LEYZER-SHLOYME RABINOVITSH

LEYZER-SHLOYME RABINOVITSH (b. June 2, 1964)

            A linguist and folklorist, he was born in Yagotin (Yahotyn), Poltava Province, Ukraine, the descendant of a Hassidic family. He was active in Zionist and community organizations in Pereyaslav and Kiev. From 1904 he was working on a large project entitled “Der hebraizmen-oytser” (The treasury of Hebraisms). The Jewish Literary Association in Kiev approved this work for publication in 1910, but it was never realized. He was nominated and became a member of the commission on orthography and terminology in the Kultur-lige (Culture league) in Kiev, when it was founded in 1918. He revised the first three letters (5,000 words) for a large Russian-Yiddish dictionary, which the Yiddish department of the Kiev Institute for Jewish Culture was to publish, but nothing of this came to fruition either, and the fate of the manuscript remains unknown. It is entirely possible that it was used in preparation of the major Russian-Yiddish dictionary that appeared in print in Moscow in 1984. Only an insignificant portion of his large collection of Yiddish proverbs, sayings, beliefs, portents, remedies, and the like was published. He wrote for the first and second issues of Tsaytshrift (Periodical) in Minsk (1926) on personages in Sholem-Aleichem’s works, the wedding entertainer Moyshe Marokhovski, and Semiticisms in Yiddish), and for Hoyzfraynd (House friend); and he placed correspondence pieces under the names Osher or Osher ben Moyshe in Yidishes folksblat (Jewish people newspaper). He corresponded with Sholem-Aleichem. The date of his death is unknown, though he was alive in Kiev in 1940.

Source: Zalmen Reyzen, Leksikon, vol. 4.

Berl Cohen

[Additional information from: Chaim Beider, Leksikon fun yidishe shrayber in ratn-farband (Biographical dictionary of Yiddish writers in the Soviet Union), ed. Boris Sandler and Gennady Estraikh (New York: Congress for Jewish Culture, Inc., 2011), p. 344.]