NOKHUM-LEYB VAYNGOT

NOKHUM-LEYB VAYNGOT (1865-July 28, 1937)

            He was born in Ripin (Ripyn), Plotsk (Płock) district, Poland, into a rabbinic family (his father was the local rabbi).  He studied in religious elementary school, yeshiva, and secular education with private tutors.  He married in 1887 and settled in Warsaw, where he worked as a merchant until the beginning of the twentieth century.  He later acquired considerable knowledge and was an inventor of technical objects—among such, he invented the zipper for sweaters and patented it for Poland.  He was later one of the leaders of Jewish Orthodoxy in Warsaw.  In 1911 at the time of the elections to the Jewish community council, he was head of the Orthodox election committee.  It was at this time that he began to write.  From his pen emerged the majority of all the calls, programs, pamphlets, and other campaign materials of Jewish Orthodoxy in Poland (until the middle of the 1920s).  He was the author of a series of pamphlets on Jewish religious and national issues, among them: Der ortodoksisher program tsu di kumendike valn in der yudisher gmine in varshe (The Orthodox program for the coming elections in the Jewish community in Warsaw) (Warsaw, 1911), 24 pp.; Vos viln di frume yudn? (What do the observant Jews want?) (Warsaw, 1911), 16 pp.  In 1916 he became editor of Dos yudishe vort (The Jewish word) in Warsaw (1916-1917, which later appeared sporadically until 1919 as Vayngot’s private serial and not as the organ of the Agudes Yisroel).  Aside from editorials, he wrote here feature pieces and polemical tracts, as well as his “Shmuesn vegn yudishkeyt” (Chats about Jewishness) which were subsequently published in volumes entitled Der yudisher shpigl, oder der veg-vayzer tsu der yudisher erhobener tsukunft (The Jewish mirror, or the guide to the elevated Jewish future) (Lodz, 1921-1927), 8 volumes, each 32 pp.  In his newspaper Vayngot also pursue a campaign for his plan to construct a new Temple in Jerusalem.  And, in the last years of his life, he administered a Yiddish publishing house and devoted his energies to tracking down writings of Kabbalists.  He published a number of them, with his own introductions and notes, in: Sefer zemirot yehuda (Volume of the songs of Judah), “various poems in the Yiddish and Hebrew-Aramaic languages and additionally from the songs of the Land from the era of R. Yisrael Nagarah with music by various composers” (Warsaw, 1936), 96 pp.  He died in Warsaw.

Sources: Poylishe yidn (Polish Jewry) annual (New York, 1938), p. 88; Sh. Ratshteyn, Shaarim (Gates) (Tel Aviv, 1946); A. Tsaytlin, in Der Tog (New York) (September 10, 1954); Y. Yarshavski, in Forverts (New York) (August 6, 1955); B. Kutsher, Geven amol varshe (As Warsaw once was) (Paris, 1955), see index; M. Prager, in Fun noentn over (New York) 2 (1956), pp. 450, 454-56; American Jewish Yearbook (1938-1939), p. 404.

Khayim Leyb Fuks