YISROEL KHAZDAN (ISRAEL HAZDAN)

YISROEL KHAZDAN (ISRAEL HAZDAN) (November 11, 1907-1992)

            He was born in Homel (Hamel, Gomel), Byelorussia.  He studied in religious primary school and in yeshivas in Homel, Ivye (Iwie, Iwye), and Warsaw.  In 1925 he moved to Riga, Latvia.  In 1935 he took up a position in the “Testimony of Israel” (Adat Jisrael) community in Stockholm, Sweden.  From 1945 he was active in Vaad Hatzalah (Rescue Committee), Scandinavian section, to assist the arriving Holocaust survivors and to found a “Beys-yankev” seminar in Lidingö, near Stockholm, for rescued Jewish women from German concentration camps.  In 1948 he moved to South Africa and he served as the rabbi in Warmbaths, Transvaal.  He published articles in the Riga newspapers: Frimorgn (Morning), Haynt (Today), and Haynt batog (Daytime today), and later for Afrikaner idishe tsaytung (African Jewish newspaper) in Johannesburg.  In book form, he published: Lakhn fun tsores (Laughing from troubles) (Stockholm, 1944), 48 pp. (due to the scarcity of Yiddish print, he published it in the Roman alphabet).  In 1926 he received a prize from Riga’s Frimorgn for an article on Rabindranath Tagore.  He also published under the names: Ben-Dovid and Zkharye-Mendl.