the same time, some refuseniks had no involvement in the Jewish movement, and refusals were not necessarily linked to specifically Jewish activity.
The first Jewish intellectuals, writers, and journalists writing in Romanian, in the second half of the nineteenth century, came predominantly from Bucovina and Galicia. As they settled in Moldavia or Walachia, they brought along a heritage acquired in Hasidic families; and they knew Hebrew and Yiddish. Many of their earliest literary efforts were in those languages, but most integrated quickly, adopting Romanian for their journalistic and literary work even as they treated exclusively Jewish topics. This generation and the one immediately following included the first journalists and editors of Jewish newspapers, among them the scholar and publisher Iuliu (Julius) Yehudah Barasch (1815–1863) as well as the Schwarzfeld brothers. Many had a thorough knowledge of German culture and were among the first to translate German classics, particularly the writings of Heinrich Heine, into Romanian.
(1884–1943), historian, political activist, and Sejm deputy. Energetic, creative, and imaginative, Ignacy Schiper (often spelled Schipper) was one of the leading Jewish historians of interwar Poland, a pioneer in Jewish economic history who based his work on extensive research in Polish and German archives. A prolific speaker and author who published primarily in Polish, Yiddish, and German, Schiper advocated a shift from traditional Jewish intellectual history to the secular socioeconomic and cultural history of the working Jewish masses.
(1866–1921), Hebrew writer and publisher, known alternately by his pseudonym, Ben-Avigdor. Born in Zaludok, near Vilna, Shalkovich grew up in Zhetl, a village in the province of Grodno. Though he attended Lithuanian yeshivas, he became a maskil and subsequently traveled to Kovno, where he studied for his university entrance exams (though there is no evidence that he ever attended university). He was married to Tsiporah Blumgarten, sister of the Yiddish poet known as “Yehoyesh” (Solomon Bloomgarden).
(1880–1972), Hebrew writer. Born in Orsha (now in Belarus), Gershom Shofman was educated at heder and in several yeshivas. He also studied the classics of Russian and Hebrew literature and was especially captivated by the works of Mendele Moykher-Sforim. Orphaned during his childhood, Shofman grew up in poverty. The fearful circumstances of his youth left their marks in his stories.
(Pseudonym of Nokhem Meyer Shaykevitch; 1849?–1905), Yiddish author and dramatist. Born in Nesvizh, Lithuania, to a wealthy family, Nokhem Meyer Shaykevitch was traditionally educated. However, he also read secular literature, including Kalman Schulman’s Hebrew translation of Eugene Sue’s Mystères de Paris and Hebrew novels by Avraham Mapu. Teaching himself German from Moses Mendelssohn’s famous Bible translation, he also explored German and Russian literature. His pseudonym comes from the last letters of each of his three names.
(1890–1973), Yiddish poet, critic, and theatrical director. Born in Lipkan, Bessarabia, Yankev Shternberg attended heder and completed five classes in the Russian secondary school in Kamenets Podolski. From 1913 on, he lived in Bucharest, moving to Kishinev when Bessarabia became a Soviet territory in 1940. He was in Tashkent during part of World War II and in Moscow beginning in 1943. In 1949, he was sentenced, together with other Yiddish writers of Bessarabia, to 10 years in Stalinist camps “for Trotskyite and Zionist activity.” After his release in 1954, Shternberg lived in Moscow until his death.
Town in Belarus. The first evidence of Jewish life in Slutsk (Pol., Słuck) dates from 1583, when the town formed part of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth; its Jewish community was granted a formal privilege in 1601. By 1623, Jews owned 16 houses. Though affected by wars in the mid-seventeenth century, both the town and the Jewish community developed rapidly. In the Lithuanian Jewish Council, Slutsk, originally a satellite of Brisk (Brest Litovsk), became one of the five leading communities in 1691.
Town in southern Bucovina. Scant documentation from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries indicates that Suceava (known also as Suczawa in Polish or by its Yiddish name, Shots) had a presence of Jewish merchants, doctors, and diplomats from Poland and Turkey. In 1707, Jews were granted permission to live in the town. When Bucovina was annexed to the Habsburg Empire in 1774, the Jewish population of Suceava was 203.
The yeshiva of the Lithuanian town of Telsiai—or Telz, as it was known among Jews—had its beginnings as an initiative of some local scholars around 1870, but it became an institution of major significance when Eli‘ezer Gordon was appointed rabbi of Telz in 1883 and took over the direction of the yeshiva. Gordon was a creative organizer who sought ways to adopt modern methods in the service of what he saw as tradition. He was one of the first to call for an Orthodox Jewish press and for modern political organization in traditionalist circles.
(1890–1945), writer. Son of a prosperous Jewish glove manufacturer, Franz Werfel was brought up in Prague, where he was friendly with Franz Kafka, Max Brod, Willy Haas, and other members of the Prague Circle. He initially found fame as an expressionist poet, first writing Der Weltfreund (The Friend of the World; 1911).
(1525 or 1530–1612), rabbi, Talmudist, and kabbalist. Born in Prague, Mordekhai ben Avraham Yafeh (or Jaffe; called Ba‘al ha-Levushim [Author of the Levushim], after the name of his works) moved as a boy to Poland, where he studied under Shelomoh Luria and Mosheh Isserles. It was probably under the latter’s influence that he took up the subjects of astronomy and philosophy. Yafeh also studied Kabbalah under Matityahu Delacrut.
Russia’s (and the world’s) first Hebrew daily. In 1886, Ha-Yom was founded, published, and edited by the veteran journalist and author Yehudah Leib Kantor, who felt a daily newspaper was necessary and possible in addition to the weeklies Ha-Melits (then published in Saint Petersburg) and Ha-Tsefirah (published in Warsaw). Ha-Yom was published in Saint Petersburg beginning on 31 January (12 February, according to the Gregorian calendar) 1886.
Town in western Romania, in the Arad Plain on the Mureş River. From 1552 to 1687, Arad was claimed by the Turkish pashalik of Timişoara, and between 1687 and 1918 it was part of the Kingdom of Hungary in the Habsburg Empire and then of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The first documented indication of a Jewish presence in Arad dates from 1717 when the commander of the town’s citadel, Baron Ştefan Cosa, agreed to allow two Jewish families to settle there. In 1743, there were 6 Jewish families; in 1754 there were 24; in 1767, 17 families with 71 people; and in 1784–1785, 30 families with 152 people.
Literally, “masters of [God’s] name” (sg., ba‘al shem); alternatively, ba‘ale shem tov, or “masters of good name.” The terms, which are often interchangeable, signify the ability to manipulate “holy” names, including both the name of God and those of angels, along with the names of Satan and evil spirits, in order to obtain practical results. Anthropologically similar to shamans, ba‘ale shem mediated between empirical reality and divine realms, between this world and the netherworld, and between spirits and living beings, employing both Lurianic and popular Kabbalah, magical remedies and mystical devices, local herbal folk remedies, amulets (Heb., kemi‘im; sg., kame‘a), and contemporary medical recipes to restore social order or provide personal security.
Site of the murder of Kiev Jews by the Nazis in 1941. On 19 September 1941, the Germans occupied Kiev, after approximately 70 percent of a total Jewish population of 225,000 (as of 1939) had managed to flee. On 29–30 September, the eve of Yom Kippur, 33,771 of those who remained—mostly women, children, and the elderly—were murdered in Babi Yar, a ravine on the outskirts of the city. All in all, during the Nazi occupation of Kiev, an additional 70,000–80,000 people of various ethnic groups, mostly but not solely Jews, were killed there as well, but the locale became especially known for the first and largest aktion.
Like many traditional societies, Jewish communities had their singers, popular writers, and entertainers. Such figures, known as badkhonim (sg., badkhn), appeared at domestic celebrations, primarily weddings or holidays such as Hanukkah and Purim.
(1873–1924), literary critic. Bal-Makhshoves (“Man of Thoughts”; pseudonym of Isidor [Yisroel] Eliashev) was born in Kovno, Lithuania, to a wealthy family. His father, Shloyme Zalkind Eliashev, had been a maskil in his youth, but after marriage reverted to religion, becoming an adherent of the Musar Movement. The dim, penitential sermons Bal-Makhshoves attended with his father as a child filled him with “gloom and terror,” stamping his personality with the pervasive melancholy that characterized him as an adult. This piety, however, was offset in the household by an open attitude to the learning of French, German, and Russian. At age 10, Bal-Makhshoves was sent to the Musar yeshiva in Grobin, from which he was expelled for heretical tendencies some two years later. A year or so afterward, his parents made the surprising decision to send him to high school in Switzerland.
(1850–1902), Hebrew author. Active in various East European cities, including Vilna (his place of birth), Lvov, Kraków, Bucharest, and Odessa, and ultimately (after 1896) in Vienna, Re’uven Braudes edited Hebrew and Yiddish periodicals and wrote essays and articles, but is best known as the author of short stories and novels that earned him a reputation as one of the outstanding maskilic Hebrew writers of nineteenth-century Eastern Europe. He also published three stories in Yiddish, although his work in that language must be considered marginal to his overall literary output.
(1766–1844), pioneer Reform rabbi. Aharon Chorin’s parents, Kalman Chorin and Schöndel, the daughter of Yesha‘yahu Donath of Boskowitz (Cz., Boskovice), engaged in modest petty trade, and moved to Deutschkreutz (Hun., Németkeresztur; Zehlemone) of Hungary’s “seven communities” in Burgenland in 1780. He attended the yeshiva at nearby Mattersdorf but spent his formative years in Prague during 1782 and 1783 studying at the yeshiva of Yeḥezkel Landau. Besides acquiring a first-class education in rabbinical literature, he became acquainted with other intellectual currents, such as the Enlightenment and mysticism.
(Taz; 1586–1667), rabbi, author, and head of yeshiva. The life of David ben Shemu’el ha-Levi, better known as Taz (after the initial letters of his Ture zahav [Rows of Gold], commentary upon the Shulḥan ‘arukh), spanned the peaceful zenith as well as the violent decline of seventeenth-century Polish Jewry. He was witness to both the bloody uprising of Bohdan Khmel’nyts’kyi and the messianic aspirations of Shabetai Tsevi. In Taz’s lifetime the Shulḥan ‘arukh achieved recognition as the authoritative code of Jewish law. His renowned and oft-reprinted commentary on that work remains his principal scholarly achievement.
Jewish folklore and ethnography emerged as a field of study during the nineteenth century. As early as 1823, Leopold Zunz, a founder of the Verein für Kultur und Wissenschaft des Judentums, outlined what a future “statistics” of the Jews should include: religion, education, occupations, language, government, pastimes, old buildings, tombstones, and “die Tradition,” which included legend, fable, and anecdote. By 1918, in a posthumously published essay, British folklorist Joseph Jacobs explicitly identified Zunz’s statistical outline as the ideal protocol for a Jewish Volkskunde (folkloristics).
Yiddish Social Democratic newspaper published from 25 November 1921 to 26 September 1939 and from February 1946 to January 1949 in Warsaw. Folks-tsaytung (People’s Newspaper) was the central organ of the General Jewish Workers Union in Poland (the Bund) and the successor to the Bundist daily organ Lebens-fragen (Vital Questions). In 1923, it changed its name three times: to Di naye tsayt (The New Times), Unzer tsayt (Our Times), and finally Unzer folks-tsaytung (Our People’s Newspaper). As of 17 January 1926, it was called Folks-tsaytung (People’s Newspaper), and one day later it adopted the name Naye folks-tsaytung (New People’s Newspaper). It was permanently in opposition to the authorities, was confiscated dozens of times, and was suspended on 5–11 October 1932. It began as a weekly, and from 1922 to 1939 was published daily. During its postwar revival it appeared only once every three to four weeks. It had four through eight pages and an approximate circulation of 10,000 in 1929; 18,000 in 1935; 14,000 in 1938; and 4,000 in its last year. It was the last Jewish newspaper in Warsaw at the beginning of the Nazi occupation.
(d. 1683), chronicler of the Khmel’nyts’kyi uprising (gzeyres takh vetat). Presumably born in Ostróg in Volhynia, Natan Note (often Neta‘ or Nata) Hannover studied at the local yeshiva and then seems to have traveled across Europe as an itinerant preacher before marrying and settling in Zasław, Ukraine. He published a sermon from this period—presented in Kraków in 1646—in Sefer ta‘ame sukah (1652).
(1749–1841), Bohemian maskil and author. Herz Homberg is known mainly for having been the government-appointed supervisor of the German Jewish school system in Galicia between 1787 and 1806. He fully endorsed the policy of enforced enlightenment of Jews and was one of the first to establish a pattern of maskilic cooperation with absolutist governments in Eastern Europe and denunciation of conservative Jewish opponents.
Yiddish actors and theater directors. Ester-Rokhl Kaminska (1870–1926) and Avrom-Yitskhok Kaminski (1867–1918) were husband and wife; the most famous of their three children was their daughter Ida (1899–1980).
(1865–1935), rabbinic leader, halakhist, theologian, and mystic. Best known as the first Ashkenazic chief rabbi of modern Palestine and the major theologian of religious Zionism, Kook lived in Latvia and Lithuania before moving to the Land of Israel in 1904 at the age of 38.
(1839–1915), Yiddish author. Born in Vinnitsa, Podolia (mod. Vinnytsya, Ukr.) to a father who was a rabbi and a devout Hasid, Yitskhok Linetski was a child prodigy. As he entered adolescence, he grew interested in the Haskalah, spending time in enlightened circles and reading secular books. Attempting to prevent what he saw as moral corruption, Linetski’s father married him at age 14 to a girl of 12; when Linetski convinced his wife to explore the Enlightenment, his father forced him to divorce her and, at 16, to marry a deaf, mentally handicapped girl, reinforcing Linetski’s hostility to traditionalist and particularly to Hasidic ways of life.
City in western Romania, known in Hungarian as Nagyvárad or Várad and in German as Grosswardein. Oradea was part of Hungary until World War I and again between 1940 and 1944; it was the seat of the historical Bihar (Bihor) county. Jews were not allowed to settle within Nagyvárad’s city limits during the eighteenth century but were encouraged to settle in the adjoining district of Váralja, an independent community until 1848–1849, where they enjoyed the right to trade and acquire plots for houses. From the 1720s on, Jews were exempt from paying property taxes.
The dynamic development of Yiddish poetry in Eastern Europe charts a complex interplay between ideological approaches, cultural factors, and literary models profoundly influenced by historic events. For instance, each generation of Yiddish poets had at its disposal the diverse forms of the Yiddish folk song with its broad range of themes and genres: love songs with their ostensibly naive language; lullabies sung largely in a mother’s voice; children’s songs; songs about soldiers and conscripts; songs about the underworld; ballads; and songs with religious, mystical content. However, Yiddish poets differ in the extent to which they used this creative source; this is one of the keys to understanding the changes in literary sensibilities and cultural attitudes.
This overview examines Jewish literary creativity in Polish, its historical and artistic roots, and its place in Polish literature. It focuses on those authors who defined themselves as Jewish by exploring Jewish themes: painting their own self-portraits as Jews, depicting Jewish social life and spiritual experience, and enriching Polish literature with forms, contents, and symbolism rooted in the Jewish tradition.
(Yid., Rayshe, Reyshe), city in southeastern Poland. Founded in 1354, Rzeszów was a privately owned town until 1845. The first mention of Jews residing there dates from 1550. Rzeszów’s owners supported Jewish settlement, and by 1592, six Jews owned houses. Local Jews made their livings as traders and artisans. In 1648 the town’s Jewish population had risen to approximately 680, augmented by Jews fleeing westward from the Cossack uprising led by Bohdan Khmel’nyts’kyi. At the beginning of the eighteenth century, 412 of the 473 merchants in Rzeszów were Jewish. By 1765, the number of Jews in the town had risen to about 1,200.
(1810–1904), author of scientific texts in Hebrew; inventor; principal of the Zhitomir Rabbinical Seminary; and founder and editor of the journal Ha-Tsefirah (The Dawn). As was the case with many nineteenth-century maskilim, Ḥayim Zelig Słonimski had to rely on inner strength, curiosity, and self-motivation to make the transition from a cultural environment steeped in tradition to one based on a more modern Jewish ethos. The education he received in Białystok, where he was born, qualified him for a career in the rabbinate, but out of a desire to expand his intellectual horizons, Słonimski taught himself European languages and read their literature.
Zionist weekly published in Prague from 1 March 1907 to 8 October 1938. Selbstwehr’s title, which literally means “self-defense,” was interpreted in the newspaper’s programmatic statement also to mean “self-help.” Communal administration was to be made democratic, and Jews were to be encouraged to stop hiding their Jewishness. In addition, Selbstwehr campaigned to have Jews recognized as one of the nationalities of the multinational Austro-Hungarian Empire. Zionist work was reported in great detail, as was news of the Jewish world and of local Jewish cultural activities. In its first years, Selbstwehr gave special emphasis to sports, which were to help in creating a new type of Jew.
Jewish employment of Christians as servants was widespread in Eastern Europe by the Middle Ages. From the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries, most Jewish-owned businesses and leaseholds hired such servants, as did families and organizations at all levels of Jewish society. Indeed it was the rare Jewish family, including those in the lower social strata, that did not employ them.
The Towarzystwo Ochrony Zdrowia Ludności Żydowskiej (Society for Safeguarding the Health of the Jewish Population; TOZ) was established in Warsaw in 1921, when the Polish branch of the Saint Petersburg–based Obshchestvo Zdravookhraneniia Evreev (Society for the Protection of Jewish Health; OZE [later, Oeuvre de Secour aux Enfants; OSE]) united in a national organization. The objective of TOZ, which was funded by memberships, donations, and foreign Jewish philanthropies, was to look after the welfare and well-being of Jewish citizens in independent Poland, promoting their health and the health of their children.
Towarzystwo Ochrony Zdrowia Ludności Źidowskiej
(Hun., Temesvár), city in the Bánát (Banat) region of present-day Transylvania, Romania, bordering the Balkan states. Temesvár was a significant settlement in the medieval Hungarian Kingdom; between 1552 and 1716, it served as a Turkish administrative center. The town was under Austrian rule until 1779 and subsequently was again part of the Kingdom of Hungary until 1918. It grew from three settlements (Inner City, Industrial City, and Joseph City); these historical developments had parallels in the local Jewish communities that had previously been independent.
(ca. 1737–1814), rabbinic scholar and Hasidic leader. Known as the Magid of Kozhenits (Pol., Kozienice), Yisra’el ben Shabetai was one of the founders of Hasidism in central Poland. Born in Opatów, the son of a poor bookbinder, he studied with Dov Ber, the Magid of Mezritsh, and later with Elimelekh of Lizhensk.
Galician Hasidic dynasty that flourished in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, during the third and fourth generations of Hasidism. Its tsadikim (lit., “righteous ones”), renowned for their esoteric learning and even purportedly for performing miracles, attracted many disciples. The dynasty continues to exist, primarily in the United States, although many of its members and leaders were murdered during the Holocaust.
(Jewish Party), political party that represented the Jewish national minority in Czechoslovakia during the interwar period. The party was founded in January 1919 at the first gathering in Prague of Jewish nationalists in that country and was supported by Zionists from different branches (with the exception of Po‘ale Tsiyon), as well as by non-Zionist Jewish nationalists. Židovská Strana was opposed by members of the Czech Jewish movement in Bohemia and by the majority of Orthodox Jews in Slovakia and Subcarpathian Rus’, who criticized the party’s Zionist orientation.
Items generally worn around the neck or on the wrist, meant to protect or aid those who carried or wore them. The Hebrew word for amulet, kame‘a, is evidently connected to the notion of tying or binding. Jewish amulets are usually comprised of texts (either letters or graphic symbols) that are inscribed on some sort of material; some may also contain plant matter or precious stones. For the most part, an amulet has a specific purpose: to ease childbirth, facilitate recovery from illness, improve one’s livelihood, and so on.
(1877–1942), historian and educator. Majer Bałaban was a founder and architect of modern Polish Jewish historiography and the first to synthesize both Polish archival sources and Jewish communal records and rabbinic responsa.
A student organization that played a decisive role in shaping the Zionist movement in the Czech lands before World War I. The history of the group can be traced to 1893, when the Maccabi Association was founded at the German university in Prague.
This entry includes three articles on children’s literature in Hebrew, Yiddish, and Polish, respectively.
About this Article (Children’s Literature)
This entry comprises three articles on East European Jewish dance traditions. An Overview surveys historical attitudes toward dance, the social and religious contexts in which dancing took place, and notes some of the basic dance forms. Traditional Dance explores folk dance genres. Theatrical Dance focuses on the choreographic styles and forms of the Yiddish theater. For additional discussion, see Hasidism: Dance.
A town on the Ikva River (Pripiat’ basin), Dubno is the district center of Ukraine’s Rivne oblast. From the 1320s, it belonged to the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, and from 1569 to the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth. From 1795 it was in the Russian Empire and from 1796 served as a district center of Volhynia province. Thereafter, from 1921 to 1939 the town was within the borders of independent Poland.
Magyar was not the first modern literary language of Hungarian Jews; few were conversant in that language before the mid-nineteenth century. Jews in Hungary had undergone an earlier stage of linguistic assimilation toward the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth centuries, shifting from Yiddish to German, the medium of instruction of the schools initiated by Joseph II (1780–1790), as well as the language of the kingdom’s more important trading centers populated largely by German burghers.
The first Hasidic sect established in Lithuania, and one of the major protagonists in the historic feud between the Hasidim and their rabbinic opponents, the Misnagdim. The founder of the Karlin-Stolin dynasty was Aharon ben Ya‘akov (1736–1772), known by generations of his followers as Aharon ha-Gadol (Aaron the Great). A disciple of Dov Ber, the Magid of Mezritsh, he founded a Hasidic prayer house in Karlin, a suburb of Pinsk, in 1762, whose devotees disseminated his teachings throughout Belorussia and Lithuania, including in the cities of Minsk and Vilna. The rapid dissemination of Hasidism by the disciples of Aharon of Karlin is what initially aroused the ire of the establishment rabbis (eventually known as the Misnagdim) who, in the early 1770s, began a vociferous campaign against the “Karliners,” as Hasidim were often referred to in the early Misnagdic polemical literature.
Yiddish literary and general-interest weekly published in Odessa from 23 October 1862 until 28 November 1872. Kol mevaser (The Herald) started out as a Yiddish supplement to the Hebrew-language newspaper Ha-Melits (The Advocate). From 20 May 1869 it was an independent “popular Jewish newspaper in the spoken tongue.” Its publishers were Aleksander Zederbaum, who also served as editor until the paper’s last years, and Aron-Yitskhok Goldenblum. The paper had more than 250 subscribers.
(1875/80–1939), Yiddish literary theoretician and critic. Moyshe Litvakov was born in the Ukrainian town of Cherkassy into the family of a melamed. He received a traditional Jewish education until the age of 17, gained an external gymnasium certificate, and attended the Sorbonne between 1902 and 1905. Litvakov returned to Russia after rejecting Ahad Ha-Am’s form of Zionism for Labor Zionism and becoming a founder of the territorialist Zionist Socialist Workers Party (SSWP). In 1907 he edited its organs Der nayer veg (The New Way), Dos vort (The Word), and Undzer veg (Our Way) in Vilna.
The concept of romantic love was seen as foreign in East European Jewish culture, a society that relied on arranged marriages and carefully separated the sexes in its religious and educational institutions. The critique of this attitude toward romantic love was fundamental to the project of modernizing traditional Jewish life. In Mendele Moykher-Sforim’s introduction to his fictionalized autobiography, Of Bygone Days, the writer lamented that his childhood and youth had failed to provide him with the ingredients of good literature:
Magic is often defined as the exercise of control over nature with the assistance of unseen powerful forces. Belief in magic was an integral part of daily life in Eastern Europe, among Jews and non-Jews alike. Magic was expressed in Jewish life in a variety of ways: there were experts in the use of magic, known as ba‘ale shem (masters of the [Holy] Name); objects infused with magical powers (amulets); magical entities (demons); and literature devoted to magic, such as folk-remedy and charm literature. There was almost no facet of Jewish life that did not include some aspect of magic; and in certain matters, mainly related to health issues, magic was particularly important.
(1754–1800), maskil and philosopher. Salomon Maimon (Shelomoh ben Yehoshu‘a) was born and raised near Nieśwież in Poland–Lithuania (now Nesvizh, Belarus). He received a Talmudic education, married at 11, and soon began to work as a private tutor. Early in his life, he encountered Jewish mystical-pietistic movements, showed an interest in Kabbalah, and flirted with new Hasidism. Later, influenced by the philosophy of Maimonides (in whose honor he adopted a surname), he devoted himself to secular studies and began to lean toward skepticism.
Located in the present-day Transcarpathian oblast’ of Ukraine, the city of Mukacheve (Cz., Mukačevo; Hun., Munkács; Yid., Munkatsh) was the cultural and spiritual center of Jewish life in the historic region of Subcarpathian Rus’ (Ruthenia). A Hasidic center, it had the highest proportion of Jews among prewar Hungarian and interwar Czechoslovakian cities. Mukacheve is located in a region that changed hands politically several times after World War I. From the eleventh century to 1918, Subcarpathian Rus’ was part of the Hungarian Kingdom; thereafter it was part of Czechoslovakia (1919–1938), Hungary (1938–1944), Ukraine within the Soviet Union (1945–1991), and independent Ukraine (since 1991).
In the period between the early thirteenth century and the mid-eighteenth century, East European acquaintance with and creativity related to Jewish mysticism reflected the impact of Jewish mystical traditions that had originated in other major centers of Jewish culture: Germany, Spain, Italy, and Safed. East European interest in mysticism began in Bohemia and moved slowly eastward until the mid-eighteenth century, at which point the center of creativity in Jewish mystical literature was the eastern part of the region under scrutiny. In Eastern Europe, a minor center of Jewish population in the first centuries of this period, Jews were more receptive to mystical traditions than Jews in other areas of Jewish settlement, and became much more creative, original, and influential at its end. This survey attempts to highlight some main topics of the diverse body of East European Jewish literature that is described in scholarship as (vaguely) mystical, flowering in the different provinces of East European Jewish settlement over six centuries.
