ZYAME OSTROVSKI

 ZYAME OSTROVSKI

            A current events writer and community leader, he was active over the years 1904-1908 in the Labor Zionist press. He withdrew from political and community work, 1908-1916. After the February 1917 Revolution, he renewed his activities in Labor Zionism, and in 1919 he switched to Bolshevik positions and in the early 1920s joined the Communist Party. In 1920, during the Congress of Toilers of the East in Baku, for which he served as secretary-general, he proposed a plan to create a special red army which would infiltrate the Middle East via the Caucasus, so as to capture Palestine and transform it into a Soviet republic. In the late 1920s to early 1930s, he worked for “Komerd” (Committee for Land Settlement of Jewish Laborers) in Moscow. His fate was the same as the majority of the other leaders of “Komzet” (Committee for the Settlement of Toiling Jews on the Land in the Soviet Union), who were arrested in the latter half of the 1930s. We have no further information about him.

            His Yiddish writings include: Di perspektivn fun der yidisher kolonizir-arbet in fssr afn 1926 yor (The perspective of Jewish colonizing work in the USSR in the year 1926) (Moscow, 1926); Albom yidishe pogromen 1918-1921 (Album of Jewish pogroms, 1918-1921) (Moscow, 1925).

Source: Chaim Beider, Leksikon fun yidishe shrayber in ratn-farband (Biographical dictionary of Yiddish writers in the Soviet Union), ed. Boris Sandler and Gennady Estraikh (New York: Congress for Jewish Culture, Inc., 2011), p. 26