NOTE GUTER

NOTE GUTER (1902-1944)

            He was born in Lodz, Poland, into a well-to-do Hassidic family.  He studied in religious elementary school and yeshiva, and secular subject matter with private tutors.  From 1926 he was living in Lodz.  He was a leader in the religious workers’ party Poale Agudas Yisroel (Israel workers’ organization).  He later settled in Berlin and devoted himself to Jewish religious education.  He was the director and a teacher of history at the yeshiva Yesode Hatorah (Foundations of the Torah).  He was a cofounder of the first Orthodox literary journal, Friling (Spring), in Lodz (1923), and served on the editorial board (with Meyer Voydislavski, A. M. Rogovi, L. G. Fridenzon, and Mikhl Kenig) of Di yidishe arbeter shtime (The voice of Jewish labor) (Lodz, 1926-1933); Beys yankev zhurnal (Bes Yankev journal) (Lodz); Ortodoksishe bletlekh (Orthodox pages); and Darkenu (Our path) (Warsaw).  He was also one of the co-editors of the educational supplement Ḥorev (Waste?).  In this he published important writings on education and the subject of Jewish history in classrooms of the schools of the Beys Yankev type in Poland.  In books, he published the first part of his work, Di geshikhte fun yidishkeyt (The history of Jewishness), “Jewish religious life in Italy” (Berlin, 1939).  This book was assigned as a textbook by Vaad hachinuch ([Orthodox] board of education) of Agudas Yisroel in Poland and was among the last Yiddish books to be published in Poland before the Holocaust of Polish Jewry during the Nazi occupation.  Guter was in the Będzin ghetto and secretly taught Jewish children there.  He died in Będzin during the liquidation of the ghetto.

Source: Kh. L. Fuks, in Fun noentn over 3 (New York, 1957).

Khayim Leyb Fuks