HENEKH ZATORSKI

HENEKH ZATORSKI (June 24, 1894-November 7, 1970)

            He was born in Ostrów, Mazowiecka (Ostrov, Mazovyetsk), Lomzhe district, Russian Poland, to a father who was a scribe for religious texts.  He studied in religious elementary school, yeshiva, and with the city rabbi—later, on his own, he pursued secular subject matter and foreign languages.  When quite young he worked as a private Hebrew tutor.  He was chairman of the Jewish library and a member of the administration of a labor cooperative.  He was a teacher of Hebrew, 1924-1928, in Bialystok at the Tachkemoni School.  From late 1928 he was in Montevideo, Uruguay, where for a time he was vice-president of the Jewish Bank, a cofounder of the colonization society, and for YIVO he was on the committee of the Jewish encyclopedia; he founded the first Jewish bookstore (“Der fakel” [The torch]) in Montevideo.  From 1930 he was a teacher of Yiddish, Hebrew, and history at the Ashkenazi Burial Society.  He published sketches, tales, feature pieces, and articles in: Morgentsaytung (Morning newspaper) and Folksblat (People’s newspaper) in Montevideo; Di prese (The press) and Argentiner beymelekh (Little Argentinian trees) in Buenos Aires; and for other serials.  In book form he published Yiddish translations of: D. Valentine, Di koraln-inzlen (The coral islands) (Warsaw, 1923); and Maria Louise Ramé, A roman fun a hunt (A novel of a dog [original: A Dog of Flanders]) (Warsaw, 1928), 216 pp.  He also translated into Yiddish the appendices to the third volume of Dubnov’s Geshikhte fun khsides (History of Hassidism) (Buenos Aires, 1958).  He was editor (together with H. Zilberberg) of a collection, Kleyn amerike (Little America) (Montevideo); his wife TSIPOYRE also published articles in Folksblat (Montevideo).  He died in Buenos Aires.

Sources: Y. Vaynshenker, Boyers un mitboyers fun yidishn yishev in urugvay (Founders and builders of the Jewish community in Uruguay) (Montevideo, 1957), pp. 101-2.