Originally the name of comprehensive elementary schools with four classes and a teachers’ seminar, established in the capital city of each province of the Habsburg monarchy in the 1770s. The Normalschulen were distinct from smaller schools (with one to three classes) in towns and villages, known as Hauptschulen and Trivialschulen. The term, however, soon became a synonym for all public schools that taught a modern curriculum, with an emphasis on secular subjects, and that applied a method focusing on an understanding of the subject (Normalmethode) rather than on mechanical repetitions.
Title given to four different Russian Jewish periodicals. The first Razsvet (Dawn) was a weekly published in Odessa from May 1860 to May 1861. The journal’s target audience was Russian maskilim, and its goal, in addition to spreading Haskalah, was to fight for emancipation.
The most prominent dynasty of rashe yeshivot (rectors of Talmudic academies) in modern times. This exceptional Lithuanian Misnagdic family has produced outstanding rabbinical scholars in every generation over the last two centuries. The family traces its ancestry to the close disciple of the Gaon of Vilna, Ḥayim of Volozhin, himself the scion of a long line of rabbis. Inspired by his master, Ḥayim established a yeshiva in 1802 in Volozhin, where he was rabbi. Although yeshivas had flourished in Eastern Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, for various reasons they had all but disappeared during the eighteenth century. The yeshiva in Volozhin marked the beginnings of an efflorescence of Lithuanian yeshivas with which the Soloveichik family is so closely identified.
(1913–2010), Yiddish poet. Born in Smorgon’, a small industrial city southeast of Vilna, Avrom Sutzkever spent his early childhood in Omsk, Siberia, where his parents took refuge from the invading German armies during World War I. Following the death of his father, Sutzkever’s mother, Rayne, resettled the family in Vilna in 1921. Sutzkever attended local heders and the Polish Jewish high school Herzliah, audited university classes in Polish literature, and was introduced by a friend to Russian poetry. His earliest poems were written in Hebrew.
East European Jewish tombstones follow the Ashkenazic pattern that was developed in Central Europe from the eleventh to the fourteenth century. Their most typical traits include vertical position (as opposed to Sephardic tombstones, which usually lie horizontally), rectangular shape, and the prominence of inscription fields. In addition to simple vertical slabs, pseudosarcophagi were popular in some localities in the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries. Beginning in the eighteenth century, some tombs of exceptional scholars, rabbis, or holy men were built with an ohel (lit., tent), a simple structure covering the grave (see image at right). Until the nineteenth century, all tomb inscriptions were written in Hebrew (with some Aramaic barbarisms in the epitaphs of learned elites), although many betray poor knowledge of the language. Hebrew inscriptions were written in square script. Cursive and semicursive script began to appear sporadically only in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and were used for the closing formula (or some part thereof) of the epitaph.
One of the most popular and influential books of East European Jewry—popularly known as the “women’s Bible.” Tsene-rene, composed by Yankev ben Yitskhok Ashkenazi of Janów, took its name from tse’enah u-re’enah benot Tsiyon (“Go forth and look, daughters of Zion”), a phrase from verse 3:11 in the Song of Songs. This phrase adorns the book’s frontispiece, following the actual title, The Pentateuch in the Language of Ashkenaz, with the Five Scrolls and the Haftarahs (the Five Scrolls [Heb., megilot] are Song of Songs, Ruth, Ecclesiastes, Esther, and Lamentations; haftarahs are prophetic portions read liturgically each week). This formulation gave rise to the mistaken conception that the book is a translation into Yiddish (called Taytsh, after the Yiddish word for German) of the biblical books that had become part of Jewish liturgical life. Actually, the book is a Yiddish adaptation of the texts, the nature of which varies from section to section.
Town in the Podlasie province of Poland; known in Yiddish as Tiktin. The first Jews settled in Tykocin in 1522 when the town’s owner, Olbracht Gasztołd, brought in 10 families from Grodno (Hrodna) and permitted them to build a synagogue, establish a cemetery, and practice their trades. In 1537, the original privilege was extended to grant juridical autonomy to the Jewish community. In 1542, ownership of Tykocin passed to the crown, with subsequent kings affirming and extending privileges for Jewish residents in 1576, 1601, 1639, and 1650. In 1661, Stefan Czarniecki assumed the post of starosta (district official), a title that after his death passed to the Branicki family and then to the Potocki and Rostworowski families.
(1890–1967), theater director, historian, critic, and communal activist. Born in Podhajce in eastern Galicia and raised in Stanisławów, Michał Weichert (Mikhl Vaykhert) received his education at heder and in Polish schools. He attended law and humanities programs at universities in Lwów, Vienna (receiving his J.D. in 1916), and Berlin; in the latter city, he studied avant-garde theater with Max Reinhardt. In 1918, Weichert settled in Warsaw.
(Isaak Emmanuilovich Babel’; 1894–1940), Soviet Jewish short-story writer and playwright. Isaac Babel was born in Odessa and brought up in the Russified middle-class family of a dealer in agricultural machinery. Odessa was then a thriving center of modern Jewish culture where writers such as Ḥayim Naḥman Bialik lectured and published. In 1916, Babel met Mendele Moykher-Sforim, the “grandfather” of Yiddish literature. Babel’s love of Yiddish is reflected in the subtext of his Russian prose, as well as in his adaptation of one of the popular folktales about Hershele Ostropolyer, “Shabos-Nakhamu” (1918). It was for love of Yiddish, not just want of money, that Babel wrote the screenplays of Sholem Aleichem’s Menakhem Mendl stories, Evreiskoe schast’e (Jewish Luck; 1925), and a novel, Bluzhdaiushchie zvezdy (Wandering Stars; 1926), and edited two volumes of stories by Sholem Aleichem in Shimon Hecht’s Russian translation (1926). The Zionist and Hebrew influences of his childhood had to be concealed after the Bolshevik Revolution, but the response of the post-Kishinev generation to pogroms and to the decay of shtetl life are evident in Babel’s first published story, “Staryi Shloime” (Old Shloime; 1913), which describes an old man’s suicide after his sons abandon Judaism under socioeconomic pressure.
The Agudas Yisroel network of schools for girls. The first Beys Yankev school was established in Kraków in 1917 by Sarah Schenirer, who sought to fight the spread of secularization and acculturation among Orthodox women—who until then had received no formal Jewish education. The institution, which achieved great success, was supported by Orthodox public figures and was adopted in 1919 by Agudas Yisroel. In 1922, Agudas Yisroel in Poland began to publish a Beys Yankev journal, which spread the idea of establishing girls’ schools to form a national network.
City in the Mogilev province of Belarus. Bobruisk was home to a Jewish population by the end of the sixteenth century. In 1765, 395 Jews were recorded as having paid a poll tax. Bobruisk was incorporated into the Russian Empire in 1793 and in 1808 had 504 Jews.
(also Borochov, Borochow, Boruchow; 1881–1917), pivotal thinker and scholar who in his short life of 36 years founded two distinct fields: Labor Zionism and Yiddish studies. He played the dual roles of theoretician and primary activist in both.
In the early modern period and even more intensely in the nineteenth century, the Jewish population of Eastern Europe grew at a rate faster than that of the non-Jewish populations. Demographers agree that this difference was a consequence, chiefly, of lower rates of infant mortality among Jews. The effect was a continually growing increase in the proportion of young people in the Jewish population. It can be hypothesized that in certain ways, the disparate ideological movements of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, including Hasidism, the new style of yeshivas, the Haskalah and the Musar movement, all of which gained substantial energy and participation from young men under the age of 20, were a consequence of this demographic factor.
Antisemitic campaign that unfolded in the Soviet Union between 1948 and 1953. The so-called Doctors’ Plot has historically been viewed as the culmination of the vicious antisemitic campaign undertaken by Stalin in the final years of his life. Stalin died before the last stage could be completed and since his death much speculation has grown up about his intentions, the extent of the action envisioned against the Jews, and the meaning of the episode in the context of the cold war.
(1891–1967), writer, journalist, and poet. Ilya Ehrenburg was born in Kiev. In 1895, his family was permitted to move to Moscow, where his father managed a brewery. Inspired by his older high school comrade Nikolai Bukharin, Ehrenburg was drawn as a teenager to the Bolshevik underground. Arrested in 1908, Ehrenburg spent five months in a tsarist jail before being released and permitted to travel to France.
City that since 1925 has been the capital of the Austrian federal state of Burgenland; before 1921, the city was under Hungarian rule and was known as Kismarton. Eisenstadt is also referred to as Ash, a Hebrew acrostic for Eisen Stadt.
(1791–1851), Hebrew satire writer, physician, and a leader of the Haskalah movement in Galicia. Yitsḥak Erter was born in the village of Koniuszek in the Premishla (Przemyśl) district of Galicia, and grew up as a Hasid. At age 13 he married a rabbi’s daughter who died six months later. He was married again in 1806, also to the daughter of a rabbi (her name was Ḥayah Sarah) and he moved to his wife’s town of Wielkie Oczy where he was supported by his father-in-law. There, Erter formed a deep bond with the maskil Yosef Tarler (a probable later convert to Christianity), who introduced him to medieval Jewish philosophy and Haskalah literature.
The official newspaper of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee in the USSR, published from 1942 until the committee was liquidated in November 1948. Written in Yiddish, Eynikayt (Unity) produced its first issue on 7 June 1942. In its early stage, the paper resembled a bulletin and appeared just a few times a month. In September 1943 it became a weekly and from February 1945 until its last issue it was issued three times a week. The editor was the committee’s secretary, Shakhne Epstein, followed by G. Zhits, who took over the periodical when Epstein died in 1945. The major Yiddish writers of the Soviet Union served on its editorial board, including Dovid Bergelson, Shmuel Halkin, Leyb Kvitko, and Itsik Fefer. In particular, the poet Fefer contributed frequently; he tried to inspire readers to greater effort and encouraged those in Nazi-occupied territory to resist.
Jewish socialist party, formed in Russia in May 1917 after the February Revolution. The Fareynikte Yidishe Sotsyalistishe Arbeter Partey (United Jewish Socialist Workers Party; the party’s complete name) resulted from the amalgamation of two Jewish socialist parties that had emerged during the Revolution of 1905. The parties had come into being when a number of Po‘ale Tsiyon (Zionist socialist) groups distanced themselves from the authority of the Zionist Organization and adopted a separatist program in response to the Kishinev pogroms of April 1903 and the political furor over the Uganda Plan.
(1818–1890), a leading figure of the Russian Haskalah. Shemu’el Yosef Fuenn (or Fünn) taught at the Vilna Rabbinical Seminary, was founder and editor of the journal Ha-Karmel, and was one of the leaders of the Ḥibat Tsiyon movement.
(1749–1821), Torah scholar and rabbi; founder of the Volozhin yeshiva. Ḥayim was born in Volozhin, where his father, Yitsḥak, was a community leader. Ḥayim studied with Refa’el ha-Kohen and Aryeh Leib, author of Sha’agat Aryeh. At the age of 19, he was introduced to the Vilna Gaon and became his disciple. Six years later, Ḥayim was appointed rabbi of Volozhin, and remained in that position until he died, with the exception of one year (1790), during which he served as the rabbi of Wiłkomierz.
(1874–1958), critic, researcher, and editor. Yosef Klausner was born in Olkeniki, near Vilna. In 1885, his family moved to Odessa and he became involved in the activities of the Ḥibat Tsiyon movement and in organizations promoting Hebrew as a spoken language. In 1893 his first publications addressed both topics—Zionist activism and the revitalization of Hebrew. He then wrote his initial work on literary criticism, on Yehudah Leib Gordon (1894). Between 1897 and 1902, Klausner studied at the University of Heidelberg, simultaneously establishing a reputation as an outstanding critic of renascent Hebrew literature.
(Heb., Maḥazike ha-Dat; Upholders of the Faith), an Orthodox ideological and political organization active in Galicia and Bucovina. After a year of difficult efforts, Makhzikey ha-Das received permission to be formally established in 1878. The primary motivation for the Orthodox to organize was the approval of a new kehiliah statute with a liberal spirit in the city of Lemberg (Lwów) in 1876. Initiated by Shomer Yisra’el—the organization of the liberal Jewish intelligentsia—this statute guaranteed control of the community council to members of means who also had secular education.
Throughout their history, East European Jews have participated in three types of pilgrimages: (1) pilgrimages to pray and petition at cemeteries in various localities of Eastern Europe; (2) pilgrimages by Hasidim to visit their sages, both living and dead; and (3) pilgrimages to the Land of Israel. After World War II, several of the traditional pre-1939 pilgrimages were revived, and various Jewish communities have embarked on new ones.
(1872–1959), Yiddish prose writer and playwright. Dovid Pinksi was born in Mogilev, Belorussia, where he received a traditional and secular education and became acquainted with Russian literature and theater. At age 13, he moved to Moscow and tried his hand at writing in Russian. In 1890–1891, Pinski lived in Vitebsk and was active in the local chapter of Ḥoveve Tsiyon. A year later, on his way to Vienna, hoping to study medicine, Pinski stopped in Warsaw, where he met Y. L. Peretz. Pinski remained in that city from 1892 to 1896. His first pieces in Yiddish were marked by his close collaboration with Peretz and the latter’s circle, who were developing new and radical approaches to modern Yiddish literature in particular, and Jewish culture in general.
Established by members of the Friedman family and consisting of several dozen rebbes (admorim), the Ruzhin (Yid., more properly Rizhin) Hasidic dynasty originated in the town of that name in Kiev province, Russia. It continued to flourish in Sadagora (Sadegere; in Austrian Bukowina) and had many offshoots in Galicia and Romania. In the 1870s, this branch of Hasidism and its unique approach to the religious life were the subject of a fierce controversy because of a ban pronounced on it by Ḥayim Halberstam of Sandz (Nowy Sącz) in 1869. The loyalty of thousands of Ruzhin Hasidim to their leaders was unaffected, however, and the ban’s purpose was not achieved.
(1893–1944), Yiddish fiction writer. Born in Biłgoraj, Lublin province, Israel Joshua Singer was the second child in a family of Yiddish writers that included his elder sister, Esther Singer Kreitman, and his younger brother, Isaac Bashevis Singer. Singer spent much of his childhood in another small town, Leoncin, Warsaw province.
To treat Jewish participation in sporting activities, this entry includes two articles. The first surveys the topic with attention to the relationship between Jewish sporting clubs and political organizations and youth movements. The second focuses on the particular situation of Jewish athletes under the Soviet sports system.
Hebrew publishing house founded in Moscow in 1917 by the patron and literary enthusiast Avraham Yosef Stybel (1885–1946) and journalist Bentsiyon Katz. Literary critic David Frishman, whose aestheticist and westernizing Hebraism influenced Stybel, was editor in chief.
(1870–1936), rabbi, sociologist, and political leader. Ozjasz (Yehoshu‘a) Thon was one of the main initiators and theoreticians of the Zionist movement in Poland. Born in Lwów, he received a traditional education. Thon was fascinated with the Haskalah and joined the Mikra Kodesh society in Lwów, which soon transformed itself into the first Zionist organization in Galicia, renamed Tsiyon.
Established in the mid-seventeenth century in what is now Ukraine, Uman (Pol., Humań) played a prominent role in the economic and political life of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth. When the Haidamaks, who were rebelling against the Polish authorities, attacked the town in 1749, many Jews were killed and their property was plundered. In the 1750s, Count Franciszek Salęzy Potocki rebuilt Uman as a commercial center and allowed some 450 Jews to reside there. Their newfound security was short-lived, however: in 1768, a reinvigorated Haidamak insurrection under the leadership of a Zaporozhian Cossack, Maksim Zhelezniak, devastated numerous Ukrainian towns and estates.
(1796–1850), Hasidic leader and tsadik. Famed for his eccentric personality, Yisra’el Friedman of Ruzhin (Yid., more properly Rizhin) presided over a Hasidic court whose opulence and wealth rivaled that of Polish nobility. The dramatic events in which he was involved—imprisonment on suspicion of aiding and abetting the violent murder of informers, flight from Russia to Austria—made him a legend in his own lifetime, revered by his followers but despised and ridiculed by his opponents, mainly maskilim. Descended from a distinguished Hasidic family (his great-grandfather was Dov Ber, the Magid of Mezritsh) that claimed descent from King David, and possessing exceptional religious charisma, sharp natural intelligence, and organizational talents, he was not only one of the most prominent and impressive Hasidic leaders in the period of the greatest growth of Hasidism, but also the founder of a new style of Hasidism known as the “regal way.”
An approbation or haskamah (Heb., lit., “agreement” or “approval”; pl., haskamot) is an endorsement or expression of approval of the contents of a book intended for publication, usually placed near the beginning of the text. The practice of publishing haskamot arose from diverse and sometimes overlapping motivations notably as a consequence of efforts by Italian Jewish communal governments to avoid conflict with the church. There were independent motivations as well. Thus, some early haskamot sought to establish a form of copyright protecting the author or the printer. Haskamot endorsed and praised books and their authors, which increased their appeal to potential purchasers. Present from the beginning of printing in Eastern Europe, haskamot were the fruit of negotiations involving printers, authors, and endorsers.
Hundreds of state and local archives throughout Eastern Europe hold millions of documents that reflect the experience of Jews over many centuries. With the collapse of the Soviet Union and other East European Communist regimes, government archives became more accessible. Although it is true that numerous documents were lost during World War II, the documents that still exist are enormously rich and valuable. Particularly with the case of the former Soviet Union, the data remain largely unexplored by researchers interested in Jewish history.
The Jewish armed resistance movement during the Holocaust (1939–1945) was an unprecedented phenomenon. The enslaved Jewish population, facing annihilation, had no effective means to fight off their aggressors. Thus the Jewish armed underground organizations in dozens of East European ghettos did not see armed resistance primarily as a way to save lives. Instead, they sought what they regarded as the most honorable death possible. Even if their armed struggle was only symbolic, the Nazi murder campaign demanded active response.
Town in northeast Romania in the area of the former principality of Moldova; administrative center of the county that shares its name. At the beginning of the seventeenth century, Jewish merchants were already present in Botoşani, (Yid., Botoshan), known for its fairs and located at the crossroads of economic routes from Poland to the Danube. Jewish numbers increased as a result of emigration from Galicia and Ukraine. This tendency was stimulated by the geographic location of the town, which permitted trade with both Bucovina and Bessarabia, as well as by the relative religious tolerance prevailing in Moldova.
(1890–1956), Yiddish poet and playwright. The son of a well-to-do businessman, Moscow-born Moyshe Broderzon and his family were among the Jews expelled from that city in 1891. His father moved to Łódź but Broderzon’s mother and the children went to Nesivizh (Pol., Nieśwież), her native town in Belorussia. In 1900, the family was reunited in Łódź. Broderzon studied accounting at a business school there and worked in that field for several years after 1907. He also wrote poems in Russian, though these pieces were not printed. In 1908, he began to write in Yiddish and published humorous skits in the Lodzer tageblat, under the pseudonym Broder Zinger.
The role played by moneylending, relative to other Jewish occupations, fluctuated with the times in Eastern Europe. Until the middle of the fifteenth century, moneylending was by far the most dominant profession in which Polish Jews, for example, were employed, as members of the aristocracy would use the services of Jews as sources for both income and credit. The public’s attitude toward these lenders was ambivalent. On the one hand, lenders were always in demand, thanks to their ability to help those in need of a loan; on the other hand, they aroused feelings of tension and of discord by the very fact that they demanded repayments of loans, and profited by collecting interest (or, as it was sometimes disparagingly referred to, usury).
(Rus., kazennyi ravvin; Yid., rabiner; Ger., Staatsrabbiner; Heb., rav mi-ta‘am). The crown rabbis of late imperial Russia held the government-mandated designation of rabbi, but their functions as record keepers, Russian administrative representatives, and sometimes Jewish communal (but secular) leaders belied the religious title. Historical research into Russian Jewry is still uncovering the precise nature of their leadership, in its variegated forms.
(1541–1613), chronicler, astronomer, mathematician, and teacher. David Gans was born into a well-to-do merchant family in Westphalia. As a youth he studied with Mosheh Isserles, the renowned head of the Kraków yeshiva. Gans moved to Prague in 1564, where he continued his studies with Sinai ben Betsal’el, the brother of Maharal of Prague, and was associated with the latter as well.
The social and hierarchical construction of the differences between the sexes, gender is also a way of signifying relationships of power. Historically, gender has generally been perceived in binary terms, with masculine traits privileged over feminine ones. Every society is gendered, with different expectations for the social roles of members of each sex; gender prescriptions are also tied to social class, religion, and geographical location, and vary with time. Although gender prescriptions powerfully shape individuals’ behavior, social and economic needs often lead to a relaxation of sharply delineated gender norms.
A scholarly institution attached to the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences and specializing in Jewish studies, the Institute of Jewish Proletarian Culture (Rus., Institut Evreiskoi Proletarskoi Kul’tury; IEPK) was founded in 1929 as a reorganization of the academy’s Chair (Department) of Jewish Culture. The initiative for the creation of the chair had come from high party circles and was supported by UkrNauka, the government department that supervised the work of scholarly institutions in Ukraine in the 1920s and 1930s.
Institute for Jewish Proletarian Culture
(Yid., Kielts), city in southeastern Poland. Until the end of the eighteenth century, Kielce belonged to the bishops of Kraków, who forbade Jews to settle there. The partitions of Poland brought the city under Russian rule. Although Kielce’s residents maintained contact with Jewish traders in neighboring towns, Jews were not allowed to settle. Nevertheless, beginning in 1833 Jews began to move into Kielce. By 1860, some 31 Jewish families, who formed a branch of the Jewish community of Chęciny, lived in the city. Two years later, Alexander II allowed Jews to settle freely in places previously closed to them, including Kielce. No large influx of Jews into Kielce occurred, however, until some decades later. In 1870, the Jewish population of Kielce numbered 992, though by 1897 it had risen to 6,137 (representing 30.2% of the city’s population).
The Yiddish term kloyz (pl., kloyzn) is apparently derived from the Latin claustrum or clausum, which refers to a building or closed complex of structures connected to a monastery. The term first appeared in Ashkenazic culture in the sixteenth century and referred to a house where scholars assembled—a place of study intended for mature, adult male scholars. By the second half of the seventeenth century, there were kloyzn in many centers of both Western and Eastern Europe. The term had by then gradually come to refer to a private house of study, existing separately from the institutions of the community and financed by a patron or a wealthy family.
(ca. 1740–1809), rabbi, Hasidic leader, and Jewish folk hero. Levi Yitsḥak ben Me’ir of Barditshev (Rus., Berdichev; mod. Ukr. Berdychiv) was a major figure within the circle of disciples around Dov Ber, the Magid of Mezritsh, and played a central role in the dissemination and defense of Hasidism in the third generation of the movement’s leadership.
Levi Yitsḥak ben Me’ir (later of Berdichev)
A city on the Styr’ River (a tributary of the Pripiat’), Luts’k (Pol., Łuck; Rus., Lutsk) is the administrative center of Ukraine’s Volyn’ oblast. Mentioned in the Ruthenian Chronicles of 1085, from 1320 it belonged to the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, from 1569 to 1795 it was a district center of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, and from 1796 of the Russian Empire. Between 1921 and 1939 it was the provincial center of Volhynia in independent Poland.
The Romanian name for the historic region between the Carpathian Mountains and the Dniester River, also known by its Russian name, Moldavia. The principality was divided along the Prut River in 1812, when Russia seized the eastern portion, Bessarabia; the western portion forms part of the modern state of Romania [see Moldavia]. Moldova became an independent state in August 1991, succeeding the Soviet Socialist Republic of Moldavia [see Union of Soviet Socialist Republics], which included Bessarabia and Transnistria. The latter region, dominated by a Slavic population, has been under the control of a breakaway government since 1990. (Transnistria is also the name given during World War II to a Ukrainian region to which many Jews, especially from Bucovina and Bessarabia, were deported.)
Modern Yiddish theater, as conceived by Avrom Goldfadn (1840–1908) in the 1870s, was above all a musical theater, and operetta was doubtless its dominant genre. This musical theater accommodated not only the tastes of the audiences but also the skills of aspiring performers—who, in the early years, joined theatrical troupes on the strength of their singing rather than their acting. As a central element of East European Jewish culture, music suffused everyday life—and Jewish musical culture was highly eclectic: it often appropriated and blended sacred and secular strains, Jewish and non-Jewish elements, and folk and art music. The Yiddish operetta was built on this musical culture and presented it in a new, theatrical form.
Secular Jewish figures active in nineteenth-century Russia. Simḥah Pinsker (1801–1864) was an educator and translator of Karaite documents; his son Lev (often Yehudah Leib or Leon; 1821–1891) was a leader of the Ḥibat Tsiyon movement.
Hebrew poetry in Eastern Europe emerged in a direct line from works written at the end of the eighteenth century in German Haskalah centers where Hebrew literature had first taken form. Naftali Herts Wessely, the most prominent Haskalah poet in Germany, exerted a pronounced influence on the genre; his Shire tif’eret (Songs of Praise; first composed in 1789) was a large-scale poetical epic paraphrasing the life of Moses through the time of the Exodus from Egypt, and described the giving of the Torah.
(1879–1933), linguist, literary historian, and political activist. Born in Rovno (mod. Rivne) to a prosperous family, Nokhem Shtif received both a Jewish and a secular education. Even as a student at a Russian secondary school and, later, at Kiev Polytechnic University (where he was enrolled between 1899 and 1903), he continued studying religious and modern Hebrew literature. He was the cofounder of a Zionist student group, Molodoi Izrail’ (Young Israel), and also participated in the 1902 Minsk Zionist Conference.
In about the year 1881, Natan Tsevi Finkel founded a novel type of yeshiva in Slobodka, a suburb of Kovno. This yeshiva quickly became well known, and after the closing of the Volozhin yeshiva in 1892, it acquired an even more prominent role among Lithuanian yeshivas. Finkel was a student of Yisra’el Salanter and an adherent of the Musar movement. This movement held that the study of Talmud had to be accompanied by the systematic study of ethics, and that the goal of yeshiva study was not only to produce trained Talmudists but also to turn out highly ethical young men. The approach appealed to many young people who were sensitive to the criticism of maskilim and other modernists who claimed that study in yeshivas meant investing one’s time in hair-splitting dialectics.
