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Yehezkel Kaufmann was born in 1889 to observant parents. His father was a cloth merchant and brought his son, as was the custom, to the “Cheder” and when the boy grew up, he studied Talmud and Poskim in the Beit Midrash. In addition to this, he studied Hebrew grammar and some new Hebrew literature from a private Hebrew teacher. Even at the dawn of his days he showed a tendency to write essays. His first article was published in “Ha-Shilo'ah” on Ahad Ha'am.

In 1919 Kaufmann immigrated to Israel and taught Tanakh at the Reali School in Haifa and, after a while, he was invited to lecture at the university in Jerusalem and was appointed professor of Bible there. He served in this position until 1957. He participated in almost all Hebrew periodicals with his articles and research in the field of Judaism, its history and problems, and twice won the Bialik Prize. Of all his many writings, Kaufmann achieved recognition mainly through two books: “Exile and Estrangement” and “The Religion of Israel, from its Beginnings to the Babylonian Exile.”

In his book “Exile and Estrangement,” Kaufmann lays the foundations for his view of the philosophy of history in general, and of the Jewish people in particular, and insists on the explanation of the uniqueness of Israel. In his opinion, the religious factor alone served to shape the unity and merger of the Jewish nation. A most original work is his great book, “The Religion of Israel, from its Beginnings to the Babylonian Exile.” Through this monumental composition, he brought redemption to biblical science, which until then was in the hands of foreign scholars or in the hands of Israeli scholars who were influenced by non-Jewish scholars.

As is known, biblical science was dominated by the view of the Wellhausen school, according to which the belief in unity in Israel developed from idolatry. Kaufmann proves on the basis of studies and evidence from the Bible itself that this view is fundamentally wrong and that the idea of the unity of the Godhead is what distinguishes Judaism and that it developed from the beginning of its appearance on the stage of history without the element of idolatry. This idea is a novelty in the literature of biblical science and, just as the idea is a novelty, so is the originality of his method and his way of proof to strengthen his position.

In the twilight of his life, he began writing commentaries on the book of first prophets and managed to publish commentaries on the book of Joshua and the book of Judges.

Kaufmann was a researcher who expressed the thought of Israel from the beginning of its existence as a people. He reflected on the spiritual beginning of the nation in order to discover its cultural cradle. In this research, he saw the purpose of his life and plowed deep into the depths of the spiritual genesis of the nation.

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Professor Zvi Sharfstein

Zvi Sharfstein's literary writing is rich and varied. There seems to be no problem in education that has not been illuminated in his many books. His theory is short and sweet. He presents his ideas in copious amounts when the matter requires it, but also in brief when the purpose is clear. And another sentence only for necessity. Law and practice are bound together for him. There is no thought without an action next to it and there is no action without a theoretical clarification.

These books were liked by teachers and students alike in different countries in the diaspora and were widely distributed.

Sharfstein was one of the first, it seems, to write a book for learning the language for adults. While he was still in Galicia, before coming to the United States, he wrote such a book together with Raphael Soferman z”l. He was the first in explaining the methodical side of the acquisition of the language. The name of the book - “Methods of Learning Our Language.” He was also one of the first to illuminate “methods of learning the Tanakh.”

He was also first in formulating problems and their clarifications mainly in other areas of our educational literature and among the first in reviving the language and speaking it in the diaspora. He was the first among the educated people of our city for whom the language was fluent and his fresh and sharp Hebrew speech led to the fact that, in other cities near and far also, the language would live on in speech, such that our small city was known for its influence on other cities in matters of Zionism.

Zvi Sharfstein: An educator with every fiber of his being. Not a professional, but for whom education is a lofty national-human moral mission. The educator begins in him from the model of his outstanding personality and continues to be embodied over decades in the act of teaching and authoring textbooks for children. In everything he wrote, even in things that are apparently far from the issue of education, an educational purpose is concealed. But since the virtue of his education is a result of the foundation of the love that is in him, from the poetry in his personality - the educational purposefulness in his writings, often unconscious and therefore also indirect, wrapped always in poetic moral values, an atmosphere of a high moral level with deep religious feeling, and within everything and above everything - an essence of love. A triple love that is one: for man in general, for the people of Israel, and for the culture of Israel. The humanistic tone in which his words are incorporated comes from here. Broad-minded humanism, which accepts the problems of the Jewish people as a general human issue.

