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Jacob Jerusalimski is one of the branched Jerusalimski family in Białystok. (In the United States the name was changed to Jerusalem, and later, in Israel, to ירושלמי=Yerushalmi).^[1]

He was born in Russian-ruled Białystok in 1897^[2], and was the second of three sons of his parents, Teme and Gershon. However, he was their only son who remained. When he was thirteen years old, his father, who was a teacher and principal at a Jewish school in Białystok, died. His father had a great influence on little Yankele and was his spiritual guide.

Yankele had a great thirst for knowledge and used to read with passion everything written in Yiddish or Russian. The tragic situation of the Jewish population under the Tsarist regime and later, after Poland became independent and Białystok came under Polish rule, weighed heavily on him. He felt a strong identification with his people and suffered together with them for the injustice done to them.

At the age of 17 he finished the Białystok “Remeslenoye” (Artisans’ School) as a specialist in textiles, which was one of the main branches of Białystok industry. In 1919 he married Manja (Malka), one of 11 children in the distinguished family of Tsvi-Hirsh and Reyzl Kagan [Cohen] (née Levkovski). During the Polish-Russian War he lost all his fortune and tried his luck in the “shpagat” [cord] business.

In 1920 his son Gershon was born, and in 1921 his daughter Ida. Seeing no future for his family in Poland, he emigrated to Belgium in 1924. His wife and their two children joined him in 1925. The family settled in Antwerp, Belgium, where he (Jacob) learned the diamond trade.

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He thus led quite a comfortable life until 1931, when the world crisis greatly affected the diamond industry in Belgium.

To get through the hard times, his wife took various jobs as a seamstress until the two of them worked their way up to a corset salon, which proved quite satisfying. Jacob, who contributed his experience in the textile trade, established a “tsudatn” (accessories) business in the corset industry, which developed very favorably until the day of the Nazi invasion of Belgium, in 1940.

In Antwerp Jacob took an active part in Jewish life, especially in the Zionist movement. He was elected secretary of the “Poale-Zion” in Belgium, at the time when Leon Kubovitski^[3] was president and Dr. Pruzhanski vice-president. At the same time he was also secretary of the Committee of Polish Jews. His abilities to observe events with a keen eye and to draw conclusions from them elevated him to the rank of journalist for the newspaper “The Belgian Day”.

He additionally specialized in critiques of Jewish theater in Antwerp. Artists greatly respected his sharp reviews, for he was not ashamed to describe a play as he saw and felt it. His will to convey his impressions to others in words led him to become a belletrist; an author of short stories, sketches, and of episodes about Jewish life in Antwerp.

His works were well received by the Jewish press and were printed in various editions. With his keen eye and noticeable instinct for the future, he accurately analyzed the political situation in Europe when the Nazi regime began to show its true face.

In August 1939, a month before the Nazi invasion of Poland, he visited his hometown of Białystok as a journalist. During this brief visit, he saw “the handwriting on the wall” and tried to warn his relatives of the impending disaster. Unfortunately, his warning was not taken seriously. It was dismissed as mere fantasy. On his way back to Belgium from Poland, he spent 24 hours in Berlin and saw that the Nazi machinery was in full swing

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and was preparing to storm. Upon his return to Belgium, he warned the Jewish population against the spread of Nazism throughout Europe. He became a member of the committee to boycott German goods. His foresight was unbelievable. He predicted the German invasion of Western Europe. He packed a suitcase with the most necessary things for each of his relatives in order to escape quickly. He also sent his son to the “Belgian Congo” (now Zaïre) in April 1940 on the last ship before the Nazi invasion of Belgium, and the son arrived in Léopoldville 5 days before the invasion (on May 10, 1940).

Jacob and his wife and daughter were temporarily housed in a place in “Marsey” [Marseilles ?], where they obtained the American visa. (Preparations for obtaining an emigrant visa to the United States had already been made by Jacob in Antwerp before the outbreak of the war).

They departed via Spain and Portugal, arriving by ship in New York in September 1941. According to the suggestion of the American consulate in Marsey [Marseille?], they shortened their family name to Jerusalem; but in all his writings Jacob continued to use the name Jerusalimski.

In New York, Jacob returned to the diamond trade. At the same time, he was active in Jewish national organizations, but especially for Eretz Israel [Palestine]. He began writing short stories again and earned his first $10 in America with the publication of his story “Three Yahrzeit Candles” in “The American”. Encouraged by this beginning, more work followed. Shortly after the end of the war, he began to write a memoir about his former hometown of Białystok, which he had printed in the “Białystoker Stimme”, the periodical of the Białystoker “landslayt”.

He began to publish his memoirs in 1949, which were delayed until 1969; the title was: “Białystok - sunny pictures of my youth”.

Together with his friends, Messrs. Ribalovski (the present secretary of “Białystoker Heym” in New York), Kaganovski, Falan, Goldberg and others, whose names escape us at the moment, they founded the “Club of Białystoker Friends” in New York.

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After his children emigrated to Los Angeles, he also moved there in 1962 to be closer to his family.

In early 1970, he began to suffer from health problems. It dragged on for longer years. He had some serious heart attacks and was close to death several times; the doctors managed to save him, but his health continued to deteriorate.

In April 1979, he got pneumonia and then additionally a heart attack. He left us forever on May 24, 1979 (27 Iyyar 5739). He found his final resting place at Mount Sinai Memorial Park in Forest-Lawn, California.

He is survived by his grieving wife, two children, daughter-in-law Regine and grandson Nemi-Roze. Honor his memory, which this book seeks to perpetuate.

The family,
Los Angeles, 1981

The author and the co-founders of the Club of “Białystok Friends” in New York

1. I also found the name written as Jeruslimsky. Return
2. The date of birth is corrected here to “1897”, but there is evidence in the book that the author was born in 1900: due to an oversight in the birth records, Jacob was incorrectly registered in 1897 instead of 1900. Return
3. Arye Leon Kubovi(tski), see http://www.blogglistene.no/blog/blogger-com/yleksikon/ Return

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