(Vsesoiuznoe Obshchestvo po Zemel’nomu Ustroistvu Trudiashchikhsia Evreev v SSSR [All-Union Association for the Agricultural Settlement of Jewish Workers in the USSR], best known by its abbreviation OZET; Yid., GEZERD). Established in January 1925 in Moscow, OZET was headed by Iurii Larin (1882–1932) and his deputy Abram Bragin (1893–?). According to OZET’s charter, membership was open to individuals over 18 provided they had no criminal record as well as to groups with the exception of religious associations and political parties (e.g., He-Ḥaluts, Po‘ale Tsiyon). Initially, OZET’s main assignments were to publicize inside and outside the USSR the plans of Komitet po Zemel’nomu Ustroistvu Evreev (the State Committee for Settling Jews on the Land; KOMZET) to foster Jewish agriculture, and to collect funds for implementing those plans.
Society for the Settlement of Jewish Toilers on the Land
Society for Settlement of Jewish Toilers on the Land
(1879–1940), revolutionary and central figure in Soviet and world communism. Leon Trotsky, originally Lev Davidovich Bronshtein, was born in Kherson province, and was the son of a well-to-do tenant farmer who later became a major landowner. Trotsky received his earliest education in a heder, though he spent just several months there. After attending elementary school in Odessa, he graduated from secondary school in Nikolaev in 1896.
(Vilna Troupe), celebrated and critically acclaimed Polish Yiddish theater company. Soon after the Germans occupied Vilna in 1915, they lifted tsarist restrictions against staging Yiddish theater. With the support of local Jewish communal leaders and some German officers of Jewish origin, a group of young actors, primarily amateurs but including several professional performers from the Russian stage, decided to establish a purely literary Yiddish company. Only professional Yiddish actors could apply for a permit to perform Yiddish theater, so the group invited Matisyohu Kovalski (Koval; 1880–1936), apparently the only professional Yiddish actor then in Vilna, to join them.
The blood libel was an accusation of Jewish “ritual murder,” which held that Jews kidnapped and murdered innocent Christians (particularly young boys) in order to make use of the blood of their victims for purposes of Jewish religious ritual. It had important historical and thematic connections to the accusation that Jews bought or stole consecrated Eucharist wafers (Hosts) in order to pierce them with sharp objects, thereby both desecrating them and subjecting them to torture. Both forms of anti-Jewish discourse derived ultimately from medieval Christian convictions that salvation could be obtained only through the blood of Christ.
Blood Libels and Host Desecration Accusations
Popular customs and practices regarding circumcision (Yid., bris; Heb., berit milah) seem to have been fairly consistent within the East European Jewish community, both Hasidic and Misnagdic, although there were some regional variations as to details. Through out the days leading up to the bris, care was taken to prevent the demon Lilith from taking the child: schoolboys were brought to recite the Shema‘ prayer every night (for which they were rewarded with sweets), and amulets were placed in the room with the child. The night before the ceremony was to take place, a special vigil (vakhtnakht) was kept. Candles were lit throughout the house. After a special meal (se‘udah), the men present recited psalms and studied Torah until midnight. The ritual circumciser (mohel) who was to perform the ceremony would also be present and would sometimes leave his circumcision knife under the mother’s pillow. All would recite the Shema‘ before leaving.
(1807/14?–1893), the first professional and best-selling Yiddish author. Born in Vilna, Ayzik Meyer Dik (generally known by his pseudonym Amad) received a traditional Jewish education and married young, settling in the Lithuanian town of Zupran where he lived a rowdy life. (Although probably born in 1807, Dik himself gave the year 1814, perhaps to avoid military conscription.) When his first wife died childless, he married the daughter of a wealthy Hasid from Nesvizh (Nezyvius) who supported the couple despite Dik’s aversion to Hasidism. Dik considered both Hasidism and lack of Western education to be the most destructive influences on the advancement of the Jews of Eastern Europe.
Yiddish social and political newspaper published from 8 March 1918 until 14 September 1938, first in Petrograd and then in Moscow. Known as Di varhayt (The Truth) until 7 August 1918, Der emes (The Truth) was the leading Yiddish newspaper in the Soviet Union in its day. It was at first the organ of the Jewish SDs (Social Democrats), Bolsheviks, and Leftist SRs (Socialist Revolutionaries); from 2 June 1918 of the Bolsheviks only. From 7 November 1920 to 9 March 1930 it was the organ of the Evsektsiia (the Jewish Section of the Russian Communist Party).
(1900–1952), Yiddish poet. Born in Shpola, Ukraine, Itsik Fefer was 12 years old when he began to work at a printing shop. In 1917 he joined the Bund and became a trade union activist. A Communist from 1919, he served in the Red Army. He began writing poems in 1918, and in 1922 joined Vidervuks (New Growth) in Kiev, a group of young Yiddish literati whose mentor was Dovid Hofshteyn. That same year, the appearance of Fefer’s small collection Shpener (Splinters) established him as a rising literary star. His poetry amalgamated the Kultur-lige poets’ revolutionary romanticism with the propagandist objectives of the workers’ movement.
(1881–1958), Hebrew poet, critic, and editor. Born in Beltsy (Bălți), Bessarabia, Ya‘akov Fichmann received a traditional and secular education, and was well versed in Hebrew maskilic writing as well as Yiddish, Russian, and German literature. The rural landscape of his childhood village remained an integral part of his imagination for the rest of his life.
(1879–1970), Polish Jewish political leader and journalist. Yitsḥak Grünbaum was born in Warsaw, received a traditional Jewish education, and graduated from a high school in Płońsk. He became an active Zionist during his years in high school. He opposed Herzl’s Uganda plan, and demanded that Zionists pay greater attention to the day-to-day needs of Diaspora Jewry and commit themselves to the struggle for civil and national rights in the Russian and Austro-Hungarian Empires. This view, known as Gegenwartsarbeit (work for the present), was incorporated in the Russian Zionist Federation’s Helsingfors Program (1906), of which Grünbaum was a major architect. He served as secretary-general of the Russian Zionist Federation (1908–1910), deputy editor of the World Zionist Organization’s Hebrew weekly, Ha-‘Olam (1909–1914), and editor of the Zionist daily Petrograder togblat (1914).
City in southeastern Belarus on the right bank of the Sozh River. The origins of Jewish settlement in Homel’ (Rus., Gomel’; sometimes Homiyah in Jewish sources) are obscure but date after the annexation of the town to Lithuania in 1537. Contemporary chroniclers first described the town in relation to the Khmel’nyts’kyi uprising in 1648, when many wealthy Jews from Ukraine fled to Homel’ for safety. The head of the fortified town allowed peasant rioters to massacre a large number of Jews. Poles reasserted their authority in Homel’ in 1665, and in 1765 the community reported 685 Jewish families.
(Formerly Stanyslaviv; Pol., Stanisławów; Ger., Stanislau; Rus., Stanislav), city in Ukraine. Jews first settled in Stanisławów just after its establishment in 1654; provisions for the community’s autonomy were guaranteed by the town’s owner in 1662. By 1736, Jews constituted 1,470 of the town’s 3,321 inhabitants, working primarily as leaseholders, artisans, and merchants, the latter in competition with local Armenians throughout the Polish period. In 1772, the city was incorporated into the new province of Galicia in the Austrian Empire.
(Pol., Kamieniec Podolski; Rus., Kamenets Podol’skii), city on the Smotrich River (a tributary of the Dniester) and district center of the Khmel’nyts’kyi region of Ukraine. In the 1430s the town passed from the Grand Duchy of Lithuania to Poland; from 1569 to 1792 it was the center of the Podolia province of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, though in 1672–1699 it was the center of the Kamenets province of the Ottoman Empire. From 1793 it was the center of the Podolian region of the Russian Empire, and from 1920 of the Soviet Union.
Hebrew-language publication, issued between 1833 and 1843, and again in 1854 and 1856. A Haskalah periodical, Kerem ḥemed (Vineyard of Delight) was intended to be issued annually. Shemu’el Leib Goldenberg (1807–1847) edited the first seven issues, publishing the first two in Vienna and the next five in Prague. Shneur Sachs (1815–1892) edited the final two, printing them in Berlin after a long respite, and renaming the periodical Kerem ḥemed: Neta‘ ḥadash (Vineyard of Delight: New Seedling).
(1875–1937), Yiddish publisher. Born in Horodishche (now in Belarus), Boris Kletskin and his family moved to Vilna, the city with which his name would thereafter be associated. An only child of wealthy parents, he received a traditional religious education and was also tutored in secular subjects.
With the onset of the modern period, parody became a quantitatively significant component within the genre of Jewish satire. The genre of parody was used to comment on a wide variety of themes connected to Jewish life, including Hasidism, socialism, Zionism, and socioeconomic issues. The majority of Hebrew and Yiddish parodies produced in Eastern Europe were imitative, in that they borrowed structures and language from well-known texts in order to comment on or mock unrelated topics, and did not attack the original, structural works. One of the earliest known parodies to appear in Eastern Europe was the Sefer ha-kundes (Book of the Prankster; 1824), a comic manual for pranksters based on the style of the Shulḥan ‘arukh. Published in Vilna, and commenting on the number of young pranksters there, this book was banned by the administrators of Vilna’s Jewish community, who collected all known copies and burned them, leaving only a small number to survive.
(Ger., Prossnitz), manufacturing town in the fertile Hána region of Moravia, in today’s Czech Republic. Known as Jerusalem of the Hána, the Prostějov Jewish community, which was founded in the second half of the fifteenth century by Jews who had been expelled from Olomouc (Olmutz) in 1454, remained the second largest community in Moravia until the second half of the nineteenth century, rivaled only by Mikulov (Nikolsburg).
City in the Mazovia province of southeast Poland, established in about 1350. A reference to a “Jewish” street in the town comes from documents dated 1567. In 1724, a Jew was accused of blasphemy and burned at the stake, and Radom’s Catholic population subsequently obtained the privilege de non tolerandis Judaeis from the king, forbidding Jewish residence in the city. For breaking this prohibition, a royal court in 1746 fined Radom’s Jews 1,000 grzywien and ordered their complete expulsion. Jews soon managed to return, however, and established a community. In 1789 the town’s Catholic residents agreed to further Jewish settlement in exchange for a monopoly on trade in salt. At the time, perhaps 100 Jews resided in Radom, with approximately 300 others in nearby villages.
(1886–1959), Hebrew and Yiddish poet and novelist. A scion of the Shneerson dynasty that has led the Lubavitch Hasidic movement since its inception, Zalman (Zalkind) Shneour was born to a middle-class, somewhat traditional family in the Belorussian town of Shklov, a center of Jewish learning, of Lubavitch Hasidism, and of the Haskalah. His childhood (which he colorfully evoked in his novella cycle Shklover yidn [Jews of Shklov; 1929]) was not a happy one. A recipient of a traditional heder education with the addition of some tutoring in modern secular studies (including Russian and modern Hebrew), Shneour became, from a very early age, an avid reader of Hebrew literature. This was definitely not encouraged by his parents, who wished to see him turn his attention to a practical career in commerce.
The Talmud was a central focus of the education of males from the beginning of Jewish settlement in Europe. Boys generally began studying Talmud somewhere between the ages of 8 and 10 (occasionally earlier), after completing an elementary course in the study of the Torah, generally lasting three years. While most students completed their studies around the age of 14, the most promising students, if they had sufficient financial wherewithal, would go on to study in a yeshiva, sometimes for an extended period. As Jews began to move east in large numbers (starting at the end of the fifteenth century and extending into the early sixteenth), they brought with them the same commitment to the study of the Talmud; it was the central focus of all educational efforts, from the most elementary to the most advanced.
(1874–1952), chemist, president of the World Zionist Organization, and first president of the State of Israel. Born in Motol, Russia, Chaim Weizmann received a typical Jewish education from a private tutor (melamed) and later went to high school in nearby Pinsk. On graduation he went to university in Darmstadt and Berlin, receiving a doctorate from the University of Fribourg, in Switzerland, in 1898. Weizmann was initially a practical and cultural Zionist. At the Eighth Zionist Congress in 1907, however, he proclaimed a new position, known as Synthetic Zionism, a form followed in later years by many other East European Zionists. This new approach meant a pragmatic attitude toward the three classic trends in Zionist thought—political, spiritual, and practical—aiming to integrate all three while giving preference to the one or the other, according to circumstances. Cultural activities were particularly dear to Weizmann: in 1913, 1918, and 1925 he participated in steps that ultimately brought about the establishment of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and in the 1930s he initiated a scientific institute that later became the Weizmann Institute of Science in Reḥovot, Israel. Nevertheless, from 1917 on, Weizmann also embraced political Zionism.
The general scholarly consensus has, until recently, held that autobiography is essentially foreign to the communal orientation of traditional Jewish literature and mentality. According to this school of thought, Jewish autobiography is viewed as an exclusively modern phenomenon deriving from those whose attachments to Jewish tradition have been attenuated or severed. The great majority of Jewish autobiographies of pre-Rousseauian origin are indeed best viewed as texts that include autobiographical elements, rather than as autobiography proper. A discussion of Jewish autobiographies must focus largely upon Hebrew and Yiddish texts because those written by East European Jews in German and the Slavic languages belong, with rare exceptions, more comfortably to the literary environment of those languages, rather than to the sphere of Jewish literature. The great exception is the first Rousseau-style autobiography of an East European Jew, Salomon Maimon, which was written in German. Maimon, however, was a trailblazer and, in his day, egregious in almost every respect; moreover, at the time in which he composed his autobiography, any form of secular literature in Hebrew, let alone Yiddish, was virtually nonexistent.
Hebrew acronym for Berit Yosef Trumpeldor (Joseph Trumpeldor Alliance), a youth movement founded in Riga in 1923 by Aharon Propes. Conceived as a small-scale local organization, during its early years Betar’s ideological platform was somewhat vague, concerned chiefly with reviving the idea of the Jewish legions that had operated during World War I.
Former Polish royal town, now in the province of Lublin. According to local tradition, the Jews of Chełm (Yid., Khelem) were granted their first privilege by King Władisław Jagiełło, though tombstones once thought to be from the fifteenth century are now considered of a later date. Hence, while earlier settlement is very probable, a Jewish community is known to have been in Chełm from the beginning of the sixteenth century; a synagogue functioned in 1580.
The first international conference in support of the Yiddish language. An international conference on Yiddish language and its role in Jewish life was convened from 30 August to 4 September 1908 in Czernowitz, then capital of the Austrian crown province of Bukowina (now Chernivtsi in Ukraine). (Czernowitz was the German form of the city’s name used at that time; the Yiddish Tshernovits is increasingly used in scholarly literature on the conference.) Occurring at a time when more than a dozen other languages on three continents were also organizing their own “first” conferences (usually under non- or even antigovernmental auspices), the Czernowitz Conference was the brainchild of Nathan Birnbaum (1864–1937), a prolific, innovative, and peripatetic Jewish educator, essayist, philosopher, politician, and social organizer.
(1883–1953), Soviet Yiddish literary author, critic, and scholar. Born in a village in Chernigov guberniia, Ukraine, to the family of a timber merchant, Yekhezkl Dobrushin received a private Jewish and Russian education at home. Between 1902 and 1909, he lived in Paris, where he studied law at the Sorbonne and was active in the socialist Zionist movement. After recovering from an illness that had confined him to bed for several years, he published his first collection of poetry and short plays, Benkende neshomes (Longing Souls) in 1912; other publications soon followed. In 1916, Dobrushin settled in Kiev and his articles and poetry appeared in various Hebrew and Yiddish periodicals. During the civil war, he edited and contributed to the publications of the Kultur-lige. In 1920, he moved to Moscow, where he coedited the magazine Shtrom and other Soviet Yiddish periodicals.
(1879–1913), Hebrew and Yiddish writer and translator. Born in Starodub, Ukraine, Uri Gnessin belonged to a generation of Hebrew writers who disagreed with the criticism of traditional Judaism by Haskalah writers. When Gnessin was nine years old, his family moved to Pochep, where his father served as the town’s rabbi (both Gnessin’s father and grandfather were Hasidic rabbis). Gnessin was a brilliant student, teaching himself Russian, French, German, and Latin as well as philosophy, history, and other nonreligious disciplines. At the Pochep yeshiva, he formed a friendship with Yosef Ḥayim Brenner, and together they edited a journal in which Gnessin published his first poems and feuilletons. At the age of 14, he was already writing reports from Pochep for the Hebrew daily Ha-Melits.
One of the largest and most prominent Ashkenazic families that has thrived since the fifteenth century. The Horowitz family is made up of Levites who took their name from the small town of Horovice in Bohemia; they dominated the Prague community in the sixteenth century and formed marriage alliances with other prestigious families. The Horowitz family preserved a tradition claiming that its roots went back to the so-called Golden Age of Jewish culture in medieval Spain; the name of Rabbi Zeraḥyah ha-Levi Gerondi (ca. 1115–1186) was sometimes specifically mentioned. They reached Eastern Europe after the expulsion from Spain, and produced numerous rabbis and leaders and, later, writers of the Enlightenment, scholars, musicians, and scientists. Karl Marx was one of its descendants.
Shabetai Sheftel ben Yesha‘yahu Horowitz
Polish-language Zionist daily published in Warsaw. Nasz Przegląd (Our Review) published a total of 8,962 issues between March 1923 and September 1939, with circulation estimates varying from 20,000 to 50,000. The paper’s key executives included Saul Wagman, Daniel Rosencwajg, Jakub Appenszlak, and Samuel Hirschhorn.
(1876–1927), Hebrew and Yiddish essayist and short-story writer; political and social activist. Born in Mszczonów and raised in a strict Hasidic milieu, Hersh Dovid Nomberg moved to Warsaw at age 21 to gain a secular education; he settled there with the help of a socialist organization. Nomberg taught himself Russian, Polish, and German and experienced a philosophical crisis as a result of his encounter with Haskalah and European literature. Convinced that Orthodoxy was outmoded, he chose a bohemian lifestyle and left his wife and young son.
Like secular Jewish literature, Russian literature invented itself relatively late. The eighteenth-century aristocrats who sought to create a national literature in Russian faced language problems (they spoke, by preference, French) and the necessity of imitating European models. The Russian apprenticeship, like the Jewish one a century later, ended quickly and permanently. By the early nineteenth century, Russian pupils had turned into masters whose works, no longer derivative, resonated across Europe.
(1894–1953), poet, satirist, translator, and editor. Born in Łódź into an assimilated family, Julian Tuwim was the grandson of Leon Krukowski, the publisher of Dziennik Łódzki. In 1916, Tuwim moved to Warsaw, where he studied law and philosophy. One of the most popular Polish interwar poets, he belonged both to the innovative group Skamander, which helped revitalize Polish poetry after 1918, and to the prestigious literary circle around the journal Wiadomości Literackie. Successfully combining intellectual and popular literature, Tuwim excelled in several fields: he was an outstanding lyricist and political satirist, and he also wrote poetry for children, texts of songs, operetta librettos, theater adaptations, and texts for cabaret. After World War II, which he spent in exile in the United States, he returned to Poland in 1946.
(1816–1893), editor and journalist. Aleksander Zederbaum was born in Zamość, Poland. After marrying in 1835, he moved to Lublin, and then in 1840 to Odessa, where he initially worked as a bookkeeper. He soon became a tailor and opened his own shop. In Odessa, Zederbaum associated with local maskilim, was involved in community affairs, and helped to found a school for adults. With Aharon Yitsḥak Goldenblum, he founded Ha-Melits (The Advocate), the first Hebrew weekly periodical in tsarist Russia (eventually it became a daily). The first issue appeared on 11 October 1860, and Zederbaum remained as the paper’s publisher and editor for the rest of his life. In 1871, he moved with the editorial offices to Saint Petersburg.
Jews played a prominent role in the Communist Party from its inception: it came into being as the Bolshevik faction of the Russian Social Democratic Workers Party (RSDWP) in 1903, becoming the Russian Communist Party (of Bolsheviks; RCP[b]) in 1918, the All-Union Communist Party (of Bolsheviks; AUCP[b]) in 1925, and the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) in 1952.
(Rus. and Yid., Dvinsk; Ger., Dünaburg; among Jews, also called Dinaburg), largest town in southeastern Latvia. Daugavpils, founded in the thirteenth century, became a district capital in the nineteenth century. Jews settled in the town in the mid-1770s. Throughout the nineteenth century and up to World War I, Jews constituted 50 percent of Dvinsk’s total population (increasing from about 1,500 persons in 1800 to about 56,000 by 1914). They lived mainly in the Altstadt, Plan, and Plezer quarters.
(ca. 1694–1764), one of the foremost and certainly the most controversial rabbinical figure of his generation. Born in Kraków, Yonatan Eybeschütz moved about 1700 to the Moravian community of Eibenschütz, where his father, Natan Note, was appointed rabbi. His father died within a year and the young orphan, who soon became widely acknowledged as a child prodigy, came under the wing of Me’ir Eisenstadt, the rabbi of Prossnitz (Prostějov). In 1711, Eybeschütz married into the Spira family, which held various rabbinical and lay leadership positions throughout the empire. Eybeschütz proved to be a very talented preacher, and was appointed to a position in Prague. Later he was chosen to head a private yeshiva.
(Ger., Danzig), port city, center of trade and industry on the Baltic. Gdańsk was a Hanseatic port in Royal Prussia and became the capital of Westpreussen (West Prussia) during the nineteenth century. From 1920 to 1939, it was known as the Danzig Free City (under the protection of the League of Nations), and since 1945, it has served as the capital of the Gdańsk Województwo in the Republic of Poland.
(1578–1654), Talmudic scholar. Born in Wallerstein, North Swabia, Yom Tov Lipmann Heller was a disciple of Maharal of Prague. A member of the rabbinic court of that city from about 1598 to 1624, Heller held the posts of rabbi of Nikolsburg (1624–1625), Vienna (1625–1627), Prague (1627–1629), Niemirów (1631–1634), Włodzimierz (mod. Ukr., Volodymyr Volyns’kyi; 1634–1643), and Kraków (1643–1654).
(Ger., Königsberg, Rus., Kenigsberg, Pol., Królewiec, Yid., Kenigsberg), former capital of the Prussian province of East Prussia, and today capital of the Russian-administered Kaliningrad District (Kaliningradskaia Oblast’). Its geographic proximity to Poland and Russia made Kaliningrad an important hub of trade between eastern and western parts of Europe and so it was home to a large number of East European Jewish merchants. It also served as an important conduit for connections between Central and East European Jewish society and culture.
A Prussian town until 1921, Katowice (Ger., Kattowitz) is now the capital city of the southern Polish province of Silesia. Although Jews were noted in the region as far back as 1733, the first Jews to settle in the village itself arrived in 1825.
(1794–1878), maskil, biblical commentator, poet, and playwright. Born in Vilna, Avraham Dov Lebensohn (known by the pseudonym Adam ha-Kohen [also rendered Hakohen]) married a girl from Mikhailishok in northern Belorussia (now Mikaliskis, Lith.) when he was 13. He lived there for eight years, engaging in traditional religious studies but also teaching himself the Hebrew language and its grammar. In 1815, he moved to nearby Oshmyany, where he worked in commerce and continued to expand his knowledge of Hebrew. Known for his expertise in Jewish law, he was asked on occasion to join the local rabbinical court.
The belief in a coming era of ultimate justice and world peace inaugurated by a redeemer who will liberate Jews from their exilic state, a principle of Jewish faith since classical times. Premodern expressions of Jewish messianism include analysis of classical prooftexts or astronomical portents to predict the date or contours of the messianic age; literary apocalyptic writings initiating spiritual, quasi-military, or political actions to pave the way for the messianic era; and fixing on a particular individual as the awaited messiah.
(Pol., Ostróg; Yid., Ostre), town on the Goryn’ River (a tributary of the Pripyat’), a district center of Ukraine’s Rovno region. From the 1320s, Ostróg was part of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, and from 1569 it belonged to the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth. After 1793, it was in the Russian Empire, from 1796 a district center of Vohlin region; in 1921 it reverted to Poland and remained a part of that country until 1939.
(Melekh Ravitsh; pseudonym of Zekharye-Khone Bergner; 1893–1976); Yiddish poet, essayist, playwright, and cultural activist. Melech Ravitch was born in Radymno, eastern Galicia, into a home where the main spoken languages were Polish and German. Ravitch received a secular general education, including business school, as well as a limited traditional Jewish education. Influenced by the Czernowitz Language Conference, he began to write in Yiddish; his initial pieces appeared in 1910 in Yiddish publications in Galicia. He lived in Lemberg and Vienna, where he worked in a bank, and during World War I served in the army.
Led by the Halberstam family and including many dozens of tsadikim and subdynasties, the Sandz Hasidic dynasty was founded in the mid-nineteenth century in Nowy Sącz (Hasidim always refer to the place as Tsanz) in western Galicia, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Many offshoots of the dynasty are still active today.
(1888–1970), Hebrew writer; Nobel laureate in literature. Shemu’el Yosef Agnon (formerly Czaczkes) was born in Buczacz, a small town in eastern Galicia, then under Austro-Hungarian rule. He left his hometown permanently when he was 20, but Buczacz and Galicia had a place in his literary work for the rest of his life. “Although forty years had passed since Dr. Langsam had left his birthplace, he still talked about it all the time,” says Agnon, as if describing himself but referring to one of the characters in his novel Sipur pashut (A Simple Story; 1935).
From 1912 to 1914, S. An-ski (Shloyme Zaynvl Rapoport) headed ethnographic expeditions to the Pale of Jewish Settlement. After a limited display of the expeditionary collection in 1914, it was exhibited at the Jewish Museum in Saint Petersburg, which opened briefly in 1917, and then again in 1923, only to be closed in 1929. In 2000, most of the remaining artifacts were located at the Russian Museum of Ethnography in Saint Petersburg, while most of the manuscripts and audio recordings were held in Kiev, at the Vernadskii National Library of Ukraine.
An-ski Ethnographic Expedition and Museum
Jewish Historical-Ethnographic Expedition
A Hasidic sect originally located in the town of Belz (Pol., Bełz) in eastern Galicia. The Belz Hasidic Dynasty was founded by Rabbi Shalom Rokeaḥ (1783–1855), a devoted disciple of Ya‘akov Yitsḥak Horowitz, the so-called Seer of Lublin. Rokeaḥ established his famous court in Belz around 1817, attracting many followers from Poland, Galicia, and Hungary. He was known as both a miracle worker and a Talmudist, and maintained a close relationship with the Galician non-Hasidic rabbinate of his time. His everyday life was simple, and he was the first rebbe who did not dress in white (as was common for kabbalists and early Hasidic leaders).