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Zvi Sharfstein, as mentioned, wrote a lot. In addition to the many textbooks, whose successors have passed through ages and countries, he also authored several foundational books, which add serious weight to any Hebrew pedagogical library (“The History of Education in Israel in Recent Generations”; “Education in the Land of Israel”).

Most visible are his autobiography books: “It Was Spring in the Land” and its sequel - “Forty Years in America.” To these can be added two more books, which also complement each other: “A Teacher's Lifestyle” and “A Conversation with the Teachers.” These books belong to the field of fine literature and in them, his personality is fully realized.

S. L. Blank lived his first eighteen years in my hometown, Dunayivtsi; then he lived in Bessarabia for about 14 years and in the United States for about forty years.

He was a son of nature, rooted in it and living with it. And in Bessarabia, in the communities and towns where he served as a teacher, he found his soul's place: the fields, the trees, and the streams; the expanses of the prairie and the flocks of sheep, and the shepherd who was part of the landscape. He was a poet of the landscape and its creatures, a poet of nature in all its manifestations.

In Dunayivtsi whose inhabitants were, like in all the towns, peddlers and shopkeepers, agents and craftsmen and Beit Midrash students - Blank did not find his world. The Jews there were mostly cut off from nature. It was somewhat different in Bessarabia - some of its Jewish residents were villagers, close to the land, breathing fresh air and earning a living through hard work. Blank chose them. He depicted their lives as he saw them with his artistic eye.

Bessarabia produced several important Hebrew writers such as Yehuda Steinberg and S. Ben-Zion, who spent most of their lives in Bessarabia, and even so the types they described were not different from the types described by Hebrew writers from other districts.

However, Blank did not deal with these types much. In his works, there are not many of the peddlers and shopkeepers, the agents and the learned and the educated. If he mentions them - it is nothing more than a cursory impression.

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Blank chose for his works the shepherd and the tillers of the land, even an American immigrant - if he were a Bessarabian Jew and lived in the city - he longs for the earth, establishes a farm for himself, and turns to the field and to the chicken coop and to the barn. As a son of nature who understands his alternatives, Blank paints him from both sides - on the side of his serenity and his beauty and on the side of his storms and destructive forces, “sheep,” “colony,” “land,” “inheritance” - these creations of his were mainly subject to the sublime quiet, the silence of its tranquilities, its charm, its landscape, and the changes of nature's wrath. The animal is also part of the landscape. The dog, the cow, the cat, the calf, the bird, and the chick - they were all in the grasp of his eye and the whispers of his heart. He was perhaps the only Hebrew writer in the diaspora whose dog was his friend - an intimate friend - the dog, Torik, in the poetic story “Eve.”

His great pleasure was to paint, with the warmth of his heart, the great peace that reigned over the expanses, the abundance of the earth that nourished its creatures. In the book “Sheep,” he begins with a depiction of a plot of land, which Boaz leased after his wedding on which to raise sheep. He started with five sheep and a dog to guard the sheep. The depictions are pastoral. The whole atmosphere is full of happiness. When Boaz sees his flock grazing on the grass, he says: Eat, my dears, and let it be palatable. And when he sees them drinking from the river water, he whispers, drink nice. And a flute for the shepherd and he plays the song of the uniqueness of the meadow and thinks about his young wife who is beloved by him. And the Shabbat in the house of this shepherd, a simple person who does not know how to read the prayer book, is described as a day of great pleasure. The entire book is an idyll, an idyll, which also includes the building of life, like the story of Knut Hamsun, “The Blessing of the Earth.”

