LEYE HALPERN

LEYE HALPERN (1894-1942)

            She was born in Wojkowice, Russian Poland, into a well-to-do family.  She graduated from a Russian high school in Bialystok, and there she also began her first pedagogical work.  At the beginning of the 1920s, she moved to Warsaw and for a specified period of time studied at university, joined the Bund, and became manager of the “Grosse Schule” in Warsaw.  She published articles on various school-related issues in Shul-veg (School ways) in Warsaw, and she compiled (with Y. Rotenberg) the reader for fifth-year students, Yidish (Yiddish) (Warsaw, 1936), 244 pp.  In addition, she translated stories from Russian and Polish into Yiddish for Kleyne folkstsaytung (Little people’s newspaper) in Warsaw.  Her translation of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s legend, Di goldene barirung (The golden touch) was published by the publishing house of Kinder-fraynd in Warsaw in 1936 (16 pp.).  When WWII erupted, she was in her home city of Wojkowice, working as a teacher in a Jewish Byelorussian public school.  She was later confined in the Wojkowice ghetto and killed with the liquidation of the ghetto in the summer of 1942.

Sources: Folkstsaytung (Warsaw) (September 3, 1936); Literarishe bleter (Warsaw) (October 30, 1936); Y. Rotenberg, in Lerer yizker-bukh (Remembrance volume for teachers) (New York, 1954), pp. 128-29; information from Y. G., in Montreal.