YITSKHOK VAYNBERG

YITSKHOK VAYNBERG (1878-July 19, 1941)

            He was born in Kozhenits (Kozienice), Radom district, Poland.  He graduated from high school in Radom, and from 1899 he studied at the Universities of Warsaw, Berlin, Breslau, and Paris—initially, Indo-Germanic and later Semitic languages, among them a contemporary dialect of Abyssinian.  Over the years 1907-1911, he was in prison in Warsaw for membership in the Polish Socialist Party.  He was sentenced to hard labor; later it was agreed that he suffered from a psychological illness and pardoned.  He was the author of lengthy scholarly works in Russian, Polish, and German.  He published as well popular scholarly pamphlets in Polish and other languages.  He translated stories by Oscar Wilde into Yiddish.  From 1902 he was writing popular scholarly articles for: Yudishe folkstsaytung (Jewish people’s newspaper), edited by Kh. D. Hurvits and M. Spektor); Y. L. Perets’s Yudishe biblyotek (Yiddish library); the Warsaw daily newspaper Nayes (News); and Forverts (Forward) and Tsukunft (Future) in New York.  In 1925 he was director of a private Polish Jewish high school in Vilna.  He also signed the first call to found the Yiddish Scientific Institute (YIVO).  He died in Warsaw.

Source: Zalmen Reyzen, Leksikon, vol. 1.