OSHER TRZHANOVITSH

OSHER TRZHANOVITSH (d. 1943)

            He was born in Shedlets (Siedlce), Poland.  He studied in religious elementary schools and yeshivas.  He studied secular subjects privately.  In 1910 he became a teacher of Hebrew in Bialystok and administered (from 1912) a kindergarten for “Mefitse haskala” ([Society for the] promotion of enlightenment).  He was a cofounder and leader of the Hebrew teacher’s union.  He began journalistic activities for A. Sh. Hershberg’s Byalistoker tageblat (Bialystok daily newspaper).  He was correspondent and later also editor of the Bialystok edition of Ekspres (Express) in Warsaw.  He was active in the Bialystok literary circle and a member of the All-Polish Journalists’ Syndicate.  He contributed to the jubilee issue of Bialystok’s Dos naye lebn (1919-1929) (The new life, 1919-1929) and other serials.  During the Nazi occupation, he was confined in the Bialystok ghetto, where he kept a diary which was lost.  He died in Bialystok during the second ghetto liquidation in 1943.

Sources: Byalistoker leksikon (Bialystok handbook) (Bialystok, 1935); jubilee issue, Dos naye lebn (1919-1929) (Bialystok) (April 4, 1929); Herman Frank, in Byalistoker shtime (New York) (February-March 1945); B. Mark, in Dos naye lebn (Lodz) (August 16, 1946); Shmuel Niger, Kidesh hashem (Sanctification of the name) (New York, 1947); A. Sh. Hershberg, Pinkes byalistok (Records of Bialystok), vol. 1 (New York, 1949), see index; Ber Mark, Der oyfshtand in byalistoker geto (The uprising in the Bialystok ghetto) (Warsaw, 1950), pp. 141-45; Zamlbukh lite (Anthology Lithuania) (New York, 1951), vol. 1, pp. 1149-50; A. Zbor, in Byalistoker shtime (April 1954).

Yankev Kahan