NAKHMEN HUBERMAN

NAKHMEN HUBERMAN (August 1886-May 24, 1955)

            He was born in Bershad, Podolia district, Ukraine.  He studied in religious elementary school, later secular subjects as well.  Around 1905 he joined the Labor Zionist movement and for many years was a leading cultural figure in his locale.  After the February Revolution, 1917, he was selected to be head of the Jewish community of Bershad and later to be the representative of the Jewish population in the provincial Rada (parliament).  In 1923 the aid organization for Jewish refugees, who were running from the Petliura pogroms through Bershad as far as Bessarabia, sent Huberman to the United States to raise funds for the pogrom victims.  He carried out his mission successfully, and on the return voyage he remained in Bessarabia.  From 1917 he was writing articles and correspondence pieces for Yiddish-language newspapers in Odessa and Kiev.  In 1924 he edited and published in Kishinev the weekly newspaper Der fuks (The fox) which, though, did not last for long.  He later wrote for the local newspaper, Der id (The Jew) and Unzer tsayt (Our time), in which he published (also using the pen name “R. Nakhmen”) articles and features as well as his travel impressions from America.  In 1926 he moved to Czernowitz, Bukovina, where for a lengthy period of time he served as editor of the Labor Zionist organ, Arbeter-tsaytung (Workers’ newspaper).  In 1936 he made aliya to Israel; for a time there he ran a cooperative savings and loan bank, later a branch of the workers’ bank in Tel Aviv.  From time to time, he published articles in Davar (Word) and Hapoel hatsair (The young laborer) in Tel Aviv.  Yivo-bleter (Pages from YIVO) in New York published an essay by him in issue 34 (1955): “Khsidim un ksides in besarabye” (Hassidim and Hassidism in Bessarabia).  He died in Tel Aviv.  Huberman worked for several years on a monograph on the town of his birth, Bershad.  It appeared in print after his death, published by “Entsiklopediya shel galuyot” (Encyclopedia of the Diaspora) under the title, Bershad betsel ayara (Bershad, in the shadow of a town) (Jerusalem, 1956), 247 pp.  In his preface to Huberman’s work, Dov Sadan marveled at the great amount of folklore that the author assembled in his monograph, and the historical and artistic value of the literary epitaph Huberman placed on his town of Bershad.  The book was written in Yiddish and then translated into Hebrew.

Source: Information from Sh. Vasilevski in New York.

Borekh Tshubinski