SHLOYME RABINOVITSH

SHLOYME RABINOVITSH (1903-December 1971)

            A journalist and editor, he was born in Ushomyr, Zhytomyr region, Ukraine. He came from a working class family. He graduated from the Moscow University for National Minorities (“Mayrevke”). He edited Kolvirt-emes (Collective farm truth) in Crimea, later substituting for the editor of Moscow’s Emes (Truth). At the same time, he actively contributed to organizing the press in the southern Jewish nationality districts, often spending long periods of time in Stalingrad, Kalinindorf, and Nay-Zlatopol, where he helped the local journalists with their work. His reportage pieces and jottings about life in the agricultural colonies, published in Emes, were often reprinted in the foreign Yiddish press. During WWII he was a journalist in the army press. After the war he stood in for the editor of the newspaper Eynikeyt (Unity). After the liquidation of the Anti-Fascist Committee, he too was arrested in early 1949 and exiled to camps in the Gulag. He was subsequently rehabilitated and returned from exile in 1956. He then frequently contributed to Sovetish heymland (Soviet homeland) in Moscow, as well as to the Russian-language press. There and in his correspondence pieces for the Soviet press agency Novosti (News), he excelled at penning sharply anti-Israel articles. In book form: Yidn in sovetn-farband (Jews in the Soviet Union) (Moscow: Novosti, 1965), 51 pp. He died in Moscow.

Khayim Maltinski

[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), pp. 345-46.]