קהילת יהודי ורשה

איזידור אחרון (1892-1948),פסנתרן ומלחין . נולד בווארשה, פולין, והיה אחיו של המלחין והכנר יוסף אחרון. למד בסנט פטרסבורג וב-1922 היגר לארצות-הברית והתיישב בניו-יורק. מעונת 1922/23 ליווה את הכנר יאשה חפץ והופיע בקונצרטים גם כפסנתרן סולן.

David Seymour (born Dawid Szymin) also known under the pseudonym Chim (1911-1956), photojournalist, born in Warsaw, Poland (then part of the Russian Empire), the son of a publisher of Hebrew and Yiddish books. At the start of WW1, his family moved to Russia and returned to Warsaw in 1919.

Chim studied at the Academy of Graphic Arts in Leipzig, Germany, and then graduated in chemistry and physics from the Sorbonne in Paris, France, in 1933. In Paris he met Robert Capa, Gerda Pohorylle, Georges Soria and Henri Cartier-Bresson. Due to financial difficulties in the family, he began working as a photojournalist, publishing his first photo essay in Paris Soir. After 1934 he worked for Regards Magazine, a French monthly news magazine, under the pseudonym Chim, documenting the Popular Front in Paris.

In 1936, during the Spanish Civil War, he was sent to Spain where he joined the Republicans. His photographs depicting the horrors of the war in Spain have earned him a reputation in Europe. Following the victory of fascist forces of General Francisco Franco, he returned to France. In 1939 he was commissioned by Paris-Match magazine to document the journey of 150,000 Spanish refugees to the exiled Spanish Republican government in Mexico. Shortly afterwards, he immigrated to the USA and settled in New York adopting the name David Seymour. Chim enlisted in the US Army in 1940 and later on served as a translator and photographer on the battlefields of Europe. He received American citizenship in 1942.

After the end of WW2, Chim started working for UNICEF, documenting the impact of war on children. The photographs he took in Poland, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Italy, Greece, and Germany, were published by UNESCO in the album "Children of Europe" (1949). In 1947 in Munich, Germany, he co-founded the Magnum photo agency and served as his president after 1954, following the tragic death of Robert Capa. During his extensive travels in Europe, USA, and Israel Chim documented the born of the State of Israel, major events in Europe as well as Hollywood movie stars. His photographic portraits include Sophia Loren, Audrey Hepburn, Marilyn Monroe and Pablo Picasso.

Chim was killed on November 10, 1956, by machine-gun fire on the Egyptian border crossing in Qantara, on the Israeli-Egyptian cease-fire line during the 1956 Israeli-Egyptian War, while he was preparing material about the exchange of prisoners for Newsweek magazine.

Emanuel Amiran (1909-1993) , composer. Born under the name Pougatchov in Warsaw, Poland, Amiran began to play the piano at an early age. In 1924 he emigrated to Eretz Israel and between 1928-1930 taught at an elementary school. Between 1934-35 he studied conducting with Bantock in London. In 1945 he co-founded the Music Teachers Training College in Tel-Aviv and served as its director until 1962. In 1949 he was appointed supervisor of music education, a position he held until his retirement in 1975. Amiran was founder of the Military Orchestra and the Gadnah Orchestra. In 1985 he was awarded the Engel Prize for his life’s work.
Amiran composed numerous songs, which contributed to the Israeli folk style. Among them are EMEK EMEK AVODAH, EL HA-MA’AYAN BA GEDI KATAN, MAYIM MAYIM, KI MI-ZIYYON, URU AHIM VE-NA’ALEH HAR ZIYYON, HA-ZORE’IM BE-DIM’AH, and HALLELUYAH-KUMU VE-NA’ALEH. He also wrote choral (SOLU HA-MESILAH, 1940) and orchestral music (HA-SHOMER, symphonic poem, 1935) as well as pieces for piano. He died in Kibbutz Yakum, Israel.

