DOVID LEVIN

DOVID LEVIN (1863?-October 29, 1941)

            He was born in Zhidik (Zidikai), Lithuania, the son of the Zhidik rabbi Shloyme Levinberg.  He attended religious elementary schools and yeshivas.  He lived in Kovno, trustee of the Jewish community and was very active in a variety of foundations, especially in the city Talmud Torah.  He was murdered in the Great Aktion of the Slobodka ghetto.  Before WWI he wrote under various pen names in Yiddish newspapers in Warsaw and Vilna, and he openly opposed Zionism and secularism generally.  He contributed to the Orthodox Der idisher leben (The Jewish life) in Kovno (a weekly in 1921, a daily 1922-1923, and from 1924 a weekly with considerable interruptions), in which he published his popular feature pieces (under the pen name Davash), often in finely rhymed verse.

Y. Kara

Berl Kagan, comp., Leksikon fun yidish-shraybers (Biographical dictionary of Yiddish writers) (New York, 1986), col. 346.