MIKHL BERKOVITSH

MIKHL BERKOVITSH (February 3, 1865-July 17, 1935)

He was born in Boryslav, eastern Galicia, and raised in Drohobych and Lemberg.  He was a pioneer of Zionism in Galicia and a founder of the association “Mikra kodesh” (Holy convocation) as well as the Zionist Association in Lemberg.  Together with Mortkhe (Mordecai) Ehrenpreis, he founded a Jewish people’s library which published a number of books in Yiddish.  In 1891 he settled in Brod, where he established a high school.  From 1893 he studied at the University of Vienna and the rabbinical seminary there.  He took a position close to Theodor Herzl, and served as his secretary for him as well as a close collaborator at the First Zionist Congress.  In late 1898 he settled in Cracow, where he served on the editorial board and administrator of Der yud (The Jew), which began to appear in 1899 under the editorship of Y. Kh. Ravnitski and later Dr. Yoysef Lurye.  He was one of the first to try to unify Yiddish orthography.  While in Cracow, he was the librarian of the Jewish library Ezra.  From 1903 he was back in Vienna where he devoted his time to philological research on old Hebrew literature and served as secretary for Hebrew and Yiddish of the Zionist Association—the association of Austrian groups for the colonization of Palestine.  He was also the founder of the Viennese student group “Gamla.”  While he was living in Vienna, he gained access to the archival materials of Aron Liberman.  He worked on them and published from them in Tsukunft (Future) 6 (1924), in Yoyvl-bukh haynt (Jubilee volume today) (1928), and in Hatsfira (The siren).  He was also on the editorial board of Monumenta Judaica.  From 1911 he served as director of a Jewish high school in Bielsk (Silesia).  Around 1880 he began publishing in Haivri (The Jew), Hamazkir (The scribe) in Lemberg, and Tsaytung (Newspaper) which was published in Rohatyn in Judeo-German.  Using the pseudonym “Student from Lvov,” he published in Broides’s Hazman (The times), Hamagid (The preacher) in Cracow, Hatsfira, Fraynd (Friend), Tsukunft, Yud, Literarishe bleter (Literary leaves), Haynt (Today), the Judeo-German weekly Hoffnung (Hope), and in the Encyklopaedia Judaica (Berlin).  He translated into Hebrew Herzl’s Der Judenstaat (The Jewish state) (Warsaw, 1896) and a portion of Herzl’s other writings; and he translated into Yiddish a story by Wilhelm Feldmann about Jewish life, Dovid Frishman’s “Matot-mase” (Tribes, journeys) with an introduction by Frishman (published by their people’s library), a booklet from German entitled A sof tsu di tsores (An end to troubles), and Henry George’s tract Moses, Apostle of Freedom.  From Yiddish into German, he translated works by Sholem-Aleykhem, Avrom Reyzen, and Y. Bershalski, among others.  He also wrote the booklet Khanike (Hanukkah), under the pseudonym “M. Henes.”  He died in Szczyrk, near Bilits, Silesia.

Sources: Zalmen Reyzen, Leksikon, vol. 1; Gershom Bader, Medina veḥakhameha (The state and its sages) (New York, 1934), p. 145; Dr. Y. Tenenboym, Galicia, mayn alte heym (Galicia, my old home) (New York, 1952), see index; A. Gurshteyn, in Visnshaftlekhe yorbikher (Scholarly annuals) (Moscow, 1929), vol. 1; Literarishe bleter (Warsaw) (August 2, 1935).