Yitzhak Gruenbaum (1879-1970), Zionist and Jewish leader in Poland and Israeli politician, born in Warsaw, Poland (then part of the Russian Empire). Gruenbaum grew up in Plonsk in Russian Poland, where he joined the Zionist movement in 1888 while in high school. His Zionist activities continued while studying law in Warsaw. He was a delegate to Zionist Congresses from the seventh congress in 1905. In Poland
he was active in promoting Hebrew culture and believed that the Zionists were the natural leaders of the diaspora Jews in the struggle for their rights. He was a central figure at the conference of Russian Zionists at Helsingfors (Helsinki, Finland) in 1906 and was in St. Petersburg, Russia, during the First World War, but returned to Warsaw in 1918, where he helped to establish the Provisional National Council, which played an important role in the campaign for civic and political rights of the Jews during the first years of independent Poland. In 1919, Gruenbaum was elected to the Sejm, the Polish parliament, where he fought for the rights of national minorities, and he remained a member until he left Poland in 1932.

At first he moved to Paris, France, but at the 1933 Zionist Congress he was elected a member of the Jewish Agency Executive and settled in Palestine. He was immediately appointed head of the Aliya Department, a position he held for two years. From 1935-1948, he was head of the Labor Department, one of the leaders of the Organization Department and also headed the Bialik publishing house. He served as treasurer of the Jewish Agency from 1949-1950.
On the eve of the establishment of the State of Israel, Gruenbaum was a member of Minhelet ha-Am (People's Administration) in charge of internal affairs and became minister of the interior in the Provisional Government. He ran for election to the Knesset in 1949 under his own personal list, campaigning largely for the secularization of the state, but was not elected.

Associated with the left wing of the Israel labour movement he remained active for many years and contributing frequent articles to the Mapam newspaper "Al HaMishmar".

בנימין טנא (1914-1999) משורר, נולד בווארשה, פולין, ועלה לארץ-ישראל ב-1937. מ-1948 ערך את "משמר לילדים".

קרל טאוסיג (1841-1871) פסנתרן ומלחין.

נולד בווארשה, פולין. תחילה, למד נגינה בפסנתר אצל אביו, אלואיס טאוסיג. מגיל 14 למד אצל ליסט. הופיע לראשונה ב-1858 בברלין ובעקבות הופעה זו היה לפסנתרן-אמן החשוב ביותר בתקופתו והופיע בקונצרטים בערים מרכזיות בכל רחבי אירופה. ב-1865 התיישב בברלין והקים את בית הספר ללימודי פסנתר למתקדמים. הלחין קטעים לתרגול יומי ומספר עיבודים למוסיקה תזמורתית. נפטר בלייפציג, גרמניה.

Bunim Heller (1908–1998), Yiddish poet and social activist, born in Warsaw, Poland (then part of the Russian Empire).  He attended a traditional heder and then a yeshiva, but left at the age of 14 when started to work as a glove maker. He started publishing his poems in 1930 and soon he was recognized as a poet of the working class in Poland. He immigrated to Belgium in 1937 and then moved to Paris, France. He returned to Poland in 1939, only to flee the German occupation of Warsaw ad taking refuge in Bialystok, in the Soviet occupied areas of Poland. He spent the years of WW2 in Alma Ata (now Almaty) in the Soviet Kazakhstan, and returned to Poland in 1947. he was editor of Yidishe Shriftn and Yidish Buch literary magazines. In 1950 he published Friling in Poilen ("Spring in Poland"), a collection of poems from the 1930s, followed by additional collections of poems during the early 1950. At the time, Heller was recognized as a leading Yiddish poet in the Communist states of Eastern Europe. Heller left Poland and after a short sojourn in Belgium and France, he immigrated to Israel in 1957.  

He published twenty-three volums of poetry, including Di erd hot getsiters (“The Earth Shook”, 1947), Heimerd (1951), Geklibene lider (“Selected Poems”, 1952), Baym rand (1957), Naye lider (“New Songs”, 1964), In varshaver geto iz hoidesh nisen (“In the Warsaw Ghetto is the month of Nissan “, 1973), Der gaist funem sturem (“The Spirit of the Storm”, 1992).  

