NAHUM GOLDMANN (July 10, 1894-August 29, 1982)
He was born in Vishnev (Vishnevo),
near Oshmene (Oshmiany), Vilna region.
At age eight, he moved with his parents to Frankfurt-am-Main, and there
he graduated from high school. He went
on to study law and philosophy at the Universities of Heidelberg, Marburg, and
Berlin, and he received his doctoral degree in law from Heidelberg. During his student years, he supported the
Zionist movement, and he began to give speeches and to write in German; he also
contributed pieces to Frankfurter Israelitsches Familienblatt (Frankfurt
Jewish family newspaper), which his father Shlomo-Zvi edited, and in other
German Jewish serial publications as well.
He spent a period of time in 1913 in Palestine, and after returning home
he published Eretz Yisrael, Reisebriefe aus Palästina (The Land of
Israel, letters from a trip to Palestine) (Frankfurt, 1914), 98 pp. During the years of WWI, he was the press
reporter for Jewish affairs in the German Foreign Ministry, and he traveled on
missions to Poland where—ignoring the opposition of assimilationist elements in
German Jewry—he intervened on behalf of Jewish national activities. From 1919 to 1921, he and Dr. Jakob Klatzkin
edited Freie Zionistische Blätter (Free Zionist newspaper).
Over the years 1922-1934, he published and co-edited Encyclopaedia Judaica (Eschkol Publishers), ten volumes in German and two
in Hebrew. At that time he began to
write as well for Yiddish publications.
He was a regular correspondent from Germany for Tog (Day) in New
York. He also published articles in Tsienistishe
bleter (Zionist leaves), organ of Y. Grinboym’s group “Al hamishmar” (On
guard), and other serials as well. He
authored the pamphlet Undzer pozitsye in der velt fun haynt un morgn
(Our position in the world of today and tomorrow) (New York, 1945), 30 pp.; and
the books, In dem dor fun khurbn un geule
(In the generation of catastrophe and redemption) (New York: Farband, 1964),
15, 320 pp., and Af lange vegn, eseyen un
redes (On long roads, essays and speeches) (Jerusalem: Hasifriya
hatsiyonit, 1968), 363 pp.
In 1927 Dr. Goldmann became a
member and later chair of the Zionist Action Committee. In 1933 he was a representative of the Jewish
Agency to the Peoples’ League in Geneva.
From 1935 he was a member of the Zionist Executive. In 1936 he founded the administrative
committee of and from 1953 served as president of the World Jewish
Congress. From 1941 he was living in the
United States, where he assumed one of the most important positions in the
Jewish community and political life.
During the 1940s he played a central role in winning the support of the
Western powers for the partition plan for Palestine. At the twenty-fourth Zionist Congress in 1956
in Jerusalem, he was elected president of the Zionist World Organization. He stood by three principal tasks: intensive
cultural activity, intervention for Jewish cultural autonomy and emigration
from Russian, and peace between Arabs and Jews.
In 1951 he received an invitation from the German Chancellor Adenauer to
negotiations concerning compensation for Jewish material losses under the
Hitler regime. He led the proceedings on
behalf of the Israeli government and for the Jewish organization that now
constituted the “Conference for Jewish Material Claims against Germany,” in
which he served as president. He was
also president of the “Committee for Jewish Claims against Austria.” From 1954 he was chairman of the (informal)
“Conference of Presidents of Jewish Organizations,” which represented the
sixteen most important American Jewish corporate bodies.
He died in Bad Reichenhall, Germany.
[Additional
information from: Berl Kagan, comp., Leksikon
fun yidish-shraybers (Biographical dictionary of Yiddish writers) (New
York, 1986), col. 138.]
No comments:
Post a Comment