קהילת יהודי וילנה / וילניוס

Moses ben Mordechai Meisel (c.1760-1838), torah scholar, author, maskil. Born in Vilna, Lithuania.

In his youth Meisel was one of the pupils closest to the Rabbi Elijah ben Solomon Zalman, the.Vilna Gaon. Later, he came under the influence of Rabbi Shneur Zalman of Lyady, the founder of Habad and he joined the Hassidic movement. In consequence, fearing persecution by the conservative Vilna religious establishment, Meisel fled to Germany. He had no desire to participate in the bitter controversies which divided Polish Jewry at that time. In Germany he became familiar with German literature and studied the writings of Moses Mendelssohn and other members of the Haskalah movement. During the Napoleonic Wars, Meisel conferred with representatives of the French government on several occasions. Shneur Zalman convinced him to stop these talks; this aroused the suspicions of Napoleon's aides who were convinced that he was collaborating with the Russians and Meisel was compelled to flee. He went to Eretz Israel and in 1813 lived in Hebron. He returned to Lithuania only after the French defeat. During the 1820s he went once more to Hebron, and in his last years he was closely associated with Sir Moses Montefiore.

Moses Meisel's poem Shirat Mosheh (Shklov, 1788) is based on the 613 laws which govern Jewish life, each line of the poem begins with a letter from the Ten Commandments.
Meisel died in Hebron in c.1838.

Zemach Shabad (Szabad) (1864-1935), physician, communal leader, and publicist, one of the heads of the Vilna community. Born in Vilna, Lithuania (then part of the Russian Empire). In 1881, Shabad moved with his family to Moscow, where he completed his studies in medicine at Moscow University (1884-1889). In 1894 he settled in Vilna, devoting himself to work in a hospital of which he eventually became a director.

Active in many communal organizations, Shabad for many years served as chairman of YEKOPO [Lithuanian Jewish Relief Committee]. He was active in promoting ORT, the world-wide organization whuich supported vocational training for Jewish youth, in Vilna and was its chairman until 1925. His also founded the Vilna branch of OZE [The society for the Protection of the Health of Jews], which was affiliated to the national organization of TOZ. The committee organized health clinics, the spreading of health care information and awareness of preventative medicine amongst the Jews of northern Europe. In this connection he wrote numerous articles about medical care and research in Folksgesund, the magazine of TOZ.

Shabad was a delegate at a conference of the Haskalah movement at St. Petersburg. A convinced socialist he participated in the 1905 Russian Revolution and as a result was exiled for three years. During World War I, Shabad worked to protect Jews in the battle areas from epidemics and hunger. In 1919-1920 he was president of the Vilna Jewish community council, and between 1919 and 1927 was a member of the Vilna municipal council. He established evening schools for women.

Politically he was affiliated with the Folkist Party (Folkspartei) in Poland which was founded after the 1905 pogroms in the Russian Empire – the party sought to achieve cultural and national autonomy for Jews in the Diaspora. In economic matters the party was liberal, secular and democratic. He was personally close to the party leadership. After the 1926 split in the party Shabad, as head of the dissidents whose center was in Vilna, made contact with the minority bloc, and in 1928 was elected a member of the Polish Senate. There he fought manifestations of anti-Semitism and discrimination by the government. At the end of his life he became close to the neo-Territorialist movement. Supporting Jewish cultural and national autonomy, and as one of the active members of the Central Yiddish School Organization (CYSHO), he struggled for the rights of secular schools with Yiddish as their language of instruction. He was one of the founders of the YIVO research institute which was established in Vilna.

Isaiah Eisenstadt (pseudonyms Yudin, Vitali) (1867-1937), one of the founders of the Jewish socialist revolutionary movement in Russia, born in Vilna, Lithuania (then part of the Russian Empire).

Eisenstadt was member of the Narodnaya Volya ("Will of the People") movement during the 1880's. He was arrested and sentenced for revolutionary activities. After one year in prison, he returned to Vilna, and joined the Social Democrats. He was an energetic organizer amongst the Jewish workers of Vilna and Odessa. The Russian authorities exiled him to Siberia from 1896 to 1901. After his return he became one of the founders of the Bund within which he was prominent amongst the "anti-legalists" (as opposed to the "legalists" whose activities were with the law). As a result he was frequently arrested. A member of the central committee of the Russian Social Democratic Workers Party, Eisenstadt tried to arrange a compromise between the Mensheviks and the Bolsheviks. After the February 1917 Revolution, Eisenstadt was active in St.Petersburg. He was elected vice-chairman of the central committee of the Bund but joined the Social Democratic Bund after its split with the communists. In 1922 he was again arrested but was given permission to emigrate from the USSR. He went to Berlin and then Paris where he continued with his political activities, this time with the Menshevik émigrés. His wife was Lyuba Eisenstadt-Levinson, a leading socialist activist in her own right.

