NAKHMEN (NACHMAN) HELLER

NAKHMEN (NACHMAN) HELLER (1864-1932)

            He was born in Bialystok, Russian Poland, the son of the Pinsker prodigy, Rabbi Yisroel Pinsker; he was also the older brother of the scholar Dr. Khayim Heller.  He emigrated to the United States at the end of the nineteenth century.  He worked as rabbi in Minneapolis, Minn., Hartford, Conn., Harrisburg, Penn., Newark, N. J., New York, and Charleston, West Virginia.  Over the course of many years, he dedicated his sermons to the idea of love of Zion, and he thus translated into Yiddish and English Daniel and Ezra (New York: Rosenberg, 1905, 1913), 176 pp., and The Book of Psalms into Yiddish, English, and a Hebrew paraphrase (Newark, 1923), 197 pp.  He also published one of his sermons under the title “Doresh letsiyon” (Expounding on Zion), delivered at Cooper Union on October 21, 1900.  In English, he published: Fact and Fiction: A Collection of Stories and Tales, Long and Short, Artistically Painting and Graphically Describing Phases and Phenomena of Jewish Life in Past and Present, Here, There and Everywhere (New York, 1916), 125 pp.; and The Coming of Shiloh: Reflections on Zionism (New York, 1928), 425 pp.  He also wrote a book of biographies and articles about American rabbis and Yiddish and Hebrew writers, as well as two treatises on Yiddish.