ELYE-ZEV (ÉLIE) EBERLIN

ELYE-ZEV (ÉLIE) EBERLIN (b. December 3, 1875)

            He was born in Mohilev (Mogilev), Byelorussia.  He studied in religious elementary school and with private tutors.  In 1897 he graduated from the Mogilev high school, and in 1902 from the University of Paris as a doctor of law.  In Paris he turned to practicing as an attorney as well as to writing.  At the sixth Zionist congress, he was opposed to the Uganda project and represented Labor Zionism.  In 1903 he founded the first Labor Zionist organization in Paris.  In 1920 he represented the Parisian “snif” (branch) of the Labor Zionists at the world Labor Zionist conference in Vienna.  He also served as secretary of the Russian Jewish Zionist student association in Paris.  When the Germans occupied France in 1940, he went into hiding and later left for Switzerland (his wife and daughter, in 1944, were sent by the Germans to Auschwitz and murdered there).  In 1945 he made his way to Israel and published in Davar (Word) articles about France.  In 1948 the publishing house of Alexander Mozes in Tel Aviv published his book in Hebrew: Et asher raiti (What I saw), 126 pp., the author’s diary from the years 1944-1946, with a preface by Y. Zerubavel.  He contributed to: Evreiskaia zhizn’ (Jewish life) and Razsvet (Dawn); Écho sioniste (Zionist echo) and other French Jewish publications; in Hebrew to Davar, Al hamishmar (On guard), and Laaḥdut haavoda (For the union of labor); and in Yiddish to Nay-velt (New world) and other serials in Israel.  He translated books and pamphlets from Hebrew into French.  His books would include: Nakanune vozrozhdeniia, vpechatleniia poezdki po okkupirovannoi Palestine (On the eve of revival, impressions of a journey to occupied Palestine) (Berlin, 1920), 148 pp.; Juifs russes, le Bund et le Sionisme (Russian Jews, the Bund and Zionism) (Paris: Cahiers de la quinzaine Univ.-Bibliothek 1904), 154 pp.; and Les Juifs d’aujourd’hui (Jews today) (Paris: Rieder, 1927), 216 pp.; among others.  He was last living in the state of Israel.

Sources: M. Anyutin [Marc Jarblum], in Parizer haynt (Paris) 569 (1927); D. Tidhar, in Entsiklopedyah leḥalutse hayishuv uvonav (Encyclopedia of the pioneers and builders of the yishuv), vol. 4 (Tel Aviv, 1950), pp. 2002-3; Noyekh Grim, in Nay-velt (Tel Aviv) 51 (1948).

Yankev Kahan