AVROM SKLARIN

AVROM SKLARIN (b. 1888)

            He was born in the town of Novouzhitse (?), Kamenets-Podolsk, Ukraine.  He studied in the town of Khust, Hungary [now, Ukraine], in the yeshiva of Rabbi Moyshe ben Amrom Grinvald, the author of Arugat habosem (The bed of flowers).  He spent many years at the court and the synagogue house of study of the Husatiner Rebbe, and he later studied in Odessa in the rabbinical seminary of Rav Tzair [Ḥaim Tshernovits].  He arrived in the United States in 1910 with the task of performing ritual slaughtering and ordaining rabbis.  He endured great hardships in settling in, and a short time later became a highly successful businessman.  He was active in the Jewish National Labor Alliance and the Jewish public schools.  He was a cofounder of both the Knesses day schools in Brooklyn and the Bronx.  In 1945 he founded the “A. Sklarin Matones Fund” to distribute stipends and prizes for the best students and graduates of the Knesses day schools and middle schools in the Zionist labor movement.  For many years he collected Yiddish folk expressions, jokes, and anecdotes and from time to time published them in the daily Yiddish press.  In book form, he published: Toyznt un eyns, vitsn anekdotn un mayselekh (1001, jokes, anecdotes, and stories), with a preface and a foreword by Y. M. Biderman (New York: A. Sklarin Matones Fund, 1958), 408 pp.  He was last living in New York.

Sources: Y. M. Biderman, foreword to Sklarin’s Toyznt un eyns (New York, 1958); D. Segal, in Forverts (New York) (May 12, 1958); Tog-morgn-zhurnal (New York) (July 20, 1958).

Leyb Vaserman