Thursday, 28 March 2019

URI KEYSH


URI KEYSH (ca. 1867-late winter 1937)
            He was an editor, thought to have come from Bessarabia.  He was popular speaker on Zionism.  Dr. Theodor Herzl gave him a subsidy to purchase Yiddish writings, which Keysh used to publicize his Zionist newspaper Di rikhtige yudishe tsukunft (The proper Jewish future) (Jassy [Iași]) (from October 25, 1907 with breaks until around 1916 and for a short time in Bucharest).  In the late 1920s, he revived the serial in Galats (Galați) with the title Di yudishe tsukunft (The Jewish future).[1]  In 1925 he published the booklet Der goles (The diaspora) (Bucharest), 16 pp.  Y. Shternberg noted: “In old Romania [he] was a pioneer of Yiddish.”  As a public speaker, wrote Shloyme Bikl, he “for many years truly mastered the realm of his adherents with his sermons.”  He died in Bucharest.

Sources: Zalmen Reyzen, Leksikon, vol. 3; Y. Shternberg, in Shoybn (Bucharest) (March-April 1937); Shloyme Bikl, in Tsukunft (New York) 2 (1956); Tog (New York) (January 8, 1966); Natan Mark, Sifrut-yidish beromanya (Yiddish literature in Romania) (Haifa, 1973), pp. 50, 53, 75; Volf Tambur, Yidish-prese in rumenye (The Yiddish press in Romania) (Bucharest: Kriteryon, 1977), pp. 142-49.
Berl Cohen

[Additional information from: Berl Kagan, comp., Leksikon fun yidish-shraybers (Biographical dictionary of Yiddish writers) (New York, 1986), col. 483.]



[1] Another newspaper noted by Zalmen Reyzen, Di yudishe tsukunft (Iași, 1899), had no connection to Keysh; the editor of that newspaper was Gershon Cohen.

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