SH. TSEPELEVITSH

SH. TSEPELEVITSH

            He was born in Vilna, where his father was a teacher of Jewish vocal music and specialized in preparing boys for their bar mitzvahs.  He went through the Vilna pedagogical courses of study in 1920-1921 and was a teacher in the Vilna Hebrew high school.  He began writing in Yiddish for Kursiste vort (Student word) in 1920 on pedagogical topics.  Over the years 1935-1939, he contributed to the Zionist daily newspaper Di tsayt (The times), in which he published articles on Hebrew school curricula and overviews of Yiddish and Hebrew writers (Mortkhe ben Hillel Hacohen, Ruvn Brainin, Hillel Tsaytlin, Sholem Asch, Dr. L. Borekh, H. D. Nomberg, and Sh. Y. Agnon, among others).  He wrote a number of plays and dramatizations for school productions in Hebrew, such as: Hazkena vehadov (The old woman and the bear) of 1925; and “Ḥashmonaim ketanim” (Little Maccabees) and “Nes purim” (The miracle of Purim), an opera for children, in 1930.  And, they were staged with students from the Hebrew high school, as well as other dramatizations.  Together with his father, he was murdered in a concentration camp in Estonia.  His mother, wife, and children were murdered by the Nazis in Majdanek.

Sources: Eliezer Ran, in Haḥinukh vehatarbut haivrit beeropa ben shete milḥamot haolam (Hebrew education and culture in Europe between the two world wars), ed. Zevi Scharfstein (New York, 1957), pp. 547-62; Shmerke Katsherginski, Khurbn vilne (The Holocaust in Vilna) (New York, 1947), p. 244.

Leyzer Ran