MIRIAM GUTGESHTALT

MIRIAM GUTGESHTALT (1904-1942)

            She came from a pious Hassidic family in Warsaw.  She was the sister of the Yiddish writer Lea Rotkop and the wife of the poet Hirsh Gutgeshtelt.  She received a Jewish and a secular education.  She studied the humanities at Warsaw University and graduated from the teachers’ course of Tsisho (Central Jewish School Organization).  She was also active in the youth movement of the Bund.  Until the coming of WWII to Warsaw, she was one of the first teachers in the secular Jewish schools and one of the most devoted Tsisho associates.  She contributed to all the pedagogical conferences at which she lectured on new pedagogical and school experiments in the secular Jewish school movement.  She published articles on Zionist problems in Shul-vegn (School ways) in Warsaw and in other pedagogical publications of the central school organization in Poland.  When the Germans occupied Poland, she escaped to Vilna.  She was in the ghetto there and was employed as a Yiddish teacher.  During the liquidation of the ghetto, she and Pati Kremer along with other Bundist women were led out to Ponar and murdered there (according to another version, offered by Sh. Katsherginski, during the liquidation of the Vilna ghetto she was deported to Treblinka).

Sources: Sh. Katsherginski, Khurbn vilne (The Holocaust in Vilna) (New York, 1947), p. 185; B. Mark, Lerer-yizker-bukh (Teachers’ memory book) (New York, 1954), p. 87.