SHMUEL ZAYNVL PIPE

SHMUEL ZAYNVL PIPE (1907-February 1943)

            He was born in the town of Sonik (Sanok), Galicia.  Until 1929 he worked in the tailoring business.  At the same time, he was an active correspondent to the folklore commission of YIVO in Vilna and a committed Labor Zionist.  In 1930 he was brought to Vilna by YIVO, and there he took a lecture course on folklore by Y. L. Cohen.  He was in the Tsemakh Shabad research program at YIVO (1935-1937).  He was among the most diligent collectors of Jewish folklore in Galicia and published a number of works on Jewish folklore, children’s songs, children’s plays, aphorisms, tales, curses, and jokes from Jewish Galicia in Yivo-bleter (Pages from YIVO) in Vilna (1930-1939).  He also published reviews of books about folklore.  In book form and separate offprints: Yidishe folklor in galitsye (Jewish folklore in Galicia) (Vilna, 1937), 18 pp., which he penned with his brother Oyzer.  His introduction to the immense anthology Yidishe kindershpiln (Jewish children’s play), with 805 entries, was initially read at the research program’s celebration in Vilna in the summer of 1937; it was also published in Dos tsveyte yor aspirantur (The second year of the research program) (Vilna, 1938), pp. 39-47 (the entire collection was lost during the Nazi domination of Vilna.  In the summer of 1939 he returned home to Sanok, but because of the war he was unable to return to Vilna.  He lived for a time in Cracow, and from there he corresponded with YIVO in New York.  He was later confined in the Sanok ghetto.  In the winter of 1942 he was taken to the Zasław concentration camp, and there he was murdered by the Nazis.

Sources: Yivo-bleter (Vilna) 10.1-2 (1936); Yedies fun yivo (Vilna) 5-6 (1037); Dr. Yankev Shatski, in Tsukunft (New York) (July 1942); Yivo-bleter (New York) 26 (1945), pp. 14-15.

Khayim Leyb Fuks