2/7 | Birthday of Moyshe Stavsky
Today in Yiddishkayt… February 7 Birthday of Moyshe Stavsky (Moshe Stavi), Yiddish and Hebrew Writer Moyshe Stavsky was born in the White Russian shtetl of Antopol (today Антопаль, Belarus). His father was a maskil who ran a grain concern and was a leader of the town’s Jewish community. Although young Moyshe loathed going, he attended the local kheder until he reached bar-mitzva age and attended primary school in Antopol. At 16 he left the shtetl and lived in Warsaw, Kremenchug, and for some time in Aleksandrowo on the border between Lithuania and East Prussia,...
Read More1/26 | Birthday of Ben Adir
Today in Yiddishkayt… January 26 Birthday of Ben Adir (Avrom Rosin), Radical Philosopher Avrom Rosin, who published under the pseudonym Ben-Adir, was born on January 26, 1878 in Krutcha (today, Круча, Belarus), in the Russian Empire. Rosin was a leading figure first in the Jewish Socialist Workers Party, later in the United Jewish Socialist Workers Party, and ultimately in the territorialist grouping known as the פֿרײַלאַנד-ליגע (Freeland League). He affiliated with illegal socialist circles in Minsk in the mid-1890s and studied in Paris at the beginning of the...
Read More1/21 | Birthday of Moses Hess
Today in Yiddishkayt… January 21 200th Birthday of Moses Hess, Radical Thinker Two hundred years ago today Moses Hess was born in Bonn, (his given name was Moïses as Bonn was then part of the First French Empire), at Judengasse 807. He had a traditional Jewish education, but learned French and German as well. After leaving the University of Bonn, Hess moved to Cologne and founded what was perhaps the first socialist journal. His ideas on collectives and community as well as on Jewish life would later be developed by his colleagues Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels into Communism....
Read More