Heller was awarded the Mendeli Prize for his book The Month of Nissan in the Warsaw Ghetto in 1975, and the Itzik Manger Prize for Yiddish literature in 1981. 

 

Abraham Joshua Heschel (1907–1972), Polish-born American rabbi descended from several renowned European rabbis on both his father's and his mother's side and one of the leading Jewish theologians and Jewish philosophers of the 20th century.

After receiving a traditional yeshiva education and studying for Orthodox rabbinical ordination, he studied for a doctorate at the University of Berlin, Germany, and then was ordained as a liberal rabbi at the Berlin Hochschule für die Wissenschaft des Judentums. There he studied under Leo Baeck and others. Heschel later taught Talmud there. He joined a Yiddish poetry group and in 1933, published a volume of Yiddish poems, "Der Shem Hamefoyrosh: Mentsch". In late October 1938, while living in a rented room in Frankfurt am Main, he was arrested by the Gestapo and deported to Poland. He then spent ten months lecturing on Jewish philosophy and Torah at Warsaw's Institute for Jewish Studies. Six weeks before the German invasion of Poland, Heschel left Warsaw for London, England, with the help of Julian Morgenstern, president of Hebrew Union College, who had been working to obtain visas for Jewish scholars in Europe. In London he establishd the Intitute for Jewish Learning.

Heschel arrived in the U.S. in March 1940. He was appointed assistant professor of philosophy and rabbinics at the Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati for five years. From 1945 until his death he taught Jewish ethics and Mysticism at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America.

Heschel studied many facets of medieval Jewish philosophy, Kabbalah, and Hasidism. According to some scholars, he was more interested in spirituality than in critical text study. Heschel was influenced by his colleague Mordechai Kaplan, the founder of Reconstructionist Judaism. Heschel saw the teachings of the Hebrew prophets as a clarion call for social action in the United States and worked for black civil rights and against the Vietnam War. He also specifically criticized what he called "pan-halakhism", or an exclusive focus upon religiously-compatible behavior to the neglect of the non-legalistic dimension of rabbinic tradition.

Heschel is among the few widely read Jewish theologians amongst non-Jews. His most influential works include "Man is Not Alone", "God in Search of Man", "The Sabbath", and "The Prophets". At the Vatican Council II, as a representative of American Jews, Heschel persuaded the Roman Catholic Church to eliminate or modify passages in its liturgy that demeaned the Jews, or expected their conversion to Christianity. His theological works argued that religious experience is a fundamentally human impulse, not just a Jewish one, and that no religious community could claim a monopoly on religious truth. In his “Man Is Not Alone: A Philosophy of Religion”, Heschel set out his views on how people can comprehend God. Judaism views God as being radically different from humans, so Heschel explores the ways that Judaism teaches that a person may have an encounter with the ineffable. A recurring theme in this work is the radical amazement that people feel when experiencing the presence of the Divine. Heschel then goes on to explore the problems of doubts and faith; what Judaism means by teaching that God is one; the essence of humanity and the problem of human needs; the definition of religion in general and of Judaism in particular; and human yearning for spirituality. He offers his views as to Judaism being a pattern for life.

His work "Torah min HaShamayim BeAspaklariya shel HaDorot", ("Torah from Heaven in the Light of the Generations") is consisdered by many to be his masterwork. The three volumes of this work are a study of classical rabbinic theology and aggadah, as opposed to halakha (Jewish law.) It explores the views of the rabbis in the Mishnah, Talmud and Midrash about the nature of Torah, the revelation of God to mankind, prophecy, and the ways that Jews have used scriptural exegesis to expand and understand these core Jewish texts. In this work Heschel views the second century sages Rabbis Akiva ben Yosef and Ishmael ben Elisha as paradigms for the two dominant world-views in Jewish theology.