(1884–1968), writer and critic. Born into an assimilated German-speaking family in multiethnic, late-Habsburg Prague, Max Brod went through an ideological transformation in his youth from German liberal and Jewish assimilationist sympathies to Jewish nationalism and Zionism. In his own time the most productive and widely recognized member of the Prague Circle of German-speaking Jewish writers, Brod is remembered chiefly for his role in the preservation of the literary estate of Franz Kafka and the introduction of these modernist masterpieces to a broad public. While his literary production over his long life would range from fiction of many different styles to translations of opera libretti, philosophical tracts, art criticism, and memoir, this ideological commitment would remain behind most of his work.
City in Ukraine. The first mention of Jews in Buchach (Pol., Buczacz) is from 1500; the population grew steadily thereafter, reaching a recorded total of 1,358 Jews in 1765. The town and much of its Jewish population survived the 1648 Ukrainian uprising relatively unharmed; the brief Turkish occupation of 1672 led to much heavier loss of life. In 1699, the Jews’ community privilege was confirmed by the town’s owner, the Potocki family, which granted them residential and occupational equality with Christian residents. Many Jews made their living from commerce, whether local, regional (with Kraków), or international (with the Ottoman Empire and Hungary). The cattle trade was particularly important. Other Jews were involved in the liquor business, fur, or in crafts. Not renowned for its Talmudic learning, Buczacz became a center of Sabbatianism in the mid-eighteenth century.
City in Romania, traditionally considered to be the capital of Transylvania. The Jewish presence in Cluj (Ger., Klausenburg; Hun., Kolozsvár; current official name, Cluj-Napoca) was first noted in a document dating from 1481 that referred to a conflict between Jews from Cluj and the powerful Haller family of Buda. One century later, in 1578, a Jewish presence at the Cluj fair was considered alarming by the authorities. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Jews were allowed to settle in just one town of Transylvania (Alba Iulia); hence, only during the age of Emperor Joseph’s II reforms (1780–1790) were there again indications of Jews in Cluj.
(Ger., Kurland; Lat., Kurzeme), a historic and ethnographic area of west and southwest Latvia. The territory of Courland was conquered in the thirteenth century by the German Livonian Order. One-third of its territory (Piltene) went to the bishopric of Courland and two-thirds to the Livonian Order. In 1309, Jews were banned in the territories by Siegfried von Feuchtwangen, Grand Master of the Order. In 1561 a treaty between the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and the Livonian Order ended Livonian independence; the document forbade Jews to settle in Courland or even to reside there temporarily for commercial transactions. The Duchy of Courland was dependent on the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth throughout its existence (1561–1795). Perhaps reflecting scattered and periodic Jewish residence, a series of laws to ban Jews from engaging in commerce was adopted in the Courland Landtag in 1692, 1698, and 1699. Only in autonomous Piltene, formerly ruled by the bishop, and, from 1585, by Poland, was Jewish residence officially permitted.
(1811–1899), maskil, poet, translator, historian, and publicist. Born in Starokonstantinov, Volhynia guberniia, Avraham Ber Gottlober married the daughter of a Hasidic family at the age of 14. With the encouragement and guidance of his father, and notwithstanding his attraction to Hasidism, he showed an interest in Jewish philosophical and Haskalah literature, along with Hebrew grammar, while still quite young.
Hebrew journal, published between 1860 and 1880. As Russia’s first Hebrew-language periodical, Ha-Karmel (Mount Carmel) was issued weekly in Vilna between 1860 and 1871, and monthly between 1871 and 1880. Supplements in Russian and German were included from time to time. Its editor was Shemu’el Yosef Fuenn.
(1885–1944), Hebrew and Yiddish poet. Born in Karelitz, near Minsk, Belorussia, Yitsḥak Katzenelson acquired his Hebrew education from his father, Ya‘akov Binyamin Katzenelson, a maskilic teacher and writer. From 1896, Katzenelson lived with his family in Łódź. His earliest Hebrew poetry was published in children’s newspapers beginning in 1899, and he quickly earned a reputation as one of the most prominent members of the generation of poets to be influenced by Ḥayim Naḥman Bialik.
(1785–1840), leading figure of the Galician Haskalah; philosopher, biblical critic, and historian. Naḥman Krochmal was born in Brody; lived most of his life in Żółkiew (punctuated by a brief stay in Lemberg [Lwów]); and after a brief return to Brody, died in Tarnopol. He was an important influence on virtually all of the thinkers associated with the Haskalah in Eastern Europe, among them Shimshon Bloch, Tsevi Hirsh Chajes, Yitsḥak Erter, Yitsḥak Ber Levinzon, Me’ir Letteris, Tsevi Menaḥem (Hirsh Mendel) Pineles, Shelomoh Yehudah Rapoport, and Yehoshu‘a Heshel Schorr.
(1749–1826), maskil, author, and translator. Born in Satanów, in Podolia—a heartland of Hasidism—Menaḥem Mendel Lefin (also Levin) was a figure who linked the Haskalah between Western and Eastern Europe. Raised in a traditional Jewish family, Lefin was drawn in the late 1780s to Berlin, where he befriended Moses Mendelssohn and other maskilim. Unlike Salomon Maimon and Yitsḥak Satanov, two Polish Jewish contemporaries who also traveled to the West, Lefin returned to Poland and sought to further the ideals of the Enlightenment in a manner suited to East European Jews.
(1890–1941), abstract artist and theorist, graphic designer, architect, typographer, photographer, and propagandist. El (Lazar [Eleazar] Markovich) Lissitzky was born in Pochinok, near Smolensk, Russia, and died in Moscow. He chose his name in imitation of El Greco and to affirm his new artistic identity. His artistic career can be divided into three overlapping periods: (1) Jewish, from 1915 to 1923; (2) Suprematist, from 1919 to the early 1920s; and (3) Stalinist, in the 1930s. The following overview emphasizes his first period, when he participated intensively in the Jewish art renaissance in Russia and played a significant role in its development (Soviet and Western critics typically discount the importance of his early work).
A skit or monologue performed, usually in the vernacular, in a domestic setting at the festive Purim family meal. The celebration of Purim, the Festival of Lots, is based on the biblical Scroll (Megilah) of Esther, which recounts how Mordechai and Esther prevented the massacre of the Jews ordered by Haman, minister of Ahasuerus, king of Persia. Various sources, particularly the Talmud (BT Meg. 7a–b, 9a; Sanh. 64b), mention entertainment at such celebrations associated with the reading of the Scroll of Esther, including pantomimes, parodies of liturgical texts, the custom of the carnival rabbi (Purim rov), and plays performed in the vernacular during the festive meal.
(1859–1944), Hebrew and Yiddish writer, editor, publisher, and educator. Yehoshu‘a Ḥana Ravnitski (Yoshue Khone Rawnitzki) was born in Odessa and received a traditional Jewish education in heder and yeshiva. After marrying, he lived from 1877 to 1887 in the nearby town of Mayak. There he taught himself Russian, French, and German.
(Reisen; 1887–1941), scholar of Yiddish language and literature, editor, journalist, and cultural activist. The brother of Avrom and Sore Reyzen, Zalmen Reyzen was born in Koidanov, Belorussia; he studied in a heder and at a Russian school. His father, a maskil, wrote poetry in Hebrew and Yiddish.
(ca. 1745–1812), Hasidic leader and founder of Ḥabad Hasidism, the branch promulgated by the Lubavitch movment. Shneur Zalman was born in Liozno (Liazna, Belarus); when he was about 20, he was attracted to Hasidism. He joined the bet midrash of Dov Ber, the Magid of Mezritsh, for a number of years, studied Kabbalah with him, and regarded him as his master. After the Magid’s death, Shneur Zalman became an associate of Menaḥem Mendel of Vitebsk, a senior colleague and teacher.
In premodern times, a variety of performers, including cantors, preachers, jesters, and instrumental musicians, engaged Jewish audiences. Amateur companies known as purim-shpilers staged skits around the holiday of Purim. But a professional Yiddish theater did not emerge until the nineteenth century.
(Yid., Zamoch, Zamoshtsh), city in Lublin province. Founded in 1580 by Jan Zamoyski, Zamość became the principal town of his family estate. The first mention of Jews in Zamość dates from 1583; Zamoyski granted them a privilege of settlement in 1588. This privilege was for Sephardic Jews only, with the expectation that they would bring economic benefits—particularly trading contacts. The Jewish quarter was situated in the northwestern sector, where Jews were permitted to build a synagogue and a mikveh. The synagogue was built of brick in the Renaissance style between about 1610 and 1618.
Hebrew newspaper. Published from 1903 to 1915, Ha-Zeman (The Time) was founded and edited by the journalist Bentsiyon Katz. Beginning publication in February 1903, during its first year it was published twice weekly in Saint Petersburg. At the end of 1903, the newspaper faced a financial crisis, and Katz enlisted the help of a wealthy Jewish businessman, Ya‘akov Eliyahu Rivkin, who accepted financial responsibility for issuing the newspaper and appointed his son-in-law, Feivel Margolin, as manager.
Party affiliated with the World Zionist Organization. When the World Zionist Organization was first established in 1897, it acted as one unified political body, based on the Basel Program that had been adopted at the First Zionist Congress that year. According to this program, the Zionist movement would be divided only into regional, not political, blocs; a mere few years later, however, the movement split into political parties, each one basing itself on an ideology other than that articulated in Basel. Consequently, the bulk of the movement was represented by international parties, including Po‘ale Tsiyon, Mizraḥi, the Radical Zionists, and the Revisionist Zionists.
(1820–1899), rabbi and scholar. German-born Esriel (‘Asri’el) Hildesheimer set out upon his rabbinical career in 1846. By that time he had completed his training under the tutelage of Ya‘akov Ettlinger—the preeminent contemporary German Orthodox halakhist—and received a doctoral degree from the University of Halle. He spent the years 1846–1851 as secretary of the community in his hometown of Halberstadt before being appointed rabbi of Eisenstadt, the well-known Jewish settlement in the Burgenland section of western Hungary. There he founded and developed a famous post–primary school yeshiva that combined intensive Torah learning with a full range of secular studies.
(1880–1940), Zionist leader, founder of Revisionist Party. Vladimir (Ze’ev) Jabotinsky was born in Odessa to an assimilated, middle-class Jewish family. He was educated entirely in Russian, and as a teenager spent two years in Bern and Rome studying law. Even before leaving Odessa, he had written poetry and articles for local liberal publications, and continued this work while in Rome. After his return to Odessa, he was the chief cultural correspondent for the prestigious Russian daily Odessa News, for which he wrote daily reviews of cultural events under the pseudonym Altalena.
(1810–1883), founder and leader of the Musar ethical movement. Known also as Yisra’el Salanter, Yisra’el ben Ze’ev Volf Lipkin was born into a rabbinical family in Zhagare, in the Kovno district. At a young age, he was sent to study Torah with the rabbi of Salant, Tsevi Hirsh Broyda. There, Salanter met Yosef Zundel, a close disciple of Ḥayim of Volozhin, and, through his influence, became interested in questions relating to moral improvement. In 1840, Salanter moved to Vilna, having been invited to serve as head of Rabbi Maila’s yeshiva. Soon thereafter he moved to Zaretcha, a Vilna suburb, where he taught Torah in the local bet midrash.
Yisra’el ben Ze’ev Volf Lipkin (Salanter)
The liturgy of East European Jewry, though by the twelfth century dominated by the overall prayer-book prototype bequeathed by the Babylonian centers, retained traces of the rites of premedieval Palestine along with those of early medieval Italy and Germany. In this way it differed from its equivalents in Spain and France, but the resulting variations were generally limited to rare occasions and special circumstances and concerned detailed wording within benedictions, such as the use of “Ve-te‘erav” in the Birkat ha-kohanim, or priestly benediction. This lyrical formulation (“May our plea be as sweet as once were our Temple offerings”), occurring in the third benediction from the end of the ‘Amidah (‘Avodah), had been part of the daily version of the central prayer service (‘Amidah or Shemoneh ‘esreh) in premedieval Palestine.
(1510?–1573), rabbi, legal authority (posek), and head of yeshivas in Brisk (Brest Litovsk), Ostraha (Ostróg), and Lublin. In traditional literature, Shelomoh Luria is known by the acronym Maharshal or Rashal, and is most famous for his Talmudic commentary, Yam shel Shelomoh. Luria received his early education in Poznań at the house of his grandfather, Yitsḥak Klober. In his writings, Luria noted Ashkenazic customs and liturgical traditions that he had learned from Klober (Responsa, 64, and others).
Zionist gymnastics and sports organization. The establishment at the end of the nineteenth century of a national Jewish gymnastic society in Europe can be explained as a reaction to mounting nationalism across the continent, with concomitant exclusion of minorities and heightened antisemitism. The Slavic Sokol (Hawk) gymnastics movement, founded in Prague in 1862, stood as a successful East European model to evoke national spirit on the athletic field.
Money played a central role in the inner life and value system of the Jewish community as well as in its relations with the non-Jewish world. This was the case in part because Jewish status in Eastern Europe was predicated on Jews’ performance of commercial, managerial, and financial services, while Jewish autonomy required an elaborate system of internal taxation.
Russian Jewish journal founded by Adolph Landau and published in Saint Petersburg between 1881 and 1906. Voskhod (Dawn) began as a monthly. After its first year of publication, a weekly entitled Nedel’naia khronika Voskhoda (Weekly Chronicle of Voskhod) was added. In practice the journal was edited inter alia by Shmuel Grusenberg, Simon Dubnow, and Yehudah Leib Gordon. In April 1899, Landau sold Voskhod to a “young men’s” group, which included Leon Bramson, the historian Saul Ginsburg, Matthew (Matityahu) Posner, Iulii (Julius) Brutskus, and others. In November 1899, both the weekly Voskhod and its monthly version changed their names to Knizhki Voskhoda (Voskhod Booklets). In 1901, the editorial board co-opted Maksim Vinaver and Leopold Sev (who from 1903 was for all practical purposes its editor in chief). The monthly journal ceased publication in March 1906, and its weekly supplement followed suit at the end of June of that year.
Yiddish Zionist periodical. Launched by the Hebrew publishing company Aḥi’asaf in January 1899 to promote the political and cultural program of the newly founded Zionist Organization, Der yud (The Jew; pronounced Der yid) was edited in Warsaw but published in Kraków to avoid tsarist censorship. Under editor Yehoshu‘a Ḥana (Yoshue Khone) Ravnitski, it appeared bimonthly, then became a weekly by mid-November of that year, edited by Yoysef Lurie. The periodical served an appreciative readership in the absence of a Yiddish daily press and stopped publication in December 1902 when the Russian censor granted long-sought permission to Saul Ginsburg to start up the Yiddish daily Der fraynd.
The economic opportunities open to Jews of Eastern Europe over their history were limited by non-Jewish society—largely through legislation. Thus, in order to understand Jewish economic life, it is important to have a clear picture of the laws and regulations imposed by non-Jewish society. These were never monolithic and were often extremely complex. Consequently, economic success for Jews was often a result of the ability to maneuver between different—and sometimes contradictory—regulations in order to achieve their goals.
(1901–1969), Yiddish poet, playwright, prose writer, and essayist. Born Isidor Helfer in the multiethnic city of Czernowitz (then capital of the Habsburg province of Bucovina; now Chernivtsi, Ukraine), Itsik Manger attended heder and later the Kaiser-Königlicher Dritte Staats-Gymnasium. When he was expelled for bad behavior, his formal education came to an end. By then, however, he had fallen under the spell of German Romantic poetry, and his knowledge of world literature was henceforth to be gleaned in German translation.
(1808–1867), key figure in the Russian Haskalah movement, and the first Hebrew novelist. Avraham Mapu was born in Slobodka (near Kovno) to a Misnaged family of Torah scholars, and the only formal schooling he received was a broad Jewish education that inevitably shaped his use of the Hebrew language. Later, though, he taught himself German, Latin, Russian, and French.
(1772–1811), founder of a unique school of Hasidic thought and practice; single master of the Bratslav (or “Breslov,” as pronounced by its members) Hasidic sect, which continues to flourish down to the present day. Naḥman ben Simḥah was the great-grandchild of Yisra’el Ba‘al Shem Tov (ca. 1700–1760), the first central figure of Hasidism, through the maternal line. His paternal grandfather was Naḥman of Horodenka (d. 1772), also a well-known figure in early Hasidic circles. As the offspring of such lineage, Naḥman, who grew up in the years when the new movement was just adopting a hereditary dynastic model, was expected to become a Hasidic leader. Naḥman at first refused, showing considerable disdain for the popular Hasidism of his uncle, Barukh of Mezhbizh (ca. 1750–1811), and others.
(Apt), a town between Kraków and Lublin in Małopolska (Little Poland) dating back to the twelfth century. In 1502, Opatów was sold by the Lubusz bishops to noble owners, who permitted Jewish residence from 1538. Eighty Jews paid a poll tax in 1578, making Opatów one of the largest Jewish communities in central Poland. In 1618, Jews owned 60 of the town’s 185 houses, and sources mention a Jewish school and hospital. A separate Jewish district had probably been established by that time.
Hebrew monthly publication, issued between 1868 and 1884. Edited by author Perets Smolenskin, Ha-Shaḥar (The Dawn) was printed in Vienna. Twelve annual volumes were issued, the ninth and tenth of which appeared irregularly. The contents of the periodical, as stated by Smolenskin in an introduction, included articles on Jewish thought, history, and literature; prose, poetry, and essays; interpretations and explanations of biblical passages; news from Eastern Europe and the Jewish world; reviews of Hebrew books; and information about recently published books.
(Yiddish, from Heb. teḥinot, meaning supplications), private devotions and paraliturgical prayers usually in Yiddish, primarily for women, published beginning in the early modern period. Tkhines were written by both women and men, and the constant reprinting of tkhine booklets demonstrates the extraordinary popularity of the genre.
(1894–1969), Yiddish linguist, literary scholar, and public intellectual. Born in Kuldiga, Latvia (then in Russia; Ger., Goldingen), Max Weinreich grew up in a German-speaking home and first took an interest in Yiddish as a teenager. His native region, Courland, had a large German population as well as a significant number of German-speaking Jews, although the historical language of the Jewish community was Yiddish. Weinreich attended Saint Petersburg University and did graduate studies in linguistics at Marburg University, where he completed his doctorate in 1923. His dissertation is entitled “Studien zur Geschichte und dialektischen Gliederung der jiddischen Sprache” (Studies in the History and Dialect Distribution of the Yiddish Language, published in 1993 with the title Geschichte der jiddischen Sprachforschung [History of Yiddish Linguistics]). In 1923, Weinreich also published his first book in Yiddish, based on his dissertation and titled Shtaplen (Rungs). It includes four essays on the history of Yiddish philology and literature.
(1889–1952), Yiddish poet. Born in Korostyshev, not far from Kiev, Dovid Hofshteyn was educated at a heder and by private teachers in Russian and Hebrew. His father, a forester, was a maskil; his mother came from the Pedotser-Kholodenko family of klezmer celebrities; and his sister, Shifra Kholodenko (1909–1974), was a noted Soviet Yiddish poet. Hofshteyn began writing poems at age nine, initially mostly in Hebrew, Russian, and Ukrainian, and his cultural experience in these languages influenced his Yiddish poetry.
Town in Wielkopolska province, Poland. Kalisz (Yid., Kulish) is considered to be the oldest town in Poland. Jews first settled there as early as the twelfth century, where they minted coins for the prince. In 1264, Prince Bolesław the Pious issued a privilege or charter for Great Poland’s Jews—the first document of its kind in the Polish lands—that became the basis for many subsequent royal privileges. In 1287, a well-organized Jewish community existed with a cemetery.
Yiddish speakers had at their disposal a rich repertoire of proverbs. The term proverb (Yid., shprikhvort) in a narrow sense refers to complete sentences of anonymous origin that are used in conversation to comment, often metaphorically, on a matter at hand. An example is Patsh zikh nit in baykhele ven fishele iz nokh in taykhele (Don’t pat yourself in the belly when the fish is still in the stream; in other words, “Don’t count your chickens before they are hatched”). Related to proverbs are proverbial phrases, proverbial comparisons, and “winged words.”
Region of Romania, between the southern Carpathian Mountains and the Danube River. Walachia (Rom., Valahia, or Vlahia; known also as Țara Românească [Romanian Land]) is made up of two provinces: Muntenia (east of the Olt River) and Oltenia (west of the river). Until its political union with Moldavia in 1859, followed by an administrative amalgamation in 1862, Walachia was a principality that had been founded at the beginning of the fourteenth century. Its princes were vassals of the Ottoman Empire, to which it paid tribute beginning about 1417. The population spoke Romanian and practiced Greek (Romanian) Orthodoxy. Its capitals were Curtea de Argeş (fourteenth century), Târgovişte (fifteenth century), and Bucharest (Rom., Bucureşti; beginning in the sixteenth century).
(The Seer of Lublin; 1745–1815), the most influential Hasidic leader in Poland and Galicia at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Though he did not found a dynasty, the majority of tsadikim living at his time in that region considered themselves to be his disciples.
(Yid., Zhovkve; Pol., Żółkiew; Rus., Nesterov between 1951 and 1992), town with a Jewish presence from the late sixteenth century; under Ukrainian sovereignty since 1991. Zhovkva was a private town in the Polish Commonwealth until 1772, when it became a part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. From 1918 through 1939 it belonged to independent Poland and then was taken over by the USSR. From 1941 through 1944 it was occupied by Germany.
On 1 January 1993, the Czech Republic came into existence as a successor state of Czechoslovakia. At the time, 10 Jewish communities existed on its territory with approximately 3,000 members, most of them living in Prague. Another 2,000 Jews were organized in different Jewish associations. The Federation of Jewish Communities in the Czech Republic estimated that approximately 15,000–20,000 Jews were living in the Czech Republic, most of whom were not registered with a formal Jewish community. Some of the communities were very small and had difficulty maintaining religious institutions without permanent rabbis.
The first Yiddish daily published in the Russian Empire. Der fraynd (The Friend), issued between 1903 and 1912, was a harbinger of the new, secular Jewish culture that would sweep Jewish communities in the final days of the tsarist empire. Founded by Sha’ul Ginsburg (1866–1940) and run out of the capital city of Saint Petersburg until its move to Warsaw in the fall of 1909, Der fraynd helped reshape and redefine both popular and elite culture for hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of Yiddish-speaking (and reading) Jews in the Russian Empire and beyond.
To survey trends and motifs in the historiography of the Jewish experience in Eastern Europe, this entry includes four articles. Following a general overview, which focuses on scholarship in Poland and Russia, are separate articles on the Bohemian lands and Hungary. The last article treats historical writings by Orthodox Jews.
(1883–1924), writer. A Jewish writer who was born and lived most of his life in Prague, Franz Kafka was one of the most important contributors to European modernist prose. All of his surviving fiction was composed in German, which must be considered his mother tongue, although he was raised in a multicultural environment and had a good command of Czech.
Yiddish literary and cultural weekly periodical, published between April 1924 and June or July 1939. Literarishe bleter was the leading Yiddish literary publication in interwar Poland. With Warsaw suddenly bereft of Yiddish cultural periodicals and the appearance of a new Polish weekly, Wiadomości Literackie (which soon became Poland’s leading literary publication), a group of young Warsaw writers created the Yiddish weekly Literarishe bleter.
The shtadlan (intercessor; pl., shtadlonim) was, ideally, a well-connected, culturally adept, linguistically capable person whose official function was to intervene on behalf of local and intercommunal Jewish communities and local and national officials on all matters that the local kahal (community board) and the intercommunal va‘ad (council) deemed appropriate. In the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries, they were often retained by detailed contracts for periods of up to three years, earning handsome salaries and receiving generous indirect payments and expense accounts.
(1904–1991), Yiddish writer; in translation, among the most widely read authors of the twentieth century. The son and grandson of rabbis on both sides of his family, Isaac Bashevis Singer was born to strictly observant parents in the village of Leoncin, near Warsaw. With the outbreak of World War I, his mother (from whose first name he later derived his pseudonym Bashevis) took her children back to the village of Biłgoraj, where her rabbi father ruled with iron discipline. There, in a place untouched by modernity, Bashevis, who was educated in traditional religious schools, acquired the profound knowledge of religious observances, folk customs, and rich range of Yiddish idioms that shaped his fiction. At the age of 17, he enrolled for one year in Warsaw’s Taḥkemoni Rabbinical Seminary, after which he taught modern Hebrew in private homes.
Euphemism for the victimization of the Jewish intelligentsia in the late Stalin years. The anticosmopolitan campaign did not commence as an anti-Jewish offensive, but rather as a concomitant of the policy of promoting “Soviet patriotism,” which in the immediate postwar years dictated the eradication of extraneous influences in culture and the reversal of the relative ideological relaxation of the war years. This trend was the other face of the isolationism the Soviet Union fostered as it instituted the Iron Curtain.
(“The Hidden One”; pseud. of Pinkhes Kahanovitsh; 1884–1950), Yiddish writer. Der Nister was born in Berdichev, Ukraine, where he received a traditional Jewish education. In his adolescence he began reading Russian literature and studied secular subjects. His elder brother Aharon, who became a Bratslaver Hasid, had a significant influence on him; his younger brother, Motl (Max), became a sculptor and well-known art dealer in Paris.
Hebrew repertory theater company founded in 1918 in Moscow and permanently reestablished in Tel Aviv in the 1930s. Habimah originated in the activities of Nahum Lazarevich Tsemakh (Heb., Naḥum Tsemaḥ; 1887–1939), a small-town teacher who assembled an amateur theater troupe that performed in Hebrew in Białystok, Vilna, and Warsaw from 1909 to 1914. In 1913 Tsemakh arranged for the publication of Hebrew translations of plays by Mark Arnshteyn, Osip Dymov, and Dovid Pinski. Trying to enlist the support of Zionist circles, Tsemakh had his troupe perform a Hebrew version of Dymov’s play Vechnyi strannik (The Eternal Wanderer) for the delegates to the Eleventh Zionist Congress in Vienna in 1913, but without result. When World War I began, the troupe fell apart. Tsemakh, who reached Moscow along with other refugees, reconstituted his group from old and new participants. In 1916, supported by Chief Rabbi Ya‘akov Mazeh (Iakov Maze), he successfully petitioned the municipal authorities to register it under the name “Habimah Jewish Dramatic Society.” Ha-bimah means “the stage” in modern Hebrew, but bimah also designates the central podium for reading Torah in a synagogue.
