Jewish

A salute to a comrade,

Grigorii Gorelik, usually known as Anatolii Gorelik was born into a Jewish family in 1889. He became an anarchist in 1904, at the age of fourteen. He was active in the Ukraine, and was arrested several times by the Tsarist police.

“He was the most modest of men” - Rudolf Rocker
Woolf Wess was born to a Jewish family in Vilkomar (or Ukmerge) near Kovno in Lithuania in 1861.

He was the son of a Hasidic master baker and at age of 12 was apprenticed to a shoemaker.

Yarchuk, Efim Zakharovich aka Khaim Zakharev - Also rendered as Yarchook, Yartchuk, Iarchuk etc.

“a man who enjoyed exceptional influence among the sailors and workers and whose idealism and devotion are matters of historic record” - My Disillusionment in Russia. Emma Goldman

Mollie Steimer: An Anarchist Life
By Paul Avrich

Originally published in Vol. 5, No. 1 of the Trotskyist journal Revolutionary History.
Reprinted in Echanges et Mouvement no 80/81, 1996.

Erich Muehsam was born in Berlin in 1878 into a fairly well-to-do Jewish family. Soon after his family moved to Luebeck in north Germany where his father worked as a pharmacist (in fact the pharmacy is still there).

In the pletzl (Marais) and in Montmartre in Paris (pictured, above), Jewish anarchists had a real influence. In 1907, police reports indicated the presence of about 450 anarcho-communists, an enormous figure if one realises that the immigrant Jewish population living in Paris at the time was about 20,000.

Jacques Doubinsky
Aka Iakov Dubinsky, born 26 March – Ukraine, died 18 February 1959 - France

Born in 1914 in Budapest, David Stetner passed the great part of his adolescence in the Bukovina. His family was unstable but relatively cultured. His mother was a great fan of German literature. He became interested in anarchist ideas at the age of 17 and started attending secret meetings held in the woods outside the town of Czernovitz.

Emma Goldman was born in 1869 in a Jewish ghetto in Russia where her family ran a small inn. When she was 13 the family moved to St Petersburg. It was just after the assassination of Alexander II and so was a time of political repression. The Jewish community suffered a wave of pogroms.

Ida Mett
Born Ida Gilman, July 1901 - Smorgon’, Russia, died 27 June 1973 - Paris, France

Rudolf Rocker
Born 25 March 1873 - Mainz, Germany, died 19 September 1958 - New York, USA

Obituary of Russian-American anarchist historian Paul Avrich by Stuart Christie from The Guardian, Monday April 10, 2006

Simon Radowitzky
Aka Szymon Radowicki, born 10 September or November 1891 - Ukraine, died 29 February 1956 - Mexico

Szymon Radowicki (more usually known in Argentina as Simon Radowitzky) was born on either the 10th of September or November 1891 into a workers family in the Jewish community in the little Ukrainian village of Stepanice (Stapanesso).

Rose Pesotta
Born Rose Peisoty, 1896 - Ukraine, died 1965 - US

Few female Jewish immigrants to the U.S. have led lives as dynamic and eventful as Rose Pesotta.

ANTI-SEMITISM & THE BEIRUT POGROM

Fredy Perlman

Israeli and Palestinian progressives mourn the death of anti-authoritarian activist, anti-Zionist and grand pacifist Toma Sik (1939-2004), killed in a tragic accident on his farm in his native Hungary, to which he returned from Tel Aviv in 1996. He died on the fields of the pacifist organic commune of "new peasants" he was building.

Landauer grew up in a prosperous and assimilated family in Germany. He became a radical as a university student and by age 21 he became the editor of a journal, The Socialist. Despite its name, Landauer espoused an anarchist philosophy that he learned and adapted from the French thinker, Pierre Proudhon and the Russian thinker, Peter Kropotkin.

Stateless Person