MOYSHE GLOYBERMAN

MOYSHE GLOYBERMAN (1892-April 5, 1919)

            He was born in Pinsk, Polesye, to observant, well-to-do parents.  He studied in religious elementary school, Talmud Torah, and later graduated from a Russian high school, and he was then employed as a secretary to a lawyer by the name of Nayditsh.  From 1912 he was an active leader and member of the Pinsk committee of the Bund.  In 1915, when the Germans occupied the city, he served as member of the civic committee which was charged with managing the city’s affairs.  He was the founder of the first Jewish children’s home, which later became the base for the secular Jewish school in Pinsk.  At the end of WWI, he was the mayor of Pinsk.  He was arrested when the Bolsheviks seized the city, and when the Poles returned he became secretary for the city council and a member of the Jewish aid committee.  He began writing in Russian for Pinskaya gazeta (Pinsk gazette) over the years 1912-1914.  He later was the regular Pinsk correspondent for Haynt (Today) in Warsaw, in which he wrote under the pen names “Mozes” and “Morris.”  In April 1919 he was arrested for no reason, together with other Pinsk Jews, during a meeting of the aid committee, and they were shot by the wall of a monastery.  This incident became known as the “tragedy of the thirty-five Pinsk martyrs.”  In memory of his good name, a Jewish school in Pinsk was named “Moyshele Gloyberman School.”

Sources: Toyznt yor pinsk (One thousand years of Pinsk) (New York, 1941), see index; Yeda am (Tel Aviv) (April 1953); Y. Sh. Herts, Doyres bundistn (Generations of Bundists), vol. 2 (New York, 1956), pp. 259-61; Khayim Sheskin, in Yeda am (Nissan, 1953).