DOVID GROYBART (DAVID GRAUBART)

DOVID GROYBART (DAVID GRAUBART) (April 6, 1906-April 27, 1984)

            He was born in Staszów, Kielce region, Poland.  He descended from an old rabbinical family.  His father Yehude-Leyb Groybart was a rabbi in Canada.  He studied in religious primary school; later when already in Canada, he graduated from middle school.  He received his higher education in the United States, where he lived from 1924.  He graduated as a rabbi from the Jewish Theological Seminary and acquired his doctoral degree in 1949 from Indiana University.  From 1946 he was professor of rabbinical literature at the College of Jewish Studies (Spertus College) in Chicago.  He wrote essays in Yiddish, Hebrew, and English.  In Yiddish he published in Idisher kuryer (Jewish courier) in Chicago, Idishe zhurnal (Jewish journal) in Toronto, and Dos idishe vort (The Yiddish word) in Winnipeg, among other places.  He was the Yiddish editor of the Britannica World Language Dictionary (1954).  In Hebrew he published in Hadoar (The mail) and Hapardes (Paradise).  In English, he edited his college publications in the 1920s and was a contributing editor to Colliers Encyclopedia.  He authored English-language books on Jewish themes.  He won literary awards in university and in the theological seminary, among them for an essay on Job.  From 1971 he was a regular contributor to Forverts (Forward) in New York.  He was living in Chicago where he died.

Sources: M. Ginzburg, in Keneder odler (Montreal) (January 10, 1955); Who’s Who in World Jewry (New York, 1955).

[Additional information from: Berl Kagan, comp., Leksikon fun yidish-shraybers (Biographical dictionary of Yiddish writers) (New York, 1986), col. 175.]