David Meckler (1891-1976), editor, born in Vilna, Lithuania (then part of the Russian Empire). In 1907 he emigrated to the United States and studied journalism at University College of Communication in Boston. Although he had received his higher education in English he preferred to communicate in Yiddish, his mother-tongue. His first articles were published in the Yiddisher Advocat (Boston); in 1911-12 Meckler was editor of the Jewish Weekly in Boston, which appeared in both Yiddish and English. Moving to New York City in 1913, Meckler joined the staff of the Varheit where he remained for 5 years. He later wrote for the Morning Journal and served as editor in chief of The Day‐Jewish Journal, which ended publication in 1971 after 57 years as the largest Yiddish‐language newspaper in the United States. Meckler, also known under his pseudonym Ben Shloimi, wrote The Truth About Henry Ford (Yiddish; 1924); Fun Rebens Hoif, (a collection of Hassidic tales in Yiddish; 1932); Machine and Men in Soviet Russia (Yiddish; 1935,) and Miracle Men (Hassidic tales written in English; 1936).

Micah Joseph (Mikhal) Lebensohn (1828-1852), Hebrew poet of the Haskalah.

Son of poet Abraham Dov Lebensohn, born in Vilna, Lithuania (then part of the Russian Empire). Despite his death at the age of 24, he was an outstanding intellectual and a very influential member of the Haskalah movement in Lithuania. Parallel to a traditional Jewish education he was privately tutored in German, Polish, Russian and French. At the age of 19 he translated into Hebrew most of the second book of Vergil’s Aenid from Schiller's German version. This established his reputation in Vilna. One year later he translated Vittorio Alfieri’s play Saul.

At the age of 17 Lebensohn contracted tuberculosis and was sent to Germany for treatment. He was never cured. He however continued to write until almost the end of his short life. He became acquainted with contemporary literature and attended lectures on philosophy. He was influenced by Shneur Zachs and by Leopold Zunz who encouraged him to write epic poetry, depicting personal emotions. After his death, his father published his works in two parts "Shirei Bat Zion" (1851) and "Kinnor Bat Zion" (1870).

Lebensohn was influenced also by the Romantic movement, which accounts for emphasized the youthful freshness of his lyrical poetry, depicting personal emotions and experiences. This contrasts with the rationalism and moralizing of earlier Haskala literature. Many of Lebensohn’s greatest poetry focuses on tragic and crucial moments in the lives of his hero - as a lyric poet he knows well how to portray the battles being fought out in the hero’s tortured soul. This often reflected his own personal situation.

Abraham Dov Lebensohn ( Adam ha-Kohen), (1794-1878), Hebrew poet of the Haskala, born in Vilna, Lithuania (then part of the Russian Empire). He received a traditional elementary and yeshiva education. He openly declared his allegiance to the principles of the Haskala. From 1849 to 1853 Lebensohn together with Isaac ben Jacob and Behak produced a commentary on Moses Mendelsohn’s translation of the Bible. This commentary made a substantial contribution to the spreading of the ideas of the Haskala amongst Russian Jewry. After the death of M.A. Guenzburg in 1846, he became the accepted leader of the maskilim in Vilna. Lebensohn became main preacher at the Tohorat HaKodesh synagogue and then in 1847 he was appointed teacher of Hebrew, Aramic and Bible at the government rabbinical school. In 1874 he published a Hebrew grammar.

Lebensohn contributed to several Hebrew periodicals. The first poems he wrote were for weddings or funerals of important members of the Vilna community. Lebensohn’s first published collection of poetry written in Hebrew was "Shirei Sefat Kodesh" (1842) ("Poems in the Holy Tongue"). In 1842 he wrote a drama “Emet veEmunah” ("Truth and Faith"), but for fear of offending orthodox sensibilities it was published only in 1867 – by that time many thought it too tame. He published a second edition two years later. In 1895 a six volume collection of his and those of his son Mikhal was published under the title "Kol Shirei Adam ve Michal".

Although his knowledge of European languages was limited, Lebensohn was influenced by West European literature and culture and by a number of Jewish and non Jewish west European writers including Luzzatto, Herz Wessely and Schiller. Most of his poems dealt with the conflict between the light (Enlightened rationalism, Haskala, optimism) and the dark and harsh reality of life (six of his children died during his lifetime). His songs became very popular. His command of Hebrew was superb and is considered to be the first eastern European Hebrew poet of significance.

