SHOYL GOLDMAN

SHOYL GOLDMAN (November 1, 1894-1940?)

            He was born in Bialystok, to a not so well-off, bourgeois family.  He studied in religious primary school, later in Jaffe’s Russian-Jewish school, and he graduated from a secular high school.  He assisted in the establishment of the first secular Jewish school at the “Youth Association” (Yugnt-fareyn) in 1916, and later became a teacher at the school.  He helped found in Bialystok the Culture League and the Sholem-Aleykhem Library.  At the start of the 1920s, he joined the Bund, later becoming a Bundist councilor in the Bialystok democratic Jewish community.  He was the Bialystok correspondent for Folks-tsaytung (People’s newspaper) in Warsaw, for which he also wrote articles on political themes.  With the outbreak of WWII, he and the entire committee of the Bund left Bialystok, but when the Germans departed from the city and the Soviets entered, he returned.  On October 2, 1939, he was arrested by the Soviet regime.  He sat in the Bialystok prison until May 13, 1940; he was then led out of the city, and nothing further from him was ever heard.

Sources: Byalistoker leksikon (Bialystok handbook) (Bialystok, 1935); Lerer-zikher-bukh (Teachers’ memory book) (New York, 1954), pp. 76-81; Forverts (New York) (May 13, 1956); Y. Sh. Herts, ed., Doyres bundistn (Generations of Bundists), vol. 2 (New York, 1956), pp. 145-47.

Yankev Kohen