(1713–1793), halakhic authority, Talmudic scholar, and chief rabbi of Prague. Yeḥezkel (Ezekiel) Landau was born in the Polish city of Opatów into a prominent and wealthy family. He was educated by his father and by Rabbi Yitsḥak of Ludmir (Rus., Vladimir; now Ukr., Volodymyr Volyns’kyi). Shortly after his marriage at age 18, Landau entered the elite Brody kloyz, which was then the center of kabbalistic study in Poland, and remained there for 13 years. In Brody, he established connections with many leading scholars and mystics. In 1733, he also became the head judge of one of Brody’s four Jewish courts.
The payment of cash for the use of property or monopoly rights, leaseholding was one of the most important Jewish occupations in Eastern and Central Europe from the Middle Ages. Its importance grew considerably in the early modern period: according to the Jewish census of 1764–1765 in the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, more than one-third of employed Jews were leaseholders of various kinds. In the nineteenth century, the importance of leaseholding declined with economic modernization, but continued to be a principal source of income for Jews.
(1788–1860), thinker and teacher; considered by some as the father of the East European Haskalah. Born in Kremenets, Ukraine, where he received a traditional Jewish education, Yitsḥak Ber Levinzon (Isaac Baer Levinsohn; known also as Ribal) married a woman from the town of Radzhivilov in 1807 and lived there until 1812. He learned Russian, German, French, and Latin and served as an official interpreter for the Russian army.
(Ukr., Peremyshl; Yid., Pshemishel), city in southeastern Poland. It is presumed that at the beginning of the eleventh century a Jewish trading post existed in Przemyśl. Larger groups of Jews settled in the town in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, and by the end of the fourteenth century a Jewish community had been constituted. At the beginning of the fifteenth century, this community numbered as many as 100 persons. A document from 1459 mentions a “Jewish” street in Przemyśl. Jews settled primarily in the northeastern part of the city, establishing a distinct quarter. They were involved in both local and long-distance trade, and also made their living as moneylenders and artisans, the latter maintaining their own guilds.
With the retreat of the German occupying forces at the end of World War I in November 1918, much of the former Russian Empire was plunged into the chaos of another war as several forces sought to consolidate control over its various territories. A good part of the western region, well behind the German front lines, managed to assert demands for local authority, resulting in the recognition of several independent states during the interwar period, including Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia. To the east, however, military and paramilitary forces clashed in a civil war that lasted two years.
(Bel., Sklou; Pol., Szkłów), district city in the Mogilev region, Belarus. Jews first received a charter to settle in Shklov in 1668. In the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Shklov became an important commercial center, where, in the words of a visiting diplomat in 1699, Jews were “the richest and most influential class of people in the city.” In 1746, the Shklov kahal briefly seceded from the regional council of Jewish communities (Va‘ad Medinat Rusyah), due to a dispute over its heavy tax burden. According to the Polish census of 1766, there were 1,367 Jews in Shklov, the same number as in Minsk.
(also Subcarpathian or Transcarpathian Ruthenia), administrative region in present-day Ukraine, known as Zakarpatska Ukraina. The area first functioned as such a unit at the end of World War I, when it became part of Czechoslovakia. Subcarpathian Rus’ comprised the historical counties of Ung, Ugocsa, Bereg, and the northern half of Máramaros in the prewar kingdom of Hungary. Until 1918–1919, Subcarpathian Rus’ belonged to the Hungarian part of the Habsburg monarchy, but in 1918–1919 it was annexed to the Czechoslovak Republic, where it remained until 1938–1939. In autumn 1938, the Hungarian kingdom annexed one part of the region; another section was autonomous until March 1939, when the Hungarians conquered it as well. Soviet troops overran the area in the fall of 1944 and arranged for its incorporation into the USSR as part of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic.
Di Tsentrale Yidishe Shul-Organizatsye (Central Yiddish School Organization), commonly known by its acronym, TSYSHO or CYSHO, was established in Warsaw in June 1921. Led primarily by members of the Bund and Left Po‘ale Tsiyon, its founders sought to create a network of secular Yiddish schools under socialist auspices. Headed by the Bundist Beynish Mikhalevitsh, the first chairman of the organization, TSYSHO was administered by a central office in Warsaw and a central education committee in Vilna. The latter was largely autonomous and less politicized than the institutions in central Poland. The administration prepared curriculum outlines, chose or published textbooks, and compiled vocabulary lists to meet the needs generated by subjects being taught for the first time in Yiddish. The curriculum consisted of Yiddish language and literature, Jewish history and culture, the sciences, math, music, physical education, arts and crafts, and, for some, Hebrew. In addition, Polish language, literature, and history were taught in the Polish language.
Among the rituals of the East European Jewish life cycle, the wedding (Heb., ḥatunah; Yid., khasene) is the most elaborate. At its fullest, from the making of the match to the celebrations following the marriage ceremony, the process of getting married could extend over a period of years, gathering in intensity and peaking with the ceremony itself. The events associated with getting married were occasions par excellence for Jewish ceremonial creativity and artistic expression, including the central role of musicians, the badkhn (master of ceremonies and jester), and dance. The public character of the festivities was intended to make the marriage binding, not only in contractual but also in emotional terms, which accounts for the intensity of feeling (weeping before the ceremony and joyous celebration after) orchestrated by the musicians and badkhn.
State in the eastern Baltic region created in 1918 out of formerly Russian territories. Under Swedish rule from 1629 to 1721, when it was annexed to Russia, northern Estonia was part of the Duchy of Estland while southern Estonia was part of Livonia. In 1940, Estonia became a republic in the Soviet Union but was occupied by the German army from 1941 to 1944. It regained its independence in 1991.
(1896–1981), Hebrew and Yiddish poet, essayist and journalist. Uri Tsevi Grinberg (or Greenberg) was a trailblazer of radical modernism in both Hebrew and Yiddish literatures, one of the leaders of the Revisionist Zionist movement (from 1930), and a member of the first Israeli Knesset.
The first testimony about a Karaite presence in the Crimean peninsula, dating to 1278, was supplied by the Karaite scholar Aharon ben Yosef (Ha-Rofe), who mentioned a dispute over the calendar between Karaites and Rabbinites (those who follow rabbinic tradition; also spelled Rabbanite) in Solkhat (Eski Krim). Karaites apparently migrated to the peninsula with the Tatar conquerors of Crimea in the mid-thirteenth century. The major centers of Karaite settlement were Kefe (Feodosiia), Solkhat, Chufut-Kale (or Chufut-Qaleh), Mangup, and, later, Gözleve.
Installations established by the Nazi regime during World War II for exploiting forced laborers, including Jews. Forced laborers worked in hundreds of camps that were built individually or in clusters, usually situated next to concentration camps. Such was the case in Auschwitz, Stutthof, Gross-Rosen, Dachau, and Mauthausen. SS leader Heinrich Himmler was determined to concentrate Jews in closed camps in order to exploit the Jewish labor potential. An increasing dearth of available working hands prompted Hitler to decree in November 1941 that every person in occupied Europe could be subject to labor service.
Memory per se was not an operative category among East European Jews. Rather, in the premodern period, Jews had their master metaphors organized around saints, sanctuaries, and sacred times. In this way, each generation of Jews shaped the model life, the model community, and the model time. In periods of crisis, the function of Jewish memory was to transcend the ruptures of history. At such times, the precise levers of inner-Jewish transformation were the historical archetypes that embodied the covenantal relationship between God and Israel: God’s command of lekh-lekho (Go forth) to Abraham, the binding of Isaac, the Exodus, Sinai, the Mosaic curses, the destruction of the Temple, the Valley of the Dry Bones, the Battle of Gog, the Megilah of Purim. The chronicler, preacher, or synagogue poet could either invoke any of the relevant archetypes, reminding God, as it were, both of His promise and of Israel’s steadfastness in the past, or, more boldly, could provoke God’s response by throwing the present sacrilege in His face. “It is for Your sake that we are slain all day long,” says Psalm 44 (23–24), “that we are regarded as sheep to be slaughtered. / Rouse Yourself: why do You sleep, O Lord? / Awaken, do not reject us forever!” In the face of national catastrophe, the Jewish response is dialectical: the worse the present expulsion order, or massacre, or blood libel, the more it recalls the most sacrilegious event of the past.
(Ger., Nikolsburg), town in Moravia, in today’s Czech Republic. Mikulov was the largest and most important Jewish community in Moravia until the middle of the nineteenth century, and seat of the Moravian chief rabbinate from the mid-sixteenth century until 1851. The oldest written evidence of Jews in Mikulov dates from 1369, but the Jewish community was probably founded by Jews expelled from Vienna and Lower Austria in 1420. Additional Jews arrived after the expulsions from Brno and Znojmo in 1454.
Yiddish daily newspaper. Published between 11 May 1910 and 22 September 1939, Der moment was one of the two longest running and most important Yiddish daily newspapers published in Warsaw. Its founder and official editor was Noah Pryłucki (1882–1941), the son of Tsevi Pryłucki, who was founder and editor of the first daily Yiddish newspaper in Warsaw, Der veg (1905–1907); the elder Pryłucki was Der moment’s actual editor for most of its existence. In its first few years, the paper was nonpolitical, but displayed a pro-Zionist and antiassimilationist stand in line with the ideology of its columnist Hillel Zeitlin. Der moment was able to compete successfully with its rival Haynt (founded in 1908) because of such popular, prominent contributors and columnists as Mordkhe Spektor, B. Yeushzon (Moyshe Bunem Yustman), Yoysef Tunkel, and Noah Pryłucki himself.
(1900–1944), Polish Jewish historian, relief worker, political activist, and organizer of the underground Oyneg Shabes Archive in the Warsaw ghetto. Born in Buczacz, Emanuel Ringelblum moved to Nowy Sącz in 1914. Under the influence of two friends, Raphael Mahler and Artur Eisenbach (also to become noted historians) Ringelblum joined Po‘ale Tsiyon, moving to the Left Po‘ale Tsiyon after the party’s split in 1920. He played a major role in the organization’s cultural work, where his passionate devotion to Yiddish, dedication to the Jewish masses, and fascination with Jewish history all began.
Yiddish literary and political journal published in Moscow from 1961 to 1991. A product of the post-Stalinist “thaw,” Sovetish heymland (Soviet Homeland) was created on the ruins of Soviet Yiddish culture silenced during the repression of the late 1940s. The title underlined continuity with the Moscow-based Yiddish literary periodicals Sovetish (1934–1941) and Heymland (1947–1948).
(Yid., Der dibek; Heb., Ha-Dibuk), dramatic work by the writer, ethnographer, and revolutionary S. An-ski (Shloyme Zaynvl Rapoport) that became the most celebrated play in the history of both Yiddish and Hebrew theater. The Dybbuk was based on material An-ski collected on an ethnographic expedition he had organized through Jewish towns of western Russia just before World War I; he had originally written the play in Russian, then translated it into Yiddish. In fact, An-ski lost his Yiddish manuscript of Der dibuk when he fled Bolshevik Russia; he reconstructed it on the basis of Ḥayim Naḥman Bialik’s Hebrew translation, published in Ha-Tekufah (vol. 1) in 1918.
The Ger dynasty (also Gur), named for the town of Góra Kalwaria in the Warsaw district, had the largest following of any Hasidic group in central Poland until the Holocaust and to a large degree dominated Jewish religious life in the area around Warsaw for some 80 years. Ger was distinguished among Hasidic groups by its particular emphasis on traditional yeshiva-type study. Ger leaders were also known for their deep and visible involvement in political and public affairs.
(1890 [or 1893]–1952), Yiddish and Russian writer. Born in Holoskovo, near Odessa, Leyb Kvitko lost both of his parents very early and was raised by his grandmother. At age 10 he began working as a quilter’s apprentice and lived briefly in Nikolaev, Odessa, and Kherson. He moved to Uman in 1915, and from there he sent several of his poems to Shmuel Niger, editor of the Vilna-based journal Di yudishe velt (The Jewish World), who rejected them as “worthless.”
(1863–1920), Russian and Yiddish writer, ethnographer, and revolutionary activist. Shloyme Rapoport (known more commonly as S. [Semen Akimovich] An-ski) is most acclaimed for two Yiddish works: his play Der dibek: Tsvishn tsvey veltn (The Dybbuk: Between Two Worlds) and the Jewish Labor Bund’s anthem known as “Di shvue” (The Oath). He is also famous for landmark ethnographic expeditions that he led to Volhynia and Podolia in 1912–1914. Rapoport distinguished himself from other Yiddish writers of his generation by his successful career as a journalist in Russian, his intense involvement first with the Russian populist movement and then with the Socialist Revolutionary (SR) Party, and his professional interest in the social sciences. He was also known by the pseudonyms S. Vid’bin, Z. Sinanni, and S. Sinani.
Political party, also known in Hebrew as Berit ha-Zohar; formally called the Union of Zionist Revisionists. The inaugural conference of the Revisionist Zionist party took place in Paris in April 1925, headed by Vladimir Jabotinsky. Though most of the delegates were local Zionists of Russian extraction who had been involved in Jabotinsky’s struggle to set up a Jewish Legion during World War I, a minority came from other countries.
Zionist socialist youth movement. Ha-Shomer ha-Tsa‘ir (The Young Guard) educated and trained its members for immigration to a kibbutz in Palestine. The movement originated in Galicia—at that time a province of the Austro-Hungarian Empire—a result of the merger of Tse‘ire Agudat Tsiyon, which was involved in the teaching of Hebrew, Judaism, and Jewish history, with Ha-Shomer, an amalgamation of scouting organizations that considered the distinct Palestine Ha-Shomer organization a worthy model to emulate. In 1916, at a meeting of Galician refugees from World War I in Vienna, the two groups officially united to form Ha-Shomer ha-Tsa‘ir.
The cantor, or ḥazan, is (usually) the professional prayer leader in the synagogue. In addition to chanting the service, he—until modern times cantors were invariably male—also functioned as an intermediary for the Jewish community in their prayers.
Educational movement and ethical program designed to promote and develop the teachings and practices introduced by Yisra’el Lipkin (Salanter; 1810–1883). Salanter’s broad notions for reinvigorating Jewish society gave way at the hands of his disciples to programs of educational reform within the circumscribed though culturally significant ambit of Lithuanian yeshivas, while his ideas gradually underwent dramatic reinterpretation and revision. Three schools of Musar had emerged by the close of the nineteenth century: the patient, pious self-cultivation of Kelem (Lith., Kelme), the near-humanist consciousness of Slobodka, and the ascetic radicalism of Novaredok (Nowógrodek; Novogrudok).
(1876–1953), writer, poet, and editor. Born in Koidanov, eastern Belorussia, Avrom Reyzen received a general and Jewish education. His father, Kalmen Reyzen, was a maskil and a writer, as were Avrom’s brother Zalmen and sister Sore. With the encouragement of Yaknehoz (pseudonym of Yeshaye Nisn Hakoyen Goldberg), Reyzen submitted articles to Dos Yudishes folks-blat in Saint Petersburg at the age of 13 or 14. He began to correspond with Yankev Dinezon and Y. L. Peretz, who published Reyzen’s poem “Ven dos lebn is farbitert” (When Life Is Embittered) in the first volume of Di yudishe bibliotek (The Yiddish Library; 1891).
(1704–1772), Hasidic leader. Dov Ber, the Magid (preacher) of Mezritsh (Pol., Międzyrzecz; mod. Ukr., Mezhyrichi), sometimes known as the “great Magid,” was the foremost leader within Hasidic circles after the death of the Ba‘al Shem Tov (Besht) in 1760. It was under Dov Ber’s leadership that the followers of Hasidism first came to see themselves as constituting a new religious movement and set out to preach and spread their teachings throughout East European Jewry. It is not known to what degree Dov Ber actually organized this process, but his leadership and teaching certainly provided the inspiration for it, both during his lifetime and afterward.
(1890–1948), Yiddish actor, director of the Moscow State Yiddish Theater (Gosudarstvennyi Evreiskii Teatr; GOSET), and chair of the Soviet Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee. Solomon Mikhoels (Shloyme Vovsi) was born into an Orthodox Jewish family in Dvinsk. After receiving a heder education, he studied at a Realschule in Riga, the Kiev Commerce Institute, and, from 1915, at the law faculty of Petrograd University. In 1918, he enrolled in Aleksandr Granovskii’s Jewish chamber theater, which later became the Moscow State Yiddish Theater.
City in southern Belarus. Pinsk’s Jewish community was founded in 1506 (and from ca. 1690 Pinsk was twinned with the town of Karlin) and was one of the five chief communities of “Lite” (Jewish Lithuania), extending its authority over at least 26 smaller Jewish settlements from the mid-sixteenth century until the abolition of Polish–Lithuanian Jewish autonomy in 1764.
To survey religious and scholarly writings by East European rabbis, this entry is divided chronologically into two articles, the first covering the period up to 1800 and the second from 1800 until 2000. For the role of the rabbi, see Rabbinate. For prayers and prayer books, see Liturgy; for sermons, see Preachers and Preaching. See also Talmud Study.
About this Article (Rabbinic Literature)
(1859–1936), journalist, writer, and Zionist leader. Born in Wyszogród, Poland, Naḥum Sokolow grew up in the town of Płock. He received a comprehensive Jewish education as well as a thoroughly secular one largely as a result of his own efforts. By 1874, he had published his first articles in the Hebrew press. After his marriage in 1876, Sokolow settled in the town of Maków, and that same year published articles on scientific subjects in the newspaper Ha-Tsefirah.
(commonly bet midrash; Yid., besmedresh; lit., “study house”), a voluntary, public institute for Torah learning, functioning for generations within Jewish communities alongside the synagogue and, from certain halakhic standpoints, even surpassing it in preference and importance. Functioning mainly as a place of study, the bet midrash (universally referred to by East European Jews in its Yiddish form, besmedresh) has also served as an alternative place of worship due to the many hours students spend there. In fact, students in Eastern Europe often took meals there and slept on the premises—so that, unlike the synagogue, the bet midrash required a mezuzah. Yet as a community of learners whose daily routine is dictated by the requirements of study, the bet midrash has been an institution that is in essence the reverse of the synagogue, challenging it and offering a certain alternative to the fixed models of communal life.
(Ger., Brünn), capital of Moravia, in today’s Czech Republic. The earliest evidence of Jewish settlement in Brno is a 1254 charter granted by Přemysl Ottakar II, Margrave of Moravia. This charter was renewed in 1268 and incorporated into municipal statutes in 1276. A charter from 1345 encouraged Jews—who were engaged primarily in commerce and moneylending—to settle in Brno.
Two major types of Jewish regional councils existed in Eastern Europe. The first encompassed all the communities in any particular region or state, such as Great Poland, Lithuania, or Moravia; the second was the Polish Council, sometimes known as the Jewish Sejm (Pol., Sejm Żydowski), which represented Jews in each region of the Polish Kingdom. Jews referred to this latter formation as the Council of the Four Lands (i.e., the four regions of which it was originally composed). Jewish councils did not develop in other regions of Eastern Europe in this period. Attempts to establish Jewish councils and congresses in later centuries resulted only in the creation of short-lived bodies that lacked the influence and prestige of their predecessors.
The determinants of Jewish attire, aside from those that affected everyone in the general society, included the requirements of halakhah, communal regulations, restrictions imposed by state and local authorities, and the influence of local non-Jewish communities. The most important factors observed generally were biblical law prohibiting mixing linen and wool in a single garment (Lev. 19:19; Deut. 22:11), known as shatnes (Heb. sha‘atnez), and the halakhic requirement that males wear prayer shawls (Yid., talesim; sg., tales; Heb., talit; Eng., tallis).
Russian Jewish financiers, communal activists, and philanthropists. The three most prominent members of the Gintsburg (sometimes Günzburg or Guenzburg) family were Evzel’ Gavriilovich (1812–1878), Goratsii (Horace) Osipovich (1833–1909), and David Goratsievich (1857–1910).
Hebrew weekly, published between 1856 and 1903. Ha-Magid (The Preacher) was the first Hebrew weekly newspaper, and in many respects its establishment marked the beginning of the modern Hebrew press. For censorship reasons it was published outside the borders of tsarist Russia (first in Lyck, Prussia, and after 1890 successively in Berlin, Kraków, and Vienna), but its contents were aimed first and foremost at the Russian Jewish reading public. Because of its broad content, however, it was distributed to many Jewish communities in Europe and beyond.
Sephardic Jews were a marginal element in Eastern Europe with the exception of Romanian lands, where because of their relatively larger numbers, they played a somewhat more significant role. Jews expelled from the Iberian Peninsula at the end of the fifteenth century, and conversos leaving those lands in later periods, did not settle in Eastern Europe. Those who did move to the region did so after settling first in Ottoman or, much less often, Italian territories. Nevertheless, some Sephardim are established as having resided in various areas of Eastern Europe, arriving from the Balkans and other regions of the Ottoman Empire in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Along with Iberian Jews, there were Italian, Greek or Romaniot, and Arabic- and Persian-speaking Jews who were often identified as Sephardim in Eastern Europe. In addition, Ashkenazic Jews sometimes married and assimilated into the group. (“Ashkenazi” became a common Sephardic surname.)
(1842–1885), maskilic writer; founder and editor of the Hebrew journal Ha-Shaḥar (The Dawn); novelist and short-story writer. Perets Smolenskin’s writings attracted a wide and enthusiastic readership and influenced the consolidation of a nationalist Haskalah movement and Zionist ideology.
(Yid., Tseytlin), prominent writers and intellectuals in prewar Poland. The father, Hillel Zeitlin (1871–1942), was a thinker, journalist, and editor. His son Arn (Aharon; 1899–1973) was a prolific poet, fiction writer, playwright, essayist, and editor in both Hebrew and Yiddish. Elkhonen (Elḥanan; 1902–1942), Hillel’s younger son, was a Yiddish poet, critic, journalist, and social activist.
Perhaps because the birth of cinema in the late nineteenth century coincides with the migration of Jews from the Pale of Settlement to the cities of Eastern Europe, newly urbanized Jews were prominent in the development of Eastern European cinema—if only intermittently as Jewish artists addressing Jewish themes or a Jewish public.
A Jewish religious movement centered on the leadership of Ya‘akov (Jakub) ben Yehudah Leib Frank (1726?–1791). The term Frankism was coined in early nineteenth-century Warsaw and was initially a slur directed at the descendants of Frank’s followers who converted to Roman Catholicism and attempted to conceal their background. It was only with the appearance of the first scholarly accounts of the movement in the second half of the nineteenth century that the term came to be used for the whole variety of phenomena connected by the authors to Frank’s activity. Sources from Frank’s era, however, provide several different perspectives. In Jewish accounts, his followers are normally not presented as a separate group but as an offshoot of preexisting heretical movements, most notably of Sabbatianism. The majority of Christian observers saw the Frankists as a Jewish sect opposed to the Talmud. The Frankists initially thought of themselves as a branch of Judaism opposed to the authority of the rabbis and rejecting some elements of rabbinic tradition. Subsequently, Frankists redefined themselves as a separate religious group, practically independent from hitherto existing forms of both Judaism and Christianity.
One of the most famous and critically acclaimed Yiddish-language theaters in the world. The Moscow State Yiddish Theater (also referred to as MosGOSET or simply GOSET, from [Moskovskii] Gosudarstvennyi Evreiskii Teatr) was, in the words of the Yiddish literary critic and cultural activist Nakhmen Mayzel, “our greatest theatrical marvel.” Widely considered one of the best theaters in the Soviet Union, it was often heralded by the government as a model of Jewish cultural achievement under communism.
(1773–1839), educator, writer, and a central figure in the Haskalah. Yosef Perl was born in Tarnopol to a wealthy family. His father, Todros, was a wine merchant and for some time also leased the communal concession for the tax on meat. In his youth, much to the displeasure of his father, Yosef was attracted to Hasidism. He became a partner in his father’s business and later an independent tax farmer. On business trips to Vienna, Hungary, and Galicia he met many maskilim and was influenced in particular by those in Brody, especially Dov Ber Gintsburg. Perl was also inspired by Menaḥem Mendel Lefin, who for a time lived nearby.
The earliest stage in the development of Jewish satire is exemplified by the Purim play, based typically on subjects related to the biblical Book of Esther. In the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, these plays were presented in a festive atmosphere of thanksgiving for the miracle of Jewish survival. In this spirit, Jews permitted themselves to poke fun at their humiliated persecutors. A limited time frame of one or two days annually at the holiday of Purim moderated the meanest of the satires, as did rabbinical supervision. Over time, however, the objects of satire shifted from gentile oppressors to Jewish communal leadership.
A city on the Hnylopiat’ River (Dnieper basin), Berdychiv (Yid., Barditshev; Rus., Berdichev; Pol., Berdyczów) is the district center of Ukraine’s Zhytomyr oblast. From 1569 it belonged to the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth; from 1793 the town was in the Volhynia province of the Russian Empire and from 1844 in Kiev province (district center from 1846).
(1887–1985), artist. Marc Chagall was one of the most prominent European artists of the modern age. To this day, the frequent exhibitions of his work in many countries continue to draw large crowds. His art is polyphonic, combining the formal concerns of several modernist trends with cultural representations and an interest in the fantastic and the grotesque. Chagall combined a variety of sources, including aspects of Jewish, Russian, and French culture and images from Christian art, in his own whimsical art, based on his reinvented biography.
(1520?–1572), rabbi and yeshiva head in Kraków, considered one of the greatest Ashkenazic legalists; known by the acronym Rema’. Mosheh Isserles studied with his father, a leader of the Kraków community, but his principal teacher was Shalom Shakhnah, the head of the Lublin yeshiva, who was the official chief rabbi of the district. Shakhnah was regarded as a rigorous legalist, and was given to using the convoluted method of argumentation known as pilpul in his teaching. According to a somewhat dubious tradition, Isserles’ first wife was Shakhnah’s daughter.
Jewish newspapers and periodicals have been published in the main three Jewish languages (Hebrew, Yiddish, and Ladino) and have also appeared in the primary languages of countries in which Jews have lived. The first Jewish newspaper, Gazeta de Amsterdam, was published in Ladino in Amsterdam (1674–1699). A short-lived Yiddish newspaper, Kurant, soon followed (1686–1687); however, other early efforts at news reporting in Yiddish did not succeed. In 1784, German supporters of the Haskalah movement created the Hebrew-language, largely literary Ha-Me’asef (The Harvester).
