YOYSEF-EMANUEL LANDSMAN

YOYSEF-EMANUEL LANDSMAN (1869-September 13, 1931)

            He was born in Lithuania.  He left in his early youth for Leipzig, Germany, where he converted to Christianity and studied at the Lutheran Theological Seminary.  Over the course of a number of years, he was later a pastor in Sweden.  Around the first years of the twentieth century, he moved to London, where he engaged in missionary work among the Eastern European Jewish immigrants.  From 1927 he was living in Warsaw, where he and a second missionary, Marcus Bregman, published a bimonthly work Der veg (The way).  Because of the enhanced esteem in which Yiddish was held, Landsman (starting with the December 1928 issue) published his work in the new orthography in language approaching general literary Yiddish.  Aside from openly missionary articles, he also published sketches in his journal, such as: “Der bobeshis mayse” (Grandma’s tale), “Di piyutim fun yom kipper” (Liturgical poems of Yom Kippur), “Aforizmen un gedanken” (Aphorisms and ideas), and others.  In book form he published a series of Christian missionary works in Hebrew and Yiddish and monographs on important missionaries, and he translated into Yiddish—from Greek texts, as he stated—the Evangelists.  He died in Warsaw.

Sources: Zalmen Reyzen, Leksikon, vol. 2; Morgn-zhurnal (New York) (February 23, 1932); obituary notice in Der veg (Warsaw) (October 1931).

Borekh Tshubinski