GEDALYE HEKHT

GEDALYE HEKHT (b. September 7, 1882)

            He was born in Tarnopol, eastern Galicia, into a well-to-do family.  He graduated from a state teachers’ seminary.  Until 1914 he worked as an inspector of Jewish government schools in Tarnopol.  He later lived in Chortkov (Chortkiv), where he was the founder of the relief society Ezra.  During WWI he was an officer in the Austrian army.  Afterward, until 1924, he worked as a teacher in the Yavneh high school, and later (until WWII) he was in Warsaw, working as director of a state public school and a handwriting expert for the Warsaw courts.  He was active in the Zionist Revisionist Party, and he was vice-chair of the society for the protection of Jewish children in Poland, “Centos.”  He began writing articles for Wschód (East) in Lemberg in 1913, and from then published in Yiddish, Hebrew, and Polish on pedagogical and general literary themes in: Dos kind (The child) in Warsaw (1925-1933); Hakanai (The zealot); Sfat ami (Language of my people); Nasz Przegląd (Our review); and Dziecko (Child); among others.  He was a contributor to Dr. Ruvn Feldshuh’s Yidisher gezelshaftlekher leksikon (Jewish communal handbook), vol. 1 (Warsaw, 1939), in which he wrote almost all of the entries concerned with pedagogy, education, and child psychology.  He also wrote under the pen name of Gad.  He died during the destruction of Polish Jewry in WWII.

Sources: Biblyografishe yorbikher fun yivo (Bibliographic yearbooks from YIVO) (Warsaw, 1928); Dr. R. Feldshuh, Yidisher gezelshaftlekher leksikon, vol. 1, pp. 855-57; Kh. L. Fuks, in Fun noentn over (New York) 3 (1957), p. 200.