Town in the Czech Republic, 50 kilometers north of Prague. Terezín (Ger., Theresienstadt) was established in 1780 as a fortress town with a military garrison. Presumably, a small number of Jews (mainly soldiers and merchants) lived there from the town’s beginnings. A Jewish military doctor is mentioned in a record dating from 1836, three Jewish families lived there in 1843, and a prayer room was functioning by 1861. Jewish settlement reached its height in 1890 (with 222 persons, representing 3% of the total population). The local prayer society was connected to the religious community of Litoměřice (Ger., Leitmeritz). The cemetery contains about 90 Jewish graves, including those of residents, prisoners of war, and civilian refugees from Galicia and Bucovina from the World War I period.
Providing assistance to the weak and needy is a religious and social tradition in the Jewish community. The attitude toward giving is rooted in the recognition that an impoverished person is an integral part of the local community and as such is bound by its norms; yet, all members of the community are entitled to a dignified existence. Poverty does not translate into exclusion from society and therefore does not grant the poor any special privileges with respect to conduct and acceptance of the community’s authority. For this reason, even those who receive assistance are not exempt from participating in communal efforts. Jewish halakhic principles hold that even a person maintained by charity is obligated to give charity.
The Yiddish folk song was sung and disseminated by Jews primarily of Eastern Europe. It constitutes a lyrical reflection of the thoughts, feelings, and experiences of the Jewish people in Yiddish. The songs shed light on religious and secular practices and customs, holidays, and celebrations and convey personal insights into daily life and historical events. Manuscript collections of folk songs exist from as far back as the sixteenth century, although systematic collection and publication did not begin until the end of the nineteenth century.
Merchants’ and artisans’ guilds were introduced into Eastern Europe during the thirteenth century by German immigrants. Taking their cue from West European counterparts, members of East European guilds sought to exclude Jews from the organizations. Despite such restrictions, Jewish artisans continued to work in trades; disputes subsequently erupted between Christian guilds and Jewish artisans.
(1883–1955), literary critic. Shmuel Niger was born in Dukor, Belorussia, to Zev Volf and Brokhe Tsharni. His father, a fervent Lubavitcher Hasid, died in 1889, leaving Shmuel’s mother a widow with five sons (he being the fourth) and a daughter. Two of Niger’s younger male siblings achieved renown. Borekh “Vladek” Tsharni (1886–1938) became a leading socialist agitator and theoretician in Eastern Europe and the United States. Daniel Tsharni (1888–1959) was a celebrated Yiddish poet.
The complex of beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors usually comprehended in the Hebrew phrase yir’at shamayim (lit., “awe [or reverence] of Heaven”) or the Yiddish word frumkayt, piety in Judaism is marked by a constant striving to live in God’s presence and to fulfill His will, both by conforming to the norms of strict Jewish practice and in terms of the inner direction of the heart. While there have been significant differences in the religious attitudes of Jews ranging across seven or eight centuries, across diverse subregions, and especially along the fault line of Hasidism and its opponents, some general characteristics of Jewish piety in Eastern Europe can still be described.
The seventeenth-century Hebrew chronicler Gavri’el ben Yehoshu‘a Schossburg characterized the historical status of the Jewish community in medieval and early modern Poland as “a delight to all the lands of the Exile for its Torah, honor and greatness” (Petaḥ teshuvah, 1651 4a). By the end of the seventeenth century, Polish Jewry had the highest number of Jews and the most individual communities of any Jewish population center; at least until the Shoah, the majority of Jews in the world could trace their ancestry to this region. Jews in Poland enjoyed extensive autonomy and collective economic prosperity, while developing sophisticated institutions of communal governance. Their rich cultural life included a complex infrastructure of religious and educational institutions, a wealth of significant additions to the Jewish library, and the cultivation and elaboration of received Ashkenazic and other traditions. Later generations have often regarded the precedents set by Polish Jewry in such areas as communal autonomy, education, halakhah, and Jewish self-definition as classic models.
A minor Jewish festival observed annually on the fourteenth of the Jewish month of Adar (February or March in the Gregorian calendar), Purim (Pirem in Polish dialects of Yiddish) celebrates the survival of the Jews of Persia despite a plot to annihilate them, and is the only Jewish holiday originally established in the Diaspora. The biblical Scroll of Esther recounts the story, including details about the instigation of the plot by a villainous official, Haman, and the Jews’ successful turning of the tables against their enemies.
The name given by Ion Antonescu, Romania’s pro-German dictator, to the Ukrainian region between the rivers Dniester and Bug occupied following the German–Romanian attack on the Soviet Union of 22 June 1941. Between 250,000 and 300,000 Jews died there during the occupation. Many of the victims were deportees from Bucovina and Bessarabia; of the 147,000 Jews sent to Transnistria from these areas between 1941 and 1943, at least 90,000 died, the majority of typhus and starvation. The number of Ukrainian Jews who were murdered or died from disease in Transnistria from September 1941 to November 1943 ranges from 130,000 to at least 170,000. A large number of these were shot by Romanians, who executed 15,000–20,000 Jews in Odessa in October 1941 in reprisals for the blowing up of the Romanian army headquarters, massacred 43,000–48,000 Jews in the district of Bogdanovka, and handed several thousand others over to local German settlers, who murdered them.
Political party that sought Jewish national autonomy in the Diaspora. Following the 1905 Russian Revolution, a small circle of public intellectuals organized under the leadership of the historian Simon Dubnow and Yisroel Efroikin to form the Folkspartey (Folks Party) in Saint Petersburg in 1906. The party, whose leadership also included Meir Kreinin, S. An-ski, Ya‘akov Ze’ev Latzky-Bertholdi, Nokhem Shtif, and Joseph Tschernikov, advanced a platform based on Dubnow’s doctrine of Diaspora Nationalism (autonomism) as expounded in his Pisma o starom i novom evreistve (Letters on Old and New Judaism; 1907).
To treat genres of Jewish humor, this entry includes two articles, on oral and literary traditions, respectively. For further discussion, see Badkhonim; Cartoons; Parody; Purim-shpil; and Satire.
Appointed by the Germans during World War II, a Judenrat (pl., Judenräte) was a Jewish council; an Ältestenrat (pl., Ältestenräte) was a council of elders. The activities of the Judenräte mark one of the most controversial issues of Jewish life during the Holocaust: some regard the councils as institutions that weakened the internal strength of the Jewish communities, while others claim that Judenräte helped the Jewish public carry on its struggle for survival.
Judenräte and Other Representative Bodies
The Society for Handicraft and Agricultural Work among the Jews of Russia (Obshchestvo Remeslennago i Zemledelecheskago Truda Sredi Evreev v Rossii). In the late nineteenth century, a number of attempts were made by Jews in the Russian Empire to found organizations that could promote economic and occupational change for Jews. The tsarist regime was very wary about allowing the formation of an organization that promoted change, but various attempts were made to circumvent the legal restrictions.
(1790–1867), rabbi, Talmudist, maskil, and scholar of Wissenschaft des Judentums (Jewish studies). Shelomoh Yehudah Rapoport (known also by the acronym Shir) was born into a rabbinical family in Lwów. He received a traditional Jewish education and in 1810 married the daughter of Aryeh Leib ha-Kohen Heller, a famous Galician rabbinic scholar and author of Ketsot ha-ḥoshen (2 parts; 1788 and 1796).
Hebrew monthly. Ha-Shiloaḥ, published between 1896 and 1926, was the leading Hebrew-language literary journal at the beginning of the twentieth century. Founded by the Aḥi’asaf publishing house in Warsaw, the publication was predominantly inspired by its founding editor, Ahad Ha-Am, who had been appointed head of the institution in 1896. Ahad Ha-Am intended the monthly to serve not only as a vehicle to raise the national consciousness of the Jewish people, but also as a central platform for discussion and analysis on past and present issues relevant to Judaism. Its name refers to a river mentioned in Isaiah 8:6, “The waters of Shiloaḥ flow slowly,” characterizing the journal’s moderate temper.
(1875–1943), poet and translator. Sha’ul Tchernichowsky was born in the village of Mikhailovka (Tavria province), on the Russia–Ukraine border. His family was rooted in a non-Jewish environment and was also closely associated with the Haskalah and the Ḥibat Tsiyon movement. Tchernichowsky was first taught exclusively in Russian and only gained a Hebrew education after attending a local modern heder. According to his autobiography, he began to write creatively at the age of 12. Ultimately, he and Ḥayim Naḥman Bialik became the most influential poets of the period of Hebrew Revival.
(1881–1921), Hebrew writer. Yosef Ḥayim Brenner was born in Novy Mlini, a shtetl in the district of Chernigov, Ukraine, and murdered near Tel Aviv on 2 May 1921. From 1894 to 1897 Brenner studied at the Pochep yeshiva. Brenner then spent time in Białystok, returned to Pochep, and eventually went to Gomel to prepare for a gymnasium education, a goal he soon abandoned. Instead, he continued to study Hebrew literature and earned his income by teaching Hebrew. This period of his life is reflected in his first novel, Ba-Ḥoref (In Winter; 1904).
Industrial city in eastern Ukraine. The Jewish community of Dnipropetrovs’k, a city with a population of more than 1,000,000, was in decline at the end of the twentieth century, but remained one of the largest in Ukraine. According to the 2001 population census, the “core” Jewish population was 22,000. The “extended” Jewish population (those meeting the requirements of Israel’s Law of Return) was estimated between 35,000 and 50,000.
In the Russian Empire, the year 1917 brought two revolutions, one that ended hundreds of years of tsarist rule and the other that inaugurated nearly three-quarters of a century of Bolshevik or Communist rule. Almost all Jews in the Russian Empire and abroad welcomed the first revolution, which came in February (new style, March), but initially, few were enthusiastic about the takeover of power by the Bolsheviks eight months later. Within weeks of the first revolution, on 22 March (new style, 2 April) the Provisional Government—in power until a Constituent Assembly could be called to determine the character of the successor Russian state—abolished all the legal restrictions on ethnic and religious communities, including Jews. For the first time since they had been admitted to the Russian Empire, Jews gained full equality with all other citizens. The tsarist regime had confined Jews to the Pale of Settlement and had severely restricted their opportunities in agriculture, the professions, military service, and education. It had completely closed off governmental and civil service positions to them, unless they agreed to convert to Christianity. During World War I the authorities had expelled thousands of Jews from their homes in the western part of the empire on the grounds that they might collaborate with the Central Powers invading from the west. Ironically, it was this expulsion that broke the confinement of Jews to the Pale, at least de facto, and brought large numbers of them to the interior of Russia. When the Provisional Government abolished the Pale de jure, large numbers of Jews made their way to the two capitals, Moscow and Saint Petersburg, as well as to other Russian cities and towns formerly closed to them.
(Schreiber; 1762–1839), rabbi and preeminent halakhic authority. Mosheh Sofer, who came to be known as Ḥatam Sofer, was born into a modest family in Frankfurt am Main. Early on, the gifted boy was taken under the wing of Pinḥas Horowitz (1730–1805), the rabbi of the community, head of its prestigious yeshiva, and one of the outstanding Talmudic scholars of his generation. He also studied several years at the yeshiva of Tevele Scheuer of Mainz. Even more significantly, Sofer became deeply attached to Natan Adler (1741–1800), a charismatic figure who gathered about him a pious circle of devoted followers. The unusual esoteric practices of this group drew the ire of the community, and Adler was threatened with a ban in 1779. It is ironic and revealing that the future conservative ideologue spent his formative years as a disciple of such an unconventional master.
(Pol. and Rus., Tarnopol), city in western Ukraine (previously in eastern Galicia). Tarnopol was founded in 1540 by the Polish governor, Grand Crown Hetman Jan Tarnowski. Jews settled there soon after its founding.
(1865–1921), writer and thinker. Mikhah Yosef Berdyczewski (or Berdichevsky) was born in Międzyboż (Medzhibizh), Ukraine, in the cradle of Hasidism, to a family descended from generations of rabbis. He received a traditional Hasidic education, and as the firstborn son was destined to inherit his father’s rabbinical title. Berdyczewski spent his childhood and youth in the town of Dubova near Uman, in a deeply religious and conservative environment. During his adolescence, however, the harmony between his beliefs and his ancestral traditions was undermined by his fascination with the Haskalah and his enthusiastic delving into its literature. As a result, he was forced to comply with his extremely religious father-in-law’s demand that he divorce his first wife.
To treat the subject of censorship, this entry includes three articles. The first treats the period before 1800 and provides an overview of what might be termed “internal” censorship or “self-censorship” by Jewish authorities as well as a brief review of church censorship of Jewish writings in Eastern Europe. The second article treats government censorship in the Russian Empire, and the third, censorship in the Soviet Union. For discussion of haskamot, see Approbation.
Zionist pioneering movement. Local pioneering groups had been founded from the earliest days of Zionist settlement activity during the First and Second Aliyahs (1882–1903; 1904–1914). However, larger regional and national frameworks appeared only from 1917 onward, the year of the Balfour Declaration, the Russian Revolution, and the emergence of newly established states in Eastern Europe. The founders of He-Ḥaluts believed that no political or propaganda accomplishment would benefit Zionism in the long run unless it were complemented by deeds of personal fulfillment, which became a primary objective in the organization’s overall ideology. In other words, to actually implement the principles of He-Ḥaluts, the individual was expected both to identify with the Histadrut (Labor Federation) and to live on a cooperative kibbutz in Palestine.
City in Belarus. The first reference to Jews in Vitsyebsk (more commonly known to Jews as Vitebsk) dates from the mid-sixteenth century. In 1627 a synagogue was built and in 1634, Jews received permission to engage in commerce, have their own cemetery and synagogue, and buy houses and land in the town. In the organizational structure of the council (Va‘ad) of Jews in Lithuania, the Vitebsk community was under the jurisdiction of the community of Brest. Starting in 1706 Vitebsk Jews began recording community activities in their own pinkas. In 1765 sources record 667 Jews and, in 1772, when Vitebsk was incorporated into the Russian Empire, 1,227. In the eighteenth century Rabbi Menaḥem Mendel (of Vitebsk) and Shneur Zalman of Liady lived in the city. Late in the century Vitebsk became a main center of Lubavitch Hasidism, although Misnagdim continued to live there alongside the Hasidism. Among its well-known religious leaders were Rabbis Yitsḥak Aizik Bogorad and Yekuti’el Zalman Landa. In the nineteenth century the Jewish population increased from 2,973 (40% of the total population) in 1808 to 33,455 (51%) in 1897.
(d. 1609), rabbi and scholar, known as Maharal of Prague. Yehudah Leib (or Löw [Heb., Liva’]; Maharal is an acronym based on the honorific Morenu ha-Rav Liva’, “our teacher, the Rabbi Löw”) was respected as an important halakhist—he was cited as authoritative, for example, by Yo’el Sirkes in Bayit ḥadash—but his fame was the result of his theological works: he brought the medieval genre of exposition of agadah (nonlegal Talmudic literature) to its peak in early modern times. Maharal’s extensive output took different forms—straightforward commentaries on Talmudic legends; commentaries on specific religious literature (the Talmudic tractate Avot, the Passover Haggadah, the legends in Rashi’s commentary on the Torah); and other works organized by subjects, historical and ethical—yet he was always true to his own method of detailed analysis and exposition of the sayings of ancient sages. Working within this traditional model, which he perfected, he presented a unique worldview, one of the most creative and original systems of thought developed by East European Jewry.
(1843–1910), Hebrew, Yiddish, and Russian writer; maskil. Mosheh Leib Lilienblum was born in Kaidan (Kedainiai), Lithuania, where he received a Talmudic education. His father married him off at the age of 13 to a girl of 11, and he moved into his father-in-law’s house in Wilkomir (Ukmergė). In addition to his intense Torah studies, Lilienblum began to study medieval Jewish philosophy and was exposed to modern Hebrew literature. He began an association with the moderate Haskalah movement and published articles in the Hebrew press—specifically, Ha-Magid and Ha-Karmel. This change in Lilienblum’s faith and worldview (though he continued to live as an observant Jew) provoked persecution at the hands of the uncompromising religious authorities of Wilkomir.
(1895–1952), Yiddish poet, prose writer, playwright, and essayist. Perets Markish was born to impoverished parents in Polonnoye, a town in Volhynia. He received a heder education and left home at a young age, working at various incidental jobs, including as a choirboy for a cantor. During World War I he was drafted into the Russian army. After his discharge from the military during the March Revolution of 1917, he settled in Ekaterinoslav.
City on the Teterev River (a tributary of the Dnieper); administrative center of Ukraine’s Zhytomyr oblast. In existence since the ninth century, Zhytomyr (Rus., Zhitomir; Pol., Żytomierz) was from the 1330s attached to the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, and from 1569 it was a district center of Kiev province in the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth. From 1793, it belonged to the Russian Empire, and from 1795 it served as a provincial center.
(1859–1922), Hebrew and Yiddish writer and editor, literary critic, translator, and poet. David Frishman was born to a family of wealthy merchants in Zgierz, near Łódź. When he was two years old, his family moved to Łódź, and Frishman received a private education that included traditional Jewish studies, French, and German. At 16, he published his first story (written at age 13), followed by poems, translations, and articles for various Hebrew newspapers and journals (Ha-Tsefirah, Ha-Shaḥar, Ha-Boker or). Frishman’s literary views were influenced by European early modernism. As a critic he greatly valued the aesthetic form, rejecting Ahad Ha-Am and Yosef Klausner’s idea that a good writer expresses the national spirit. However, Frishman’s own short stories are simplistic, didactic, and sentimental, in the vein of Haskalah literature. Some of them show the influence of fin de siècle neoromanticism.
(1840–1908), playwright, theater director, poet, and impresario; considered the “Father of Yiddish Theater.” Avrom Goldfadn’s productions emerged during the period of the Haskalah movement in Russia and the cultural-nationalistic activities of East European minorities. The first director to create a viable Jewish national theater, Goldfadn built up an audience and initiated its members into Western aesthetics, secularism, and a modern Jewish consciousness.
(1831–1892), the most important Hebrew poet of the nineteenth century; leading figure of the Russian Haskalah movement. Yehudah Leib Gordon was born in Vilna in 1831 and started writing Hebrew poetry at a young age. He soon became close to the circle of maskilim in that city, a group that included Adam ha-Kohen (Avraham Dov Lebensohn) and his son Mikhah Yosef Lebensohn. Writers associated with this group sought to expand their poetic and literary work and commitment to the renaissance of Hebrew letters in an Enlightenment key.
Yiddish daily newspaper, published in Warsaw between 1908 and 1939. Haynt (Today) was one of the two longest running and most important Yiddish daily papers published in Warsaw in the early 1900s. In view of the success of the earlier popular and inexpensive Yiddish daily Idishes tageblat (1906–1910), its energentic editor, Shmuel Yankev Yatskan (1874–1936), founded Haynt with his associate publishers, brothers Noyekh and Nekhemye Finkelshteyn.
A network of secular Zionist educational institutions that functioned in Poland in the interwar period; the language of instruction was Hebrew. The network operated kindergartens, elementary schools, high schools, teachers’ seminaries, and agricultural schools. Additionally it provided pedagogical courses, evening classes for adults, and lending libraries; and published pedagogical journals, educational textbooks, and children’s journals.
An executive board that was chosen to run an autonomous Jewish community. A kahal served as a Jewish community council, or as a decision-making committee of a kehilah. Throughout the history of the Jewish Diaspora, even before the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE, the Jewish community was organized as a self-governing community, running its internal affairs according to its own laws, later codified as halakhah and continuously amended and supplemented by time-bound statutes and legislation known as takanot. This autonomy was not idiosyncratic or specific to Jews, but conformed to the basic organization of the premodern state, whether in ancient Rome, medieval Christendom, or Islam. This structure was also present in early modern Europe, in which society as a whole was divided into corporations and estates, including the nobility, the clergy, the peasantry, the townspeople, and the Jews. Each estate had its own specific code of laws, its own courts, and its own tax obligation and collection systems (or relief from such obligations).
For most of the nineteenth century, the Volozhin (Bel., Valozhyn) yeshiva was the most important institution of its type in Eastern Europe. It was founded around the year 1803 by Ḥayim ben Yitsḥak, the leading disciple of the Gaon of Vilna. Ḥayim ben Yitsḥak’s fame attracted many youths to Volozhin, and when the small town could no longer support so many students, he established a yeshiva that provided subsidies to students. His success at dispatching fund raisers enabled him to build a private study hall that allowed the yeshiva to be both financially independent and physically isolated.
(Yisra’el ben Eli‘ezer, “the Besht”; ca. 1700–1760), healer, miracle worker, and religious mystic; leader of Hasidim in Międzyboż (Yid., Mezhbizh; mod. Ukr., Medzhibizh); recognized as founder of the modern Hasidic movement. Yisra’el Ba‘al Shem Tov was born in tiny Okopy Gory Świętej Trójcy (a town whose name means Hill Fortification of the Holy Trinity, referred to in Jewish sources as Okopy), a then recently civilianized military outpost near the southern border of Ukraine (then part of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth). He spent his early life mainly in various towns of Podolia—one of which was the minor commercial center of Tłuste—finally settling in 1740 in the prosperous regional military, administrative, and trade emporium of Międzyboż (owned by the Czartoryski family), whose Jewish community was dominated by wealthy commercial families.
Territory in the far eastern reaches of the Soviet Union, designated in 1928 as the Jewish homeland and as a Yidishe Avtonomne Gegnt (Jewish autonomous region) in 1934. Yiddish was the territory’s official language.
Jewish section of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Socialists viewed nations as ephemeral creations of the capitalist order, and expected them to disappear with the advent of socialism. Vladimir Lenin pointed approvingly to European Jews, who, in his view, had already begun assimilating into the nations among whom they lived. In 1913 Joseph Stalin argued that since Jews lacked a common territory, language, and economy, they did not constitute a nation.
Groundbreaking and contentious interdenominational conference that took place in Pest, Hungary, from December 1868 to February 1869. Having achieved a compromise with Austria that granted Jews independence in domestic affairs in 1867, the new Hungarian government sought to integrate Jews more completely into its general society. To this end, Jews were granted emancipation and the government worked with liberal-minded Jewish leaders to create a consistory-type, autonomous nationwide Jewish organization that could both regulate internal communal affairs and present a unified front in external relations.
Congress of Jews from Hungary and Transylvania
(Gaon of Vilna; 1720–1797), Torah scholar, kabbalist, and communal leader. The Gaon of Vilna (known also by the acronym Gra, for Gaon Rabbi Eliyahu) was a spiritual giant, a role model and source of inspiration for generations, and the central cultural figure of Lithuanian Jewry. Eliyahu ben Shelomoh Zalman was born into a rabbinical and scholarly family, and following a short period of study in a heder, studied Torah with his father. At age 7, he was sent to study with Mosheh Margoliot, rabbi of Keydan (Lith., Kėdainiai). Soon thereafter, he began to study on his own, and at 18, left Vilna to go into “exile”—a period of wandering through Jewish communities of Poland and Germany.
(Culture League), general name of a number of cultural and social organizations formed in the 1920s and 1930s in Eastern Europe as well as in certain countries of Western Europe and the Americas. The Kultur-lige was founded in Kiev during the period of the Central Rada (the Ukrainian Council that declared an independent state in January 1918), early in 1918. Its aim was to promote the development of all spheres of contemporary Yiddish culture, including education, literature, theater, art, and music.
Hebrew newspaper. Ha-Tsefirah (The Morning or The Dawn) was the first Hebrew newspaper in Poland, founded in Warsaw and issued between 1862 and 1931. Ḥayim Zelig Słonimski established the paper as a weekly whose primary purpose was to report news concerning Jews and to provide popular articles about natural sciences and the latest inventions.
From their earliest days, a small proportion of East European Jews engaged in agriculture. Jews began to penetrate the region’s agricultural economy in the late sixteenth century. In particular, many Jews leased the great latifundia of Ukraine, paying noble landowners large sums that the lessees recouped by running the estates. In this way, some Jews became involved in agricultural management. From at least the sixteenth century, also, Jewish merchants and drovers in southeastern Poland were prominent in the cattle trade. They purchased oxen and other cattle, often in Moldavia, and drove them to major trade fairs chiefly in western German lands.
A peninsula in the Black Sea with a multiethnic population. Since 1992, Crimea has been an autonomous republic within independent Ukraine. Russia annexed the region from the Ottoman Empire in 1783. From 1921 it was an autonomous republic of the Russian SSR; it was transferred to the Ukrainian SSR in 1954. Jews have lived there since at least the first century CE, consisting of Karaite, Krymchak, and Ashkenazic elements. The Jewish population remained below 10,000 until the 1880s.
City in southwestern Ukraine, lying on the Prut River. Chernivtsi (Rom., Cernăuți; Ger., Czernowitz; Yid., Tshernovits) is the current capital of the Chernivtsi region. The presence of Jews there was first mentioned in 1408. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the number of Jewish inhabitants increased significantly. During this period the Jews mainly spoke Yiddish and were active as traders. The kahal (community), led by an elected judge and a rabbi, enjoyed limited autonomy and the right to its own jurisdictions.
Branch of Hasidism founded by Shneur Zalman of Liady (ca. 1745–1812). The townlet of Lyubavichi (Yid., Lubavitsh; commonly, Lubavitch), some 50 miles west of Smolensk, was the center between 1814 and 1915 of the main branch of Ḥabad Hasidism (Ḥabad, or ḤaBaD, is an acronym for ḥokhmah, binah, da‘at—“wisdom, understanding, knowledge”). Shneur Zalman emphasized an intellectualist form of spirituality and a systematized version of the teachings of Yisra’el Ba‘al Shem Tov (ca. 1700–1760) and Dov Ber, the Magid of Mezritsh (1704–1772).
Orthodox Zionist movement whose name was derived from the words merkaz ruḥani (spiritual center), and whose slogan was “the Land of Israel for the People of Israel according to the Torah of Israel.” The movement advocated the realization of the Zionist vision and incorporated some of its modern and revolutionary characteristics. The adoption of Zionist ideology, however, was accomplished for the most part by denying its secular and innovative aspects, or by assigning religious interpretations to its basic tenets.
