From the Pages of Yedies

by ROBERTA NEWMAN

Six years into World War II, in September 1944, Yedies published excerpts from letters YIVO had recently received from young Jewish soldiers serving in Allied forces. The letters spoke about the destruction of Jewish communities in Europe, encountered as the American, British, and Russian armies penetrated further into formerly Nazi-controlled territories; the inspiration the soldiers drew from reports of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, which had taken place a year earlier; and their hopes of playing a role in disseminating awareness of Judaism and Jewish cultural heritage after the war.

Among the letters received were a few from particularly notable correspondents:

S. (Zosa) Frydman-Szajkowski, who was in the process of becoming an important collector of Jewish archival materials in France, which are now held in collections at YIVO, Brandeis, the Jewish Theological Seminary, Hebrew Union College, and Columbia University. Szajkowski, who also became an archivist and research associate at YIVO, died in notoriety after being discovered stealing rare documents from libraries, such as the New York Public Library and the Bibliothèque nationale et universitaire in Strasbourg. Read an article about Szajkowski’s troubled legacy in Tablet.

Bernard Bellush, who became a noted professor of American history at City College, the author of books such as Franklin D. Roosevelt as Governor of New York (1955) and Union Power and New York: Victor Gotbaum and District Council 37 (co-author with Jewel Bellush) (1984). Read a short biography of Bellush in the magazine of the American Historical Association.

David Opatoshu, already well-known as a Yiddish actor of stage and screen, and later famous for his role as Akiva in the film Exodus. Read his New York Times obituary.