The story, “Sheep,” and his other books of this type - “Moshava,” “Inheritance,” “Land” - are the only ones in our literature that are based on the poetry of the land (except for the stories of Mapu and Buki Ben Yagli, who preceded him). Even in the Land of Israel, where the religion of labor developed and its pioneers gave their souls to revive the wilderness, no idyll was created, it was not created and it could not be created.

Blank's Boaz was the innocent united with nature, son of mother earth who nursed from her breasts, and the pioneers were the sons of the cities, people saturated with culture who approached the land not as its descendants, but as broad-minded idealists who, due to their wisdom and understanding of the history of the nations, came to the general conclusion that the land is the mother of all life and that through work, the nation of Israel would be resurrected.

The other side of nature - its tremendous eruption in storm and tempest, and the inner storm in the human soul. In Blank's books there is a description of storms and horrors and angry rains. The black clouds, the thunders, the lightning, and the violent whirlwind of leaves and branches and trees being uprooted - the whole vision of nature diverging from its framework to break and to explode and to destroy - all these were described with great power. And he also painted with vigor the turmoil of the soul, the eruption of lust for the flesh, the terror of revenge, and the feelings of murder, and the thirst for blood.

And since Jewish types were not the most suitable for mental turmoil and the outburst of desire - to use knives and rifles - Blank went with black people, Italians, and Romanians - Romanians during the riots against the Jews. These depictions are full of power and talent. He forces us to believe in these outbursts, their climaxes that reach a high level, that they are found in life, and that they are the obligation of reality, complicated results in the soul.

“A Man, a Woman, and a Monkey” is a wonderful story about a disabled Italian who fights with his young and healthy wife

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who cheated on him and was about to strangle him, and the woman killed him with a pistol bullet. The book, “During the Emergency,” is full of acts of sadism and murder by Romanians and their abuse of the Jews - their victims. In his story, “The Haters,” the heavy atmosphere is felt, the atmosphere of savagery in the Moldavian villages. The scene of the war fought by a Jewish boy who returned from the army and defended the honor of his mother and the honor of his fiancée - a work of thought. The boy's attack on his enemy, Akseno the Romanian, is a great artistic achievement. Blank wrote a lot about the life of the Jewish immigrants here - actually one could say: the immigrants in Philadelphia and its surroundings. He described the changes that occurred in the immigrants because of their desire to adapt or because of the necessity of adaptation, because of their desire to climb the class ladder. The descriptions are written in a sociological spirit and whoever comes to write in the future about the changes in the lives of the immigrants, the first and second generation in America, their transition from crafting and from small peddling to shops, and from shops to wealth, and the ways of imitation and human and social relations - will find what they are looking for in Blank.

I saw his name for the first time in one of the last volumes of “Ha-Tekufa” and the things, the words of poetry, made an impression on me. I remember something new in their way of expression, new and unusual and original. I was amazed at that natural nakedness, that extreme lack of flowery language that is so rare in any poetry and least of all in our Hebrew poetry. And at the same time - what simplicity they are and what special devotion.

The poet is a villager and it is the village that set the boundaries of his world, but in the meantime, he went out and wandered in the big world and behold, he was captured and lost in the city. From it he strays and is drawn from his framework to nature and to the perfection in nature and complains over human beings who closed their souls in the city. And there is that, in his longing for nature, a sudden realization of illusion will come and illuminate for the poet in the suburbs of the city and he hears the following as a kind of whisper: “Man will return again to the earth and to God and somewhere the fields' harvest will still wait for us.” A pure, simple, and human expression of the main prayer of his life.

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And in this state of mind of standing in prayer, behold he gives us gentle homeland songs. He gave us a melodic poem, “Did you hear the sound in the ravine?” The ending: “From afar, the echo still sings - is the trembling still sounding?” Or the poem, “Naked and Scorched by Sands,” in which he says to his country:

See,
At the edge of your horizon, the tent was built.
Did you know perhaps?
Command pleasantness nightly and at ease

In the bosom of a woman and in the lamb's pen,
And with a burst of light in the cracks
Rise up and engrave the destiny of my name
Like the purity of your clods of earth.