(Pol., Śląsk; Ger., Schlesien; Cz., Slezsko), a region at the borders of Prussia, Saxony, Bohemia, Moravia, and Poland. Silesia was disputed territory from the tenth century. Around 990, it was separated from the Bohemian lands and became part of Poland. In the period of the regional fracturing of Poland, the majority of the Silesian princes accepted the sovereignty of the Czech king, which Kazimierz the Great eventually acknowledged, abdicating Silesia to Bohemia. The Habsburgs ruled it from 1526, and as a result of the Silesian Wars (1740–1763), the majority of its territory came under Prussian rule, with only the southeastern regions remaining in the realm of the Habsburgs. The latter region, Austrian Silesia—comprising the principalities of Teschen (Pol., Cieszyn; Cz., Těšín), Troppau (Pol., Opawa; Cz., Opava), and Jägerndorf (Pol., Karniów, Cz., Krnov)—remained under Habsburg rule from 1742 to 1918. After World War I, the Opava and Krnov areas of Austrian Silesia became part of Czechoslovakia, while the Cieszyn region was to be divided according to the results of a plebiscite, which never took place, however, due to the earlier annexation of the western part of this region by Czechoslovakia during the Polish–Soviet war in 1920. The remaining part of Cieszyn region, together with the eastern strip of Prussian Upper Silesia, became Polish and was made the Autonomous Silesian Voivodeship in 1922. This was enlarged with the annexation from Czechoslovakia of the western part of Cieszyn region in 1938. The majority of Upper Silesia and all of Lower Silesia remained part of Germany. After World War II, all of German Silesia was annexed to Poland.
An educational and civic association devoted to the acculturation of Jews in the Pale of Settlement, the Society for the Promotion of Culture among the Jews of Russia (known in Russian as Obshchestva dlia Rasprostraneniia Prosveshcheniia Mezhdu Evreiami v Rossii; OPE) was founded in 1863 during a period of liberalization. It remained active until it was forced to close in 1929 under the Bolshevik government’s program to abolish independent political and cultural institutions. The OPE experienced three phases of programming, reflecting the internal state of the Jewish community in Russia and adjusting to its changing relations with the Russian government.
Society for the Promotion of Culture among the Jews of Russia
Society for the Promotion of Culture (or Enlightenment) among the Jews of Russia
Society for the Promotion of Culture among the Jews
Society for the Promotion of Culture among the Jews in Russia
Society for the Promotion of Enlightenment among the Jews of Russia
Society for the Spread of Enlightenment among the Jews of Russia
Jewish youth movements in Eastern Europe, particularly in the interwar period, achieved extraordinary strength, numbers, and influence as a result of a number of interelated contemporaneous factors, in addition to the particularly pressured conditions under which, for example, all of Polish Jewry lived. Factors included the tremendous expansion of state education (school attendance became mandatory in Galicia in 1867, and in all of Poland after World War I); the postponement of employment and marriage to a more advanced age; the new psychological and educational theories that recognized childhood and adolescence as stages of life with needs distinct from those of adulthood; and the undermining of traditional religious values, which in turn empowered young people to propose their own solutions to social and national problems.
The term Ashkenaz is mentioned in the Hebrew Bible in Genesis 10:3 and 1 Chronicles 1:6 as the dwelling place of a descendant of Noah’s son Japhet, ancestor of later Europeans. In Jeremiah 51:27 it seems to be part of Asia, perhaps Asia Minor, and is located northwest of Palestine. How the place name eventually supplanted earlier descriptive names for German-Jewish lands, such as the Rhineland (Rinus) or the lands of King Lothar (Lotir) is not clear.
(also Brest Litovsk; Pol., Brześć nad Bugiem; Yid., Brisk or Brisk de-Lita [Brisk of Lithuania]), city now in Belarus. Located at the confluence of the Bug and Mukhavets Rivers, Brest was a district capital and a large commercial center. Jews settled in Brest at the beginning of the fourteenth century. In 1388, they received a privilegium (charter) from Lithuanian Grand Duke Vytautas. It repeated the terms of the Charter of Bolesław, granted to Jews in Poland a century earlier, and assured Jews of occupational freedom and communal autonomy, as well as security of life, limb, and property.
(1860–1941), Russian Jewish historian and ideologue of Jewish Diaspora nationalism. Simon Dubnow was born in Mstislavl in the Belorussian sector of the Russian Pale of Settlement to a religiously observant family; his father worked in the lumber business, a common Jewish occupation at the time. One of Dubnow’s brothers, Wolf, became a Biluist (a group of Russian Jewish youth who pioneered modern settlement in the Land of Israel) and emigrated temporarily to Palestine after the pogroms of 1881–1882. Their grandfather Bentsiyon was known throughout the region as an esteemed rabbinic scholar who taught according to the rigorous methods of the Gaon of Vilna.
Acronym referring to the “[Evil] Decrees of 1648–1649.” The Ukrainian lands were part of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth in the first half of the seventeenth century. To the south, Crimea—a region bordering the Black Sea—was part of the Ottoman Empire and was populated largely by Muslim Tatars. Most of the land in Ukraine was owned by Catholic Polish magnates and nobles, while the peasants were mainly Eastern Orthodox Ukrainians. The urban centers were home to a mixture of Poles, Ukrainians, Jews, and members of other groups. In the southern parts of Ukraine were groups known as Cossacks. They were Orthodox Christians and mainly—but not exclusively—of Slavic origin. They were not farmers but maintained themselves sometimes by hunting and fishing, and largely by warfare and the spoils of war. The Crimean Tatars often attacked the Slavic peasants in the north, taking booty and slaves, and in return, the Cossacks did the same to the Tatars. In the course of time, the Polish crown began to employ the autonomous Cossacks for the defense of the region.
Capital city of the Republic of Moldova. From the beginning of the sixteenth century, Kishinev (officially, Chişinău; Yid., Keshenev) was in the principality of Moldova (Moldavia), which was annexed to the Russian Empire in 1818 and called Bessarabia. In 1918–1940 and 1941–1944 it was in the Kingdom of Romania and, in 1940–1941 and 1944–1991, it served as capital of the Moldavian SSR. The earliest documentation of a Jewish presence dates to the beginning of the eighteenth century.
To survey the history of the rabbinate in Eastern Europe, this entry is divided chronologically into two articles, the first covering the period up to 1800 and the second from 1800 until 2000. For religious and scholarly writings by rabbis, see Rabbinic Literature; for the role of the rabbi’s wife, see Rebetsin; for government-appointed rabbis, see Crown Rabbi; for rabbinic education, see Seminary and Yeshiva; for Hasidic rebbes, see Hasidism.
One of several Soviet anti-fascist groups formed after the Nazi invasion of the USSR in June 1941. On 24 August 1941, two dozen Jewish cultural figures, led by the Yiddish actor and theater director Solomon Mikhoels (1890–1948), issued an international radio appeal to Jews around the world to unite in the struggle against Nazi Germany. To allow Jews to appeal to their fellow Jews was an extraordinary step for the Kremlin. But Stalin understood the need for the regime to repair relations with the Western powers in the face of the German onslaught.
During the Revolution of 1905, or, more accurately, 1904–1907, sizable sectors of the Jewish community in the Russian Empire entered the arena of national politics. The upheaval began in the fall of 1904, when public opinion turned sharply against the government in reaction to the ruinous defeats the country suffered in its ill-considered war against Japan.
From the beginning of Jewish settlement in Eastern Europe, moneylending and money dealing in its various forms represented—alongside commerce, tax farming, and leasing—a central area of their economic activities. Into the nineteenth century, Jewish entrepreneurs were typically involved in more than one of these areas. Furthermore, in the early modern period Jewish communities played a significant role in the monetary economy of Eastern Europe by borrowing from church institutions and the aristocracy. In the nineteenth century—considerably later than in Western or Central Europe—the whole of Eastern Europe witnessed the emergence of prominent figures who served, either primarily or exclusively, as private bankers. With the rapid spread of joint stock banks, such figures declined in significance by World War I. However, the proportion of Jewish capital in these public companies remained significant, and Jews continued to be prominent in the management of those company’s affairs.
(1884–1952), Yiddish novelist and dramatist. Born in Okhrimovo, Ukraine, to a wealthy family, Dovid Bergelson received a traditional Jewish education in heder and a general education through private tutors. His parents died while he was a teenager and he was raised under the supervision of his older brothers. He settled in Kiev in 1903, where he remained with some interruptions until 1921; and in that city he was both a witness and a central participant in its transformation into an important center of modern Yiddish culture.
(Eng. and Fr., Jassy; Yid., Yos; Heb., Yas), town in Moldavia (northeastern Romania) on the Bahlui River; an important trading center with links to Bucovina, Bessarabia, Ukraine, and Russia; capital of the former principality of Moldavia (1565–1862). The largest and most important Jewish community of Moldavia lived in Iaşi. The presence of Jews was first documented in the late sixteenth century when Sephardic Jews arrived accompanying the new rulers appointed by the Turkish sultan. The oldest tomb inscription in the local cemetery probably dates to 1610.
This entry includes articles on fiction writing and the development of the novel in Hebrew and Yiddish, respectively. For further discussion of works in those languages, see Hebrew Literature; and Yiddish Literature. For works by Jews in other languages, see Belarusian Literature; Czech Literature; German Literature; Hungarian Literature; Polish Literature; Romanian Literature; Russian Literature; and Ukrainian Literature.
(1880–1957), Yiddish novelist and playwright. Born in Kutno, Russian Poland, Sholem Asch was the youngest of his Hasidic parents’ 10 children. Traditionally educated and a talented student, he began teaching himself German with the aid of Moses Mendelssohn’s translation of the Bible. Since his parents disapproved of these secular studies, he moved in with relatives in a nearby village, where he became a Torah instructor and for the first time encountered the lives of Polish peasants. Relocating to the town of Włocławek, Asch earned his living writing letters for illiterate people, an experience he appreciated for the insights it offered into human needs and longings.
Karl Marx and most of his followers considered ethnicity a construct of the ruling bourgeoisie in capitalist societies. Ethnicity was designed to divert the attention of the working class away from its economic and political grievances and focus attention on the identities and cultures that divided workers, rather than on the class interests that united them. Thus, the ruling capitalists were said to pit workers of one nation against those of another on the pretext that their primary allegiance should be to the nation, not the class. In World War I, French and British workers on one side, and German and Austrian workers on the other, tried to kill each other out of loyalty to their respective nations. Along with other socialists, Vladimir Lenin, the leader of the Bolshevik faction of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party, viewed this as a tragic strategic error that could occur only because of the shortsightedness and lack of class consciousness of the proletariat. As it matured and was educated by the “vanguard of the proletariat,” the more historically conscious intelligentsia that led the socialist movement, the proletariat would come to realize that its common interests transcended national borders and that all workers together should combat the exploiting capitalists, who themselves were a transnational class.
Jewish conversions to Christianity in Eastern Europe were infrequent in both premodern and modern times. Mass conversions to Christianity occurred at two intervals: to Eastern Orthodoxy during the Khmel’nyts’kyi uprising (1648–1649; gzeyres takh vetat), and to Catholicism by followers of Jakub Frank in the second half of the eighteenth century. Jewish and Christian sources suggest that individual conversions to Judaism also took place.
(Rom., Moldova), region of Romania. Moldavia was a principality founded in the middle of the fourteenth century. Its princes were vassals of the Ottoman Empire from about 1456 until Moldavia’s political union with Walachia in 1859, followed by an administrative union in 1862. Moldavia included Bucovina until 1775 and Bessarabia until 1812. The capitals were Câmpulung, Baia, Siret (fourteenth century until ca. 1380), Suceava (ca. 1380–1565), and Iaşi (1565–1862).
City in Wielkopolska province, Poland; known in Hebrew and Yiddish as Pozna and in German as Posen. Poznań’s Jewish community was one of the earliest to be established on Polish soil; the first reference to Jews living in the town comes from 1379. While tradition dates the town’s synagogue to 1367, there is no documented evidence of its existence until 1449 (the cemetery, however, was first mentioned in 1438). In the second half of the fifteenth century, a legend declared that in 1399 some Jews in Poznań had committed a Host profanation. The same period also saw the establishment of Poznań’s famed yeshiva, known as Lomde Pozna.
Name generally given to the set of military conflicts during the years 1914–1918 that set the armies of Germany, Austria-Hungary, Turkey, and Bulgaria (the Central Powers) against those of Great Britain, France, Russia, Italy, the United States, and other countries (the Allied and Associated Powers, more commonly known as the Allies or the Entente). The geographical scope of the war, the sophistication of weapons employed by both sides, the human cost of the fighting among both soldiers and civilian populations—all of these were at the time unprecedented in the history of warfare, and during the subsequent two decades the experience of the war weighed heavily upon the thinking and behavior not only of political leaders but of virtually all who had been affected by it.
Capital city of the province of Lower Silesia, in Poland. The first reference to Jews in the vicinity of Wrocław (Lat., Vratislavia; Ger., Breslau; Czech, Vratislav) dates to before 1153; the next citation is from the beginning of the thirteenth century. The oldest Jewish gravestone, dated 1203 (for David ben Sar Shalom), indicates that there probably was permanent Jewish settlement at that time. In 1267, a synod of bishops in Wrocław imposed limitations on the Jewish population, yet the restrictions were probably never implemented. The first privilege was granted in about 1273 by Duke Henry IV Probus, confirmed by his successor Henry V in about 1290 (neither has been preserved). At that time, Wrocław had the largest Jewish community in East Central Europe after Prague. The main occupations of Jews were moneylending, trade, and, marginally, artisanry.
(Ger., Siebenbürgen; Hun., Erdély), a province in the western area of current Romania. There is archeological and numismatic evidence of the presence of Jews in Transylvania as early as the times of the Roman rule over Dacia (106–275 CE). The next known reference to a Jew in Transylvania dates to 1357. Until the beginning of the sixteenth century, Jews worked in the main Transylvanian cities (Cluj, Sibiu, Braşov) as tradesmen and creditors, acting as middlemen in commercial and financial relations with neighboring countries (Moldavia, Walachia, the Ottoman Empire, Poland, and Hungary).
In 1734, the Russian state permitted Jewish merchants to visit Kharkov (more properly Khar’kov; Ukr., Khar’kiv) to engage in retail and wholesale trade. Jewish residence in this city outside the Pale of Settlement, however, remained under strict control throughout the imperial period. In 1821, Jews lost their right to enter the city but regained this privilege in 1835 when the governor complained about the loss of more than 10 million rubles in trade revenue.
A messianic movement, established around Shabetai Tsevi (1626–1676), Sabbatianism (often Sabbateanism) erupted in the Ottoman Empire in the second half of the seventeenth century and spread widely among Jews in Europe, North Africa, and Asia.
Imperial Russia and other areas of Eastern Europe did not become fully industrialized until the end of the nineteenth century. Nevertheless, even in its earliest stages, Jews played prominent roles in industry. The two main reasons for this were first, the emergence of a Jewish bourgeoisie, some of whose members had accumulated vast wealth that to a certain extent was invested in industrial development; and second, the Russian government’s policy of seeking to transform the empire’s Jewish residents into contributors who would play a beneficial role in the Russian society and economy. During the first half of the nineteenth century, industrialization in the Russian Empire (which at that time included much of Poland) had begun at a sluggish rate. After the Crimean War (1855), however, production was financed by private wealth, under tight governmental supervision. Gathering speed under new conditions, by the 1880s and 1890s industrialization had advanced rapidly.
The largest nonpolitical organization dedicated to helping Jews in distress all over the world. Generally known as the JDC or “Joint” and headquartered in New York, the organization (until 1931) was called the Joint Distribution Committee of (the American) Funds for Jewish War Sufferers. It was founded on 27 November 1914 with the aim of centralizing allocations of aid to Jews adversely affected by World War I.
American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee
(also Mitnagdim; Heb., opponents), common name for rabbinical opponents of the Hasidic movement, based largely in Lithuania, northern Belorussia, and northeastern Poland, that is, the territory inhabited by Litvaks (Lithuanian Jews). While the terms Menagdim and were first employed in defensive Hasidic writings from the 1770s to describe the rabbinical enemies of the movement, those opponents of Hasidism eventually came to embrace the appellation with pride. Over time, and with the growth of non-Hasidic and anti-Hasidic religious institutions—most notably the Lithuanian yeshivas and the Musar Movement—whose purpose was, at least in part, to counteract the rapid spread of Hasidism, the term Misnagdim took on a positive connotation among non-Hasidic Jews of northeastern Europe, and became almost synonymous with Lithuanian Jewry. (In contemporary Israel, the term Lita’im [Hebrew for Lithuanians] is commonly used instead of Misnagdim.)
[This entry treats the Jewish community of the current Slovak Republic since the 1990s. For earlier history of Jews in the region, see Czechoslovakia.] The Slovak Republic became an independent state in 1993 following the dissolution of the Czech and Slovak Federal Republics. Its constitution guarantees that the country will be a multicultural and multiethnic parliamentary democracy.
City now in Belarus; also known in Polish and Russian as Grodno and in Yiddish as Horodno or Grodne. Grodno’s Jewish community, one of the oldest in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, existed as early as the fourteenth century. Its privilege, allegedly obtained in 1389 from Grand Duke Vytautas, was, however, a forgery dating from the early sixteenth century. The first Jews settled mainly in the western part of the town, near the Old Castle; ultimately their quarter expanded eastward and they also settled in districts owned by noblemen, outside municipal jurisdiction. By 1560, an estimated 1,000 Jews lived in Grodno, and by 1765 this population had expanded to 2,418.
The movement for religious reform in modern Judaism began in Central Europe around the beginning of the nineteenth century as a response to the confrontation between traditional Jewish thought and practices and the values and demands of a modernizing state, society, and culture. The transformations involved both new conceptions of Judaism that were thought to be more in harmony with idealistic philosophy and liturgical reforms motivated by both aesthetic and ideological considerations. From German-speaking Europe, Jewish religious reform spread eastward to Hungary, Bohemia, Galicia, Russia, and Poland. Although differing from German Jewry, where modernized forms of Judaism had become dominant by the second half of the nineteenth century, East European Jewries were to varying degrees also affected and divided by the trend to adjust Judaism to new realities.
Political groups seeking to limit the role of Jews in Central and East European states and societies emerged in the second half of the nineteenth century against the background of economic crisis, ethnic and political tensions, reaction to Jewish emancipation, and the increasing prominence of Jews in economic and cultural life. Such groups appeared first in Germany around 1880 and, shortly thereafter, in Austria-Hungary and elsewhere in Eastern Europe.
A town in present-day Ukraine, about 80 kilometers northeast of L’viv (Pol., Lwów). Brody (Yid., Brod) was founded at the ford over the Styr River (bród is Polish for ford) in 1586 by Stefan Żółkiewski. Jewish settlement began at the end of the sixteenth century and the local kehilah was subordinated to that of Lwów. In the early seventeenth century, an imposing masonry synagogue was built, generally referred to as Brody’s “old fortress synagogue.”
Hebrew newspaper. Ha-Melits (The Advocate) was the first Hebrew-language weekly to appear in tsarist Russia. Between 1860 and 1870 it was published in Odessa, and in 1871 it was relocated to Saint Petersburg where it remained until its last issue in 1904. From 1883, the paper was printed twice weekly, and in 1886—to compete with the new Ha-Yom newspaper—it became a daily. Throughout its history it was forced to contend with a number of interruptions in its production, the longest of which lasted from 1873 to 1878.
This entry includes articles on poetry in Hebrew and Yiddish, respectively. For further discussion of works in those languages, see Hebrew Literature; and Yiddish Literature. For works by Jews in other languages, see Belarusian Literature; Czech Literature; German Literature; Hungarian Literature; Polish Literature; Romanian Literature; Russian Literature; and Ukrainian Literature.
To understand the complex history of Jews in Russia, one must begin with a fundamental distinction, often effaced in the historiography and popular memory, between Russia as a state—the Russian Empire, the Soviet Union, and since 1991, the Russian Federation—and the geographically much smaller entity of ethnic Russia. Until the 1720s, there were essentially no Jews in the Russian Empire except for travelers and migrant merchants, and the Russian state forbade Jews from settling in its interior, out of traditional Christian hostility.
Historical name of the region between the Dniester and Prut Rivers and the lower reaches of the Danube. Today, most of Bessarabia is in the Republic of Moldova, with northern and southern districts in Ukraine. Before 1812 it was part of the Principality of Moldova and its southernmost district, Budzhak, was under direct Ottoman rule. Bessarabia was within the Russian Empire from 1812 to 1918, though from 1856 to 1878 Budzhak was under Romanian rule. Between 1918 and 1940 Bessarabia formed part of Romania; from 1940 to 1991 it was in the USSR.
The crafts practiced by East European Jews in the medieval period were a direct outgrowth of Jewish ritual requirements, and therefore were protected by rights and privileges granted by monarchs and other rulers. Such crafts included those associated with slaughtering and baking (due to Jewish dietary laws); with textile manufacture and tailoring (due to the biblical prohibition against mixing linen and wool); and with hairdressing (due to religious restrictions on shaving beards). In 1389, the Grodno Jewish community was granted a charter in which the right of local Jews to “work in various crafts” was expressly guaranteed. Though special privileges granted by local authorities would, as a rule, only allow Jewish artisans to perform work for their fellow Jews, it was invariably the case that Jewish butchers, tailors, and barbers would cater to Christians as well. Moreover, reports from Lwów in 1460 make specific mention of Jewish artisans involved in work unconnected to Jewish ritual. They also mention that some of Lwów’s Jews were leather tanners and that this profession had been widespread among Jews from time immemorial.
(Yid., Peysekh; Heb., Pesaḥ), the eight-day holiday commemorating the exodus of the Israelites from Egypt. The special dietary requirements of the holiday—the ban on leavened products and the need for matzo and other special foods—necessitated early planning. Sometimes goose fat was rendered on Hanukkah to be used for Passover; serious preparations for the holiday begin a month before, on Purim, with the collection of moes khitim (Heb., ma‘ot ḥitim;money for wheat), intended to help the poor pay for the special foods needed for Passover. Other preparations for Passover included whitewashing houses, painting walls, washing floors, and airing out clothes. Books, too, were aired out in the open. It was the season when new clothes and shoes were bought, to be worn during the festival.
In the early twentieth century, the Labor Zionist Po‘ale Tsiyon (Workers of Zion) organization evolved from various groups in Eastern Europe that followed the Labor Zionist teachings of Naḥman Syrkin and Ber Borokhov and the secular nationalism of Khayim Zhitlovski. Seeking to base Zionism on the Jewish proletariat, the Po‘ale Tsiyon rejected territorialism, Bundism, and assimilationist Marxism as solutions to the Jewish Question. Straddling the boundaries of revolutionary socialism and Jewish nationalism, the movement then experienced a large number of splits and disagreements over such issues as Palestine versus the Diaspora, Hebrew versus Yiddish, cooperation with nonproletarian Zionists, support for the USSR, and over whether pioneering zeal or objective historical conditions would serve to build a Jewish home in Palestine.
(1856–1927), Zionist thinker. Born in Skvira, Ukraine, Ahad Ha-Am (born Asher Ginzberg; Heb., more properly Aḥad ha-‘Am, a pen name that translates as “One of the People”) was a Hebrew essayist of singular power and authority, a Jewish nationalist leader who publicly eschewed politics while seeking to fundamentally change the priorities of Zionism and, more broadly, the Jewish people as a whole. Although his impact on Hebrew culture was extensive, his political imprint was equivocal.
(Ger., Pressburg; Hun., Pozsony; Yid., Preshborg), capital of the Republic of Slovakia. Situated on the Danube River at the crossroad of major highways, Pressburg was a gateway into the Kingdom of Hungary. Until the rise of Budapest in the nineteenth century, it was the most important commercial center of Hungary, as well as its capital, serving as the seat of the kingdom’s administration until 1784 and the site of the Diet until the Revolution of 1848.
Founded in 1925, YIVO (Yidisher Visnshaftlekher Institut, or Yiddish Scientific Institute) became the leading institution for scholarship in Yiddish and about the history and culture of East European Jews and their emigrant communities.
City in central Lithuania. Part of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth until 1795 when it came under Russian rule, Kaunas (Yid., Kovne or Kovna; Pol., Kowno; Rus., Kovno; Ger., Kovne) was occupied by Germany during World War I, after which it served as the capital of Lithuania between 1920 and 1941. Occupied by the Nazis until 1944, Kaunas again came under Soviet domination until Lithuania regained its independence in 1991.
Capital of Latvia. Founded at the beginning of the thirteenth century, Riga was a member of the Hanseatic League. Jewish merchants became active in the city from the mid-sixteenth century, although opposition from local merchants forced them to live on the outskirts of the town. After the Russian conquest at the beginning of the eighteenth century, Jewish commercial activity expanded. The Jewish population continued to grow in both Riga itself and neighboring Sloka despite several expulsion orders, and Jews played a central role in economic and commercial life, engaging in trade, industry, and finance.
State in the eastern Baltic region, created in 1918 out of the former Russian provinces of Courland (an autonomous duchy linked to Poland until 1795), Livonia (under Swedish rule from 1629 to 1721), and Latgalia (part of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth until 1772). Between 1940 and 1991, Latvia was a republic of the Soviet Union, regaining full independence with the breakup of the USSR.
(Ger., Bukowina), a historic region in Eastern Europe, roughly encompassing the current region of Cernăuți in Ukraine and the area of Suceava county in Romania. In the Middle Ages, Bucovina formed part of the Halicz Kingdom and eventually was included in the principality of Moldova. The frontiers of the province were established in 1774 when, for strategic reasons related to the first division of Poland, the Habsburg army occupied more than 10,000 square kilometers of northwestern Moldova and, with the consent of the Ottoman Empire—the suzerain power at the time—annexed it in 1775 as the district of Bukowina.
A summary and codification of halakhah in brief and authoritative form, completed in Safed in 1563 by the Sephardic rabbi, Yosef Karo. First published in Venice in 1565 and reprinted many times in the succeeding decades and centuries, the Shulḥan ‘arukh is an abridgement and distillation of Karo’s Bet Yosef—commentary and glosses on the medieval code Arba‘ah turim by Ya‘akov ben Asher. As is the Turim, the Shulḥan ‘arukh is divided into four sections: Oraḥ ḥayim, on Sabbath, holiday and daily commandments; Yoreh de‘ah, on dietary laws and various other categories such as mourning and purity; Even ha-‘ezer, chiefly on marriage and divorce; and Ḥoshen mishpat, mainly on civil law.