Joseph Elijah Triwosch (1855-1940), Hebrew writer, biblical commentator, and educator, born in Vilna, Lithuania (then part of the Russian Empire), he grew up in the environment of the Haskalah movement. He settled in Grodo (now Hrodna, in Belarus) as a teacher of Hebrew, Russian and general subjects. He started to write in 1873 when he published his first story in Ha-Levanon. Other stories, some of the first examples of modern Hebrew fiction, were published in Ha-Shahar, Ha-Melitz, Ha-Carmel, and Ha-Shiloah and other Hebrew literary publications. Most describe Jewish life in Russia. His story Ha-Litai in Ha-Shahar, (1880) and especially his book Dor Tahpukhot (1881), which was about the activities of Russian Social Democrats, made a great impression.

After World War I, Triwosch returned from St. Petersburg to Vilna and taught at the Hebrew secondary school of Vilna. In his last years, he also engaged in biblical and philological research. He wrote the major part of the commentary to the individual books of Mikra Meforash (1909), a project of biblical exegesis, which he edited together with N. Lewin, D. Lewin, and D. Nottick. Triwosch translated into Hebrew the works of Theodore Herzl and also Tolstoy's War and Peace and Anna Karenina (1918-22). He published an anthology of medieval Hebrew literature (1925), and wrote a textbook Hystoria Ke'lalit together with M.Y.Nadel..

Uriel Weinreich (1925-1967), Yiddish and general linguist, editor, and educator, born in Vilnius (Vilna), Lithuania (then part of Poland), he was the son of linguist Max Weinreich. He emigrated to the USA in 1940. Weinreich earned his Ph.D. from Columbia University and went on to teach there, specializing in Yiddish studies, sociolinguistics (the study of the connections between language and society and the way it is used in different social situations) and dialectology (the study of dialects). He advocated the study of semantics as a branch of linguistics and edited an influential Yiddish-English dictionary. He is credited with being the first linguist to recognize the phenomenon of "interlanguage", a temporary tool in language or dialect acquisition.

He was appointed professor of Yiddish language, literature, and culture at Columbia University in 1959, and served also as chairman of the university's Department of Linguistics (1957-1965). His monograph Languages in Contact: Findings and Problems (1952), became a standard reference work in its field; the textbook College Yiddish: An Introduction to the Yiddish Language and to Jewish Life and Culture (1949) which was reprinted 10 times. Weinreich's research papers, written and published in Yiddish, English, Hebrew, French, and Russian, ranged from a cultural history of Yiddish rhyme through phonology, grammatical theory, bilingualism, language standardization, dialectology, semantics, and lexicology.

Weinreich edited the U.S. State Department's Problems of Communism (1950-1951); the linguistic journal Word (1953-1960), the first three volumes of The Field of Yiddish: Studies in Yiddish Language, Folklore, and Literature (1954, 1963, 1969), and the YIVO's Yidisher Folklor [YIVO, the Jewish Scientific Institute founded in Vilna but now centred in New York which preserves mainly Yiddish manuscripts]. He was the editor of the Yiddish section in the Encyclopaedia Brittanica's World Language Dictionary (1954). He published Language and Culture Atlas of Ashkenazic Jewry, a large-scale project designed to record and study Yiddish dialects by harnessing the methods of advanced linguistic research and computer data processing.

Eliakum Zunser (1836-1913). Yiddish poet, song-writer and badchen [Hassidic wedding entertainer]. Born in Vilna, Lithuania (then part of the Russian Empire), in his youth he began to compose songs for weddings which he set to music of an Oriental character. He was at first associated with the Musar movement but was later drawn to the Haskalah. He was forcible conscripted into the Russian army in 1856 but was soon released.

In the 1870s his wife and 9 children all died. After the pogroms which followed the assassination of the Czar Alexander II he became associated with the Zionist movement and was affiliated with Hovevei Zion and Bilu. In 1889, Zunser emigrated to the United States, where he toured the country singing and reciting his songs. In 1905 he settled in New York

His first published book was Shirim Hadashim (Vilna, 1862). Altogether he wrote more than 600 poems, which were published in sixty-five collections, some with music and some with translation into Hebrew. The themes of his poems were simple and had catchy tunes intended to appeal to popular fancy, but many of them were melancholy reflecting the tragedies which occurred during his life. Some were influenced by the desire to return to Palestine and till its soil. Several of his earliest poems describe the plight of the Jewish draftees in Russia.