YANKEV VAYNBERG

YANKEV VAYNBERG (1890-February 18, 1945)

            He was born in Borshtshivke (Borshchiv), Kiev district, Ukraine, into a poor family.  He received a sternly traditional education.  He studied in the Berdichev yeshiva, making a name for himself as a prodigy.  Later his attention was captured by the Jewish Enlightenment, studied Hebrew and secular subjects on his own, and completed the fourth level of high school.  At age seventeen he left to study in Odessa in the yeshiva of Dr. Chaim Czernowitzer.  At age twenty-one he left for the Land of Israel, where he worked as a teacher in a senior high school in Jaffa.  With the outbreak of WWI, he left for Egypt and from there in 1915 made his way to the United States.  He worked for a time as a Hebrew teacher in New York.  He studied chemistry at Ohio Northern University.  In 1925 he received his Masters of Science degree from New York University, and in 1932 his Ph.D.  Over the course of twenty years, he held a position in the Health Department of the city of New York.  In 1936 he began working on his translation of the Babylonian Talmud into Yiddish, and over four and one-half years he translated over 600 pages of it.  In Yivo-bleter (Pages from YIVO) 23.3 (May-June 1944), he published an essay entitled: “Problemen baym iberzetsn dem talmud bavli af yidish” (Issues in the translation of the Babylonian Talmud into Yiddish), with three examples given from tractates Sanhedrin and Bava Metsia.  His approach to the translation of the Talmud was, among other things, that the translation be understandable without commentaries.  This gave rise to a discussion among specialists; a portion of the discussion was published in Yivo-bleter 25.3 (May-June 1945).  In Yedies fun yivo (News from YIVO) 5 (November 1944), there was a notice with a call to establish a committee to publish Vaynberg’s Talmud translation, but his sudden death cut off the translation work in which he was engaged.  He died in New York.

Sources: R. Lazarson, in Yivo-bleter (New York) 25.3 (May-June 1945); “Diskusye” (Discussion), in Yivo-bleter 25.3 (May-June 1945); Yedies fun yivo (New York) 5 (November 1945).

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