HERSHL GRINBOYM

HERSHL GRINBOYM (ca. 1908-1942)

            He was born in Warsaw and graduated from a secular Jewish public school, later from the Jewish teachers’ seminary in Vilna.  He was a teacher in Bereze (Bereza) and in Pruzhane (Prużana), later in the Warsaw Tsisho (Central Jewish School Organization) schools and in the Medem Sanatorium.  He was an activist for the Bund, and thus in his later years worked with the archives of the Bund’s central committee.  He participated in various conferences and published a number of important treatises in the Tsisho organ, Shul-vegn (School ways).  He also published articles in Folkstsaytung (People’s newspaper) and Foroys (Onward) in Warsaw.  In 1939 just after the outbreak of WWII, he left Warsaw, initially staying in Braslav (Brasław), Vilna region (birthplace of his wife), later moving to Vidz (Vidzy), Vilna region, where he worked under Soviet occupation as a teacher and later (in 1940) as a school administrator.  Following the German invasion in 1941, he returned quickly to Braslav and was in the local ghetto.  During the liquidation of the ghetto, he escape into the woods, where—after a string of hiding places and wanderings—he found himself among a group of Polish shepherds who turned him over to the Germans who shot him.

Sources: Lerer yisker-bukh (Remembrance volume for teachers) (New York, 1952-1954), pp. 117-19; Kh. Sh. K. (Kazdan), Doyres bundistn (Generations of Bundists), vol. 2 (New York, 1956), pp. 302-4.