YITSKHOK-MOYSHE MELAMDOVITSH (MELAMED)

YITSKHOK-MOYSHE MELAMDOVITSH (MELAMED) (January 2, 1904-October 14, 1990)

            He was born in Bialystok, Russian Poland.  He studied in religious elementary school, in a Russian high school, and later in a Polish high school from which he graduated in 1922.  From 1924 he was working as a teacher in secular Jewish schools in Bialystok.  From 1928 he was a member of the Bund, and he was a member of the Bialystok Committee of the party.  He was elected in 1938 on the Bundist list to the Bialystok city council.  He authored textbooks: Undzer rekhnbukh, far 2tn klas folkshul (Our arithmetic book, for the second year in public school), illustrated by M. Berman (Warsaw: Kultur-lige, 1937), 130 pp.; Undzer rekhnbukh, far 3tn klas folkshul (Our arithmetic book, for the third year in public school) (Warsaw, 1938), 147 pp.; Undzer rekhnbukh, far 5tn klas folkshul (Our arithmetic book, for the fifth year in public school) (Warsaw, 1938), 244 pp.—all published by the Khmorner Fund of the Central Jewish School Organization (Tsisho) in Poland.  With the outbreak of WWII, he lived for a time in Vilna.  In 1941, with the assistance of the Jewish Labor Committee, he came to the United States.  He lived in Chicago where he worked as a teacher in the schools of the Sholem-Aleichem Folk Institute and was executive director of the institute.  He contributed to Pedagogisher byuletin (Pedagogical bulletin), published by the education committee in New York, and there he published dramatizations of performances for the secular Jewish schools in America.  From 1948 until 1960, he served as executive secretary of the Chicago division of the World Jewish Culture Congress.

With his wife

Benyomen Elis