ASHER-ANSHIL GRINVALD

ASHER-ANSHIL GRINVALD

           He came from a town in the Czech Carpathian Mountains.  He lived in Ungvár (Uzhgorod, Uzhhorod) and Berehove, Ukraine.  He was community Zionist activist in the Mizrachi Party.  In 1933 he traveled to Israel.  He authored a number of religious texts, in Hebrew and Yiddish, among them: Mate asher (The staff of Asher), Zokher haberit (Remembering the covenant), and Ner mitsva (The commandment of candles).  After his trip to Israel, he published a short religious work in Hebrew and Yiddish: Tuv yerushalayim (The well of Jerusalem) (Berehove, 1934), 48 pp., with two maps and pictures, in which he described “all the holy sites and cities, places of sanctity and graves of holy men, the beauty of Jerusalem.  Also, a survey of the contemporary state of the country, the mass aliya and its adherents and opponents.”  He also relayed his conjectures about the future of the Land of Israel which, according to him, had to be faithful to the Jewish religious tradition.  Biographical details remain unknown.