Industrial city in northeastern Poland, Białystok (Rus., Belostok) sits nestled in a heavily wooded area that divides central Poland from Belarus and Lithuania. The town, originally founded in 1320, remained part of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth until 1795, after which it became part of Prussia. In 1807, Białystok was incorporated into the Russian Empire, and in 1921 it fell under the aegis of the Second Polish Republic. As it shifted between these regimes, Białystok grew into a multiethnic, industrial city, home to Poles, Russians, Germans, Lithuanians, and an unusually large Jewish population—both in absolute numbers and in its percentage of the total population.
Established in Russia and Romania in the early 1880s when concepts promoting modern Jewish nationalism began to spread from intellectual circles to the masses, the Ḥibat Tsiyon (Hibbat Zion; Love of Zion) movement was a pre-Zionist Jewish nationalist movement; its followers were called Ḥoveve Tsiyon (Lovers of Zion). The founders of the movement were Perets Smolenskin, Mosheh Leib Lilienblum, and Eli‘ezer Perlmann (later Ben-Yehudah), who in the late 1860s and throughout the 1870s applied modern theories of nationalism to Jewish circumstances.
(Agudat Yisra’el; Aguda[h]; Union of Israel) is a political movement of Orthodox Jewry, founded at a conference in Kattowitz (Upper Silesia; today Katowice, Poland) in May 1912. Subsequently, branches of the movement were established in most countries of Western and Eastern Europe, as well as in the United States and pre-state Israel. It was in interwar Eastern Europe, though, that Agudas Yisroel reached the pinnacle of its political achievement and institutional development. Hasidic rebbes in Poland and yeshiva heads in Lithuania legitimized the movement religiously, and their followers formed the bulk of its constituency.
From the beginning of the nineteenth century, there were attempts to reform the training of rabbis and teachers in Europe. Such programs were conducted at seminaries that were modeled on elite state schools under Enlightened absolutism and on ecclesiastical seminaries, and combined traditional learning with the modern sciences; what was novel was the instruction in secular subjects as well as homiletics. The idea of rabbinical and teachers’ seminaries was developed by maskilim, under both the pressure and the protection of the state. At times there were also open-minded traditional rabbis and teachers among the founders of the seminaries, who intended to anticipate and moderate changes dictated by the state or by radical Jewish reformers.
(1873–1934), foremost modern Hebrew poet. Ḥayim Naḥman Bialik was born in the village of Radi, near the city of Zhitomir in Ukraine. After his father’s timber business failed, the family moved to Zhitomir when Bialik was about six years old. His father opened a tavern in a suburb but died after about a year. Because of her own poverty, his mother sent him to be raised by his grandfather.
A republic located in central Europe, Czechoslovakia was founded on 28 October 1918 as one of the successor states of the Habsburg Empire. It included the Czech lands (Bohemia, Moravia, and Austrian Silesia), Slovakia, and Subcarpathian Rus’. Following the signing of the Munich Agreement on 29 September 1938, Nazi Germany annexed the borderlands of Bohemia and Moravia (Sudetenland), which were populated mostly by Germans. The rest of the republic (minus regions annexed by Poland and Hungary) was called the Second Czecho-Slovak Republic. After the Nazi occupation of 15 March 1939, the Czech lands were transformed into Protectorate Bohemia and Moravia, with Slovakia becoming a semi-independent state. Following World War II, the Czechoslovak Republic was reestablished without Subcarpathian Rus’, which was incorporated into the Soviet Union. On 1 January 1993, Czechoslovakia was divided into two independent states called the Czech and Slovak Republics.
The tradition of Hebrew belles lettres in Eastern Europe began with anti-Hasidic satires by Galician maskilim in the 1820s and ended with desperate attempts to preserve the remnants of Hebrew literary activity in Poland on the eve of World War II. The intervening period witnessed 120 years of intense creative activity, during which modern Hebrew literature flourished in various geographic centers as a highly stratified and ramified system that laid the foundations of its canon.
(Mendele Moykher-Sforim; 1835–1917), Hebrew and Yiddish writer. Sholem Yankev Abramovitsh is acknowledged, almost universally, as the founder of modern artistic prose in Hebrew and Yiddish. Born to a middle-class family in the Belorussian town of Kapulye (Kopyl), he lost all familial support at the age of 15. After spending several years as a student at various yeshivas, he made an adventuresome, perilous trek south to Ukraine on foot and in the company of itinerant beggars, arriving in Kamenets Podolski in 1853, where he stayed for five years as a teacher and then as the son-in-law of a middle-class family. He cultivated the friendship of the few local exponents of the Haskalah (especially Avraham Ber Gottlober) and began writing on matters pertaining to education.
To treat the Nazi ghettoization of Jews during the Holocaust, this entry comprises three articles. Establishment of Ghettos surveys the types of ghettos created and reasons for their creation; Life in Ghettos treats the ways in which ghettoized Jews organized and conducted their daily lives; and Ghetto Police describes the role that Jews played in the enforcement of ghetto regulations. For further discussion, see Armed Resistance; Holocaust; Judenräte and Other Representative Bodies; Killing Centers; and Labor Camps.
This entry surveys the history of East European Jewish theater, including the emergence of a Jewish theater audience; the rise of professional Jewish theater in Yiddish, Hebrew, and non-Jewish languages; Jewish theater’s social context; and amateur productions by schools, youth groups, and theater societies. It begins with an overview, which treats the historical development of Jewish theater, followed by articles on theater in Hebrew and Yiddish and continuing with articles on Jewish participation in the theater in Poland, Russia, Romania, and Hungary, respectively. The entry concludes with an article on criticism and scholarship, which focuses on the Yiddish theater.
Capital of Romania. The first written reference to Bucharest (Rom., Bucureşti) is in a document dated September 1459, issued by Prince Vlad Țepeş (known as Vlad the Impaler) and referring to the “citadel of Bucureşti.” Situated in the south of Romania, Bucharest became, with occasional interruptions, the capital of Walachia as early as the sixteenth century. The town’s geographic location enabled it to expand by integrating and assimilating several villages, and it also experienced significant population growth during the eighteenth century. Given its economic importance, Bucharest attracted, besides Romanians from various regions of the country, a large number of foreigners, mainly from neighboring Balkan areas. Thus the city acquired a strong cosmopolitan character, with foreigners constituting approximately one-quarter of the population around the year 1800.
The Sabbath was the focal point of the religious life of East European Jewry. Signs of its imminent approach were already evident in the frenetic activity that characterized Jewish households on Friday mornings and in the spare lunch eaten early on that day, so as to leave a good appetite for the sumptuous evening meal. Lunch was followed by the weekly visit to the bathhouse, “upon returning home from which it was customary to taste the fish that had been prepared for Sabbath,” according to memoirist Shemu’el Rappaport (Barukh, 1980).
Commercial activity was the mainstay of Jewish economic life in Eastern Europe from the medieval period until the mid-twentieth century. However, its significance went beyond the incomes that it brought to Jewish society and helped support not only individuals and families but also the communal infrastructure. For many centuries, non-Jewish authorities viewed Jews’ success in the field of trade as the very raison d’être for Jewish settlement in Eastern Europe. The support that trade brought Jews allowed them to overcome their neighbors’ attempts to exclude them from urban life. Trade was thus a political factor in Jewish social development. In addition, Jewish trading networks, important for economic success, helped strengthen ties between different centers and so contributed to the development of transnational elements in East European Jewish culture.
To treat the history of Jewish settlement in Lublin, this entry is divided into two articles, the first on the pre-Partition period and the second on the post-Partition period until the present.
The territories of the Russian Empire in which Jews were permitted permanent settlement. Although large in size (approximately 472,590 square miles or 1,224,008 sq km), and containing areas of dynamic economic growth, the Pale (known in Russian as cherta postoiannogo zhitel’stva evreev; the English word pale was borrowed from the term applied to the area of English settlement in Northern Ireland, where the lands of the “wild Irish” were considered “beyond the pale”) was considered the greatest legal restriction imposed on the Jews of the empire.
The Yiddish term for town, shtetl commonly refers to small market towns in pre–World War II Eastern Europe with a large Yiddish-speaking Jewish population. While there were in fact great variations among these towns, a shtetl connoted a type of Jewish settlement marked by a compact Jewish population distinguished from their mostly gentile peasant neighbors by religion, occupation, language, and culture. The shtetl was defined by interlocking networks of economic and social relationships: the interaction of Jews and peasants in the market, the coming together of Jews for essential communal and religious functions, and, in more recent times, the increasingly vital relationship between the shtetl and its emigrants abroad (organized in landsmanshaftn).
Established in 1991, Belarus (Yid., Raysn, Vaysrusland) is the successor state of the Belorussian Soviet Socialist Republic, with the same borders. The Jews of Belarus belong historically to the branch of Jewry known as Litvaks, a group distinguished by language (the northeast dialect of Yiddish) and by certain cultural attributes. The first mention of Jews in Belarus came in the fourteenth century, when Grand Prince Vytautas of Lithuania granted charters to Jews in Brest (1388) and Grodno (1389). In the sixteenth century Belarus became part of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Between 1624 and 1764 the majority of Jewish communities in Belarus belonged to the Va‘ad (Jewish Council) of Lithuania. In the mid seventeenth century, 80,000–90,000 Jews lived in the territory that is now Belarus. As a result of the partitions of Poland, Belarus became part of the Russian Empire.
(Shalom Rabinovitz; 1859–1916), one of the founding fathers of modern Yiddish literature. A supreme Jewish humorist, Sholem Aleichem tapped into the energies of the East European, spoken-Yiddish idiom and invented modern Jewish archetypes, myths, and fables of unequaled imaginative potency and universal appeal.
(Yid., Lodzh), Polish city and industrial center about 100 km west of Warsaw. From a hamlet of 767 people, including 259 Jews, in 1820, Łódź grew over the next century to a city of 670,000, with a Jewish community of more than 230,000, the second largest in Poland. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, Łódź was home to about 1 million people, fewer than 300 of whom were Jews.
(1852–1915), Yiddish and Hebrew poet, writer, essayist, dramatist, and cultural figurehead. Yitskhok Leybush Peretz was born to a prominent family in Zamość, a multiethnic Polish city ruled by Russia during his lifetime, and a stronghold of Jewish Enlightenment. Peretz’s father, Yude, was a merchant; his mother Rivke, who shared the running of their shop, bore nine children of whom Leybush, the second, was the oldest of three who survived into adulthood.
To survey the development of Yiddish literature in Eastern Europe from earliest times until the present, this entry comprises two articles. The first treats early (“Old Yiddish”) literature; the second treats Yiddish literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. For discussion of the Yiddish language from a linguistic perspective, see the relevant articles in the entry Language. See also Printing and Publishing.
(Heb., ḥeder; Yid., kheyder; lit., “room”), the most widely accepted and widespread elementary educational framework among East European Jewry since the Middle Ages. Study in heder was considered an integral part of the process of raising and socializing a Jewish child, including the inculcation of Jewish religious and cultural values through imparting basic knowledge of the canonical sources—Torah, Mishnah, Talmud—and of the liturgy. Pupils spent the entire day in heder, beginning with morning prayers, followed by study of various subjects, and ending with evening prayers. (In certain areas it was customary to give pupils a midday break of one or two hours.) Both boys and girls studied in many heders (Heb., ḥadarim), either together or separately. There were no criteria for acceptance to heder, and no consideration was given to disparities in the intellectual and cognitive abilities of the students.
Capital of the Republic of Belarus since 1991. From the beginning of the fourteenth century, Minsk was part of Lithuania; from the mid-sixteenth century it belonged to the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth. In 1793, the city was annexed to the Russian Empire and became the capital of Minsk province. From 1920 to 1991, Minsk served as the capital of the Belorussian Soviet Socialist Republic (BSSR).
Although widely used in both scholarly writing and public life, the term assimilation, without modification or qualification, lacks critical rigor. Conceptually, it can encompass—and is often confused and conflated with—four analytically distinct changes in Jewish behavior and status in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: acculturation (the acquisition of the cultural and social habits of the dominant non-Jewish group), integration (the entry of Jews into non-Jewish social circles and spheres of activity), emancipation (the acquisition of rights and privileges enjoyed by non-Jewish citizens/subjects of similar socioeconomic rank), and secularization (the rejection of religious beliefs and the obligations and practices that flow from these beliefs). In Eastern Europe, as in Western Europe, these processes, while obviously influencing each other, operated in the end independently of each other. Thus, in most East European states, Jewish acculturation and secularization were well in advance of legal emancipation and social integration.
As early as the eighteenth century, Jews in Eastern Europe constituted the largest Jewish community in the world. By the early twentieth century, they were the absolute majority, and 90 percent lived in regions that had been part of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth several generations earlier, or were among communities of immigrants created elsewhere by Jews from those regions. At the same time, only 0.3 percent of Jews worldwide lived in the Land of Israel (ca. 26,000 in 1881), though Jews of the Diaspora mentioned the Land daily in prayers and commemorated it in festivals and fasts.
Present-day Orthodox Judaism has a distinct and readily identifiable profile. It finds its expression in robust institutionalized forms such as nationwide organizations of synagogues, communities, and rabbis; schools and yeshivas; newspapers and other media; and even political parties in Israel and Hasidic townships in the United States that are self-designated as Orthodox. Orthodoxy in all its variety is characterized by a firm ideological stance, defining itself in relation to rival trends within Judaism. It implies more than an adherence to traditional forms of religious observance; rather, it is an ideology committed to the preservation of tradition. It is this conservative posture that lies at the very core of the self-definition of the modern-day Orthodox. As such, it is a relatively new phenomenon, a consequence of the challenges posed to tradition by modern ideologies. With the authority of tradition no longer taken as self-evident, it has had to be consciously defended and justified, augmented and amplified. Orthodoxy thus emerged in response to ideologies that challenged tradition and presented themselves as legitimate alternatives. It did not arise in the absence of ideological confrontation even where there was noticeable erosion of tradition associated with modernization.
After 1873, the capital of Hungary. Before they were united in 1873, the city’s sections of Buda, Pest, and Óbuda were independent towns.
The lands of the Bohemian crown (also referred to as Bohemian lands or Czech lands) comprised the geographic regions of Bohemia, Moravia, and Silesia (after 1742, only the part of Silesia that remained part of the Habsburg domains). After 1918, these territories constituted the westernmost regions of Czechoslovakia; since 1993, they have formed the Czech Republic. The lands of the Bohemian crown were attached to the Přemyslid dynasty from roughly the ninth to the fourteenth century, and to the house of Luxembourg in the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries. In 1526, they passed definitively to the Habsburg dynasty (during the reign of Ferdinand I) where they remained for nearly 400 years, up to the dissolution of Austria-Hungary in 1918.
Der Algemeyner Yidisher Arbeter Bund in Lite, Poyln, un Rusland (The General Union of Jewish Workers in Lithuania, Poland, and Russia), known simply as the Bund, was founded in Vilna in October 1897 by a small group of Jews who were profoundly influenced by Marxism. Led by Aleksandr (Arkadii) Kremer (1865–1935), their goal was to attract East European Jews to the emergent Russian revolutionary movement.
In general usage, a pogrom is an outbreak of mass violence directed against a minority religious, ethnic, or social group; it usually implies central instigation and control, or at minimum the passivity of local authorities. The term came into widespread usage after the riots of 1881 and 1882 in the Russian Empire. While the standard Russian bureaucratic term for mass unrest was besporiadki (disorders), the occasional use of the word pogrom to describe the events of 1881 and 1882 popularized the term in the West. The Oxford English Dictionary records its first use in the Times of London on 17 March 1882 (“That the ‘Pogromen’ [riots against the Jews] must be stopped . . .”), defining the word as “an organized massacre in Russia for the destruction or annihilation of any body or class: orig. and esp. applied to those directed against the Jews.” In Soviet historiography, the word was applied to violence carried out by reactionary groups against opponents of the tsarist regime, and it thereby gained a political but lost a specifically “Jewish” connotation. In contemporary Russian, pogrom is used for violence directed against any ethnic group.
Founded in 1794 on land conquered from the Turks on the site of the Black Sea fortress town of Khadzhibei, Odessa received its name the following year. Within a few decades it was already a sizable city and soon commanded an international reputation as the preeminent Russian grain-exporting center. However, it would retain the aura of a new place: transitory, irreverent, neither cosmopolitan nor urbane.
(Ukr., Kyiv; classical Heb., Kiyov), capital of Ukraine. Jewish settlement in Kiev dates to the first years of the city, in the ninth century, when it was the capital of Kievan Rus’ and an important stop on the trading route between Europe and Central Asia. Although sources are few, in the ninth century there were probably both Karaite and Rabbinite Jews in Kiev. The communities included branches of Byzantine Jewry as well as Khazars.
(Yid., Lemberg; Ger., Lemberg; Pol., Lwów; Rus., Lvov; Latin, Leopolis), city in contemporary western Ukraine, about 65 km (40 miles) from the border with Poland. Jews lived in the city from the time of its establishment in the mid-thirteenth century; some, mostly merchants, were Sephardic residents who later mingled with Askenazic immigrants. In the mid-fourteenth century, after its conquest by King Casimir III, the town permitted Jews to establish a quarter of their own within the walls of a new section built by the king. Two communities thus coexisted: the original and the center within the new walls—known as the Vorstadt (suburban) community.
To trace the history of Jewish presence in the city of Kraków, this entry is divided chronologically into two articles, the first treating the period through the Polish partitions and the second from 1795 until 2000.
Spread over 237,500 square kilometers and counting 22 million inhabitants, modern Romania (Rom., România) neighbors the Republic of Moldova and Ukraine to the northeast, Bulgaria to the south, the Black Sea to the east, Serbia to the southwest, and Hungary to the west. This is broadly the area in which the Romanian people developed, after Dacia—as the region was known in antiquity—was conquered by the Romans in 101–106 CE. Several Judaic cult items and inscriptions date to the Roman period (first to third centuries), indicating the presence of Jews in the Roman legions camped there.
To treat the history and experience of East European Jews during the Holocaust, this entry includes five articles. The first is an overview that provides context and defines the subject. It is followed by three articles that treat the creative work of Jews under Nazi occupation and in the camps: Holocaust Diaries, which examines personal written accounts; Art and the Holocaust, which surveys works in the visual arts; and Music and the Holocaust, which takes note of musical activity in the ghettos, partisans’ songs, and composers’ activity. The last article, Restitution, Reparation, and Indemnification, discusses the postwar efforts to seek return of Jewish property and reparations payments from European governments.For further discussion, see Armed Resistance; Ghettos; Judenräte and Other Representative Bodies; Killing Centers; and Labor Camps.
Southernmost of the three Baltic states. The name Lithuania originally referred to a grand duchy established along the Baltic coast to the northeast of Poland around 1250. By the mid-fourteenth century, the Grand Duchy of Lithuania had expanded into a large state, including substantial territories that today are part of Latvia, Belarus, and Ukraine. In 1386, it was joined to Poland in a personal union; the same monarch occupied the thrones of the two states. In 1569, Lithuania confederated formally with Poland in the Union of Lublin, forming a state often called the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth (Rzeczpospolita). With the Polish partitions of 1772, 1793, and 1795, virtually all of the historic Lithuanian lands were incorporated into the Russian Empire.
Founded by Peter the Great (r. 1682–1725) in 1703, Saint Petersburg is located at the northwest periphery of Russia, on the Gulf of Finland. In 1712, it replaced Moscow as the capital of the Russian Empire. Over the course of the next two centuries, Saint Petersburg was transformed into a grand metropolis and chief conduit of Western influence, the nerve center of Russia’s political, cultural, and economic life. During the late imperial period (1861–1917) the city’s Jews aspired to play an analogous role in the life of Russian Jewry.
This entry is divided into two articles, one treating the yeshiva in the period before 1800 and the other covering the following two centuries. The first article focuses on Poland, the location of the most significant yeshivas in the early period. For the period following 1800, in addition to the survey article here, see the entries on the individual Lithuanian yeshivas (for example, Ponevezh, Yeshiva of). For examples from other regions, see Bratislava and Sofer Family. For further discussion of religious education, see Bet Ha-Midrash; Heder; Kloyz; and Talmud Study.
To treat the historical rise, beliefs, and practices of the movement known as Hasidism, this entry includes five articles. The first is a historical overview that describes the development of the movement and its geographic expansion from the late eighteenth century to the present. The second article surveys Hasidic teachings and literature. It is followed by a description of the distinctive features of everyday life among Hasidim and successive articles on music and dance in Hasidism. For further and related discussion, see also entries on specific Hasidic dynasties and leaders; Misnagdim; Mysticism and Mystical Literature; and Piety.
Capital of the Czech Republic. The city of Prague has the oldest Jewish community in Bohemia and is one of the longest enduring and most important Jewish centers in East Central Europe. From the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries, Prague was one of the largest Jewish communities in Europe. The presence of Jewish merchants at Prague markets is mentioned in a report by the Iberian Jewish merchant Ibrāhīm ibn Ya‘qūb in about 970. Jewish settlement at the time was located near the prince’s marketplace in the area below Prague Castle (Suburbium Pragense). A second community, near Vyšehrad Castle (Vicus Wissegradensis), on the right bank of the Vltava (Moldau) River, is mentioned in a record of 1091.
Although Jews have had a long history in ethnolinguistically Ukrainian territory, by the turn of the twenty-first century only a small remnant of this once commanding population remained. In 2001, Ukraine had a population of 48 million, approximately 75 percent of which was of Ukrainian ethnicity, with a large Russian minority (some 21%, or 10 million). The exact number of Jews is a matter of some controversy: the 1989 census listed 487,300 Jews, but only 104,300 were recorded in the first post-Soviet census of 2001, a figure that is questioned by some but that certainly reflects the massive emigration of Jews in the 1990s.
The Jewish Enlightenment, or Haskalah, was an ideological and social movement that developed in Eastern Europe in the early nineteenth century and was active until the rise of the Jewish national movement in the early 1880s. Its partisans were known as maskilim. In certain senses, Haskalah was an extension of the eighteenth-century European Enlightenment, but it was centrally concerned with Jews’ political status and their relationship to European culture. Essentially, Haskalah sought to exploit the new possibilities of economic, social, and cultural integration that appeared to become available to Jews in the late eighteenth century with the removal of legal discrimination.
To treat the history of Jewish presence in Hungarian lands, this entry includes three chronologically arranged articles. The first covers early history and Habsburg rule through the end of World War I and the dissolution of the empire; the second covers the interwar and Holocaust periods (1918–1945); and the last covers Hungary during the Communist and postcommunist eras.
Region in southeastern Poland and northwestern Ukraine. Galicia existed as a crown land of the Habsburg Empire from the time of the first partition of Poland in 1772 until the end of World War I in 1918. (The name Galicia, or Galizien, was derived from Halicz, a city with nearby salt mines.) It included the districts of Zamość, Sandomierz, and Chełm until these were annexed to the Grand Duchy of Warsaw in 1809. During the Congress of Vienna (1814–1815), Austria gained back the regions of Tarnopol (Ukr., Ternopil’) to the east, which it had ceded to the Russian Empire in 1809, and Kraków to the west. Kraków itself gained the status of a free city and remained so until after the Polish uprising of 1846, when it became an Austrian territory.
(Pol., Wilno; Rus., Vilna; Yid., Vilne), capital of the republic of Lithuania. In 1323, Gediminas made Vilnius the capital of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. The city became part of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth in 1569. It fell under the domination of the Russian Empire after the Polish Partition of 1795; in the interwar period (1920–1939) it was under Polish control. At the end of World War II it was the capital of the Lithuanian SSR until independence in 1991. The city’s large Jewish population and atmosphere earned it the nickname “the Jerusalem of Lithuania.”
Present-day capital of the Russian Federation, Moscow was capital of the Russian state from the end of the fifteenth century until 1712, and capital of the Soviet Union from 1918 to 1991. Jews were first mentioned in connection with Moscow in the fifteenth century. During the reign of Tsar Ivan IV (the Terrible; r. 1533–1584), Jews were forbidden to enter the region of Muscovy. They first appeared in Moscow during the Russian–Polish war of 1645–1667, some converting to Christianity and remaining in the city.
The October 1917 Bolshevik Revolution created the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic, the RSFSR, as the successor state to the Russian Empire. In December 1922, by which time the Bolsheviks had in fact established control over the territory of the former empire (except those areas taken from it by the treaties that marked the end of World War I) their state became the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), comprising four soviet socialist republics (SSRs): Russian, Ukrainian, Belorussian, and Transcaucasian (by 1936 there were 11 SSRs; the number eventually grew to 15). The USSR’s prime importance, however, was not its size—it was the largest country in the world—nor its considerable wealth of raw materials, but the nature of its regime. As the first Communist state, it preached, and sought to propagate abroad, an ideology that purported to have a message for the modern world, industrial and precapitalist alike. Its regime, therefore, served as a model or laboratory, whose policies and achievements were designed to serve as a stimulus for other countries the globe over.
To treat the history of Jewish settlement and cultural and political activity in Russia, this entry includes three chronologically arranged articles. Russian Empire covers the period from 1772, when the first partition of Poland placed a large Jewish population under tsarist rule, until the end of the empire in 1917. Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic covers the Soviet period, specifically within the Russian Republic itself, until the fall of the USSR in 1991. Russian Federation covers the post-Soviet period of the 1990s until 2000. For related discussion, see Pale of Settlement; Belarus; Ukraine; and Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.
As a modern political movement, Zionism was created to achieve political independence for the Jewish people in the Holy Land. Although scholarly literature is divided about the exact origins of the movement, this summary begins with the history of Zionism from its roots in the Ḥibat Tsiyon period (1881–1897). This section is followed by an account of five additional stages of Zionist development and activity in Eastern Europe: the period of political growth from the First Zionist Congress (1897) to World War I; the interwar years; the Holocaust; the cold war era; and the fate of Zionism after the fall of communism in 1989 through the year 2000.
Capital of Poland from 1596 to 1794 and again since 1918. Warsaw’s importance in Polish and Jewish history is a relatively late phenomenon. For much of the Middle Ages, the Duchy of Mazovia, in which Warsaw was located, was a sparsely populated region, only loosely subject to the Polish crown. Warsaw itself was established in the second half of the thirteenth century on the west bank of the Vistula River.
To treat the history of Jewish presence in the Polish lands, this entry includes three chronologically arranged articles. The first covers early history through the third Polish partition in 1795; the second covers the period from 1795 to 1939, including the partition period, , and the interwar years; the last, "Poland since 1939," covers Poland during and after World War II and the Communist and postcommunist eras.