A. PALEYES

A. PALEYES (1898-193?)

            He was born in Minsk to poor parents.  Until the tenth year of his life, he attended the religious primary school of Yaknehaz [pseudonym of Shaye-Nisn Goldberg], and he also studied modern Hebrew and secular subjects.  He began writing at age eleven in both Hebrew and Yiddish.  He debuted in print, however, with articles and poems in Russian in Severo-zapadnaia mysl’ (Northwestern thought).  Over the years 1915-1920, he took part in the work of Minsk’s Yekopo (Yevreyskiy komitet pomoshchi zhertvam voyny, or “Jewish Relief Committee for War Victims”) and the Jewish historical-ethnographic society.  At the invitation of the Byelorussian People’s Commissariat of Education, he organized in 1925 a Jewish division of the old Jewish manners, art, and culture into the Byelorussian State Museum in Minsk.  For the commission to take care of old monuments, he compiled a detailed listing of the old Jewish monuments in Byelorussia.  In 1928 he discovered in the Minsk central archives the archive of the Minsk Jewish community before the first half of the nineteenth century, and together with Hillel Aleksandrov, he catalogued the archive.  He published articles and essays in Minsk’s Oktyabr (October), among other pieces, on the work of the Jewish division at the Byelorussian State Museum, on the visit of Goldfaden’s theatrical troupe to Minsk in 1881, and he edited the collection Proklamatsyes fun 1905 (Proclamations of 1905), published by the Institute for Byelorussian Culture (“Invayskult”).  He prepared for publication a collection of articles concerned with Jewish art and culture.  He disappeared in the early 1930s in the Soviet gulag.

Source: Autobiographical notes.

Leyzer Ran