Was the poet in real life among the true pioneers? It is impossible for those who have not tasted the taste of their lives to feel what he feels and expresses.

And with the sprouting of my first buds
The leaves of the tenderness of your skin
I will hide my face and cry with joy:
My seed, the seed of the homeland.

The secret of the homeland is revealed to the poet, if he can feel in the poem, “In the Spring,” what he put, in his humility, in the mouth of the one walking in amazement wondering in the meadow (the p' has a kamatz vowel): “The walker wondered in the meadow/Who took root in the landscape?/To the tree top of a birch above the blue/He will focus his eye/The flower of happiness.”

A hint of spring - and also a hint of love. Among the pearls of the dream - he tells us - there is one full of grace still illuminating the path of his life from then until now: “Aviv. Valley and forest. Light and blue sky. Paths and paths wander up the mountain. A girl runs in the wild so stormily happy. After her - he, the young poet.

Suddenly a flash of light lit a fire in the eyes.
A storming wave of blood is aroused.
Like the gold of bells silently the lips sounded,
The girl cries - and I love, love.

This last verse, full of simplicity and wonderful beauty, gives us more about love than we have found in some long and great love songs.

His first steps into Hebrew poetry were encouraged and he immediately entered the most excellent literary quarters of those days, “Ha-Tekufa” edited by Ya'akov Cohen, and since then we have indeed seen his poems in all the periodicals, “Mozna'im” and “Gilyonot,” “Davar” and “Ha-Aretz,” “Bustanai” and “Ha-Po'el Ha-Tsa'ir,” “Ha-Do'ar” and more, and he also published several lyrical and epic poetry books.

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Twenty-five years ago, the poet Avraham Rosen immigrated to Israel and his first meeting with the homeland was an experience for him that mostly nursed an ancient vision and his first poems that he wrote in Israel are filled with imagination, dream, and admiration. Morning light like the gold of a dream danced his first step in the sand on the beach of Jaffa and Tel Aviv seemed to him like a queen's daughter, her sides the charms of the moon and her heartbeat “dreaming of the azure of the sea and the height.” And whenever he went out on the paths of the homeland and his eye encounters the high mountains on its border, he will feel that “the ancient world in the mountain is still standing before his eyes and the sleep of thousands of generations still weaves the dream.” The sound of his country, if he heard it in the ravine, seemed to him smooth and soft like the silk of a dream and he felt that all this was a commotion in his soul. Thus his being clung to all the gentleness, the light, and the landscape in the land, and his soul sunk in the dream of his land. Nothingness is never a dream, the time of awakening also comes, and the poet sees the stillness of the landscape of the homeland as a life force and, if the homeland is also “naked and charred sands,” indeed he will believe in her fate that days will still come when buds will germinate on “the softness of her skin.”

And the longer the poet's residence in Israel, the more his poetry absorbed the land's vitality. The place of the dream was taken by reality and he sings about a poor clump of earth, about a plow and a horse, about an asphalt path and a poor shack, and the people of honest work. Avraham Rosen moved from the sounds of a homeland of pleasures sunk in paradise and dreams to the poetry of reality and also wrote about the days of great suffering and terror, of bloody events, and, as was his way, without raging tones, his voice restrained, nothing in it from the storm or the cry, but every word of his is from the poetry of the time, the war, the Holocaust - saturated with pain.

The landscapes of the homeland, Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, villages and farms, labor and building, mothers and children - all those manifestations of life with its ups and downs - are echoed in Rosen's poems, but the center of his poetry is his individual lyricism. In this area, too, it will be revealed to us in his clear and polished idiom without the drag of shiny words and without over-polishing. Rosen opens for us in his singular poem windows to peek through them into his soul, his thoughts, his emotions, the quiet sorrow that stirs in him, to loneliness, to the reconciliation that comes after difficulties following an inner awakening. The poet knows that there is no companion in dreaming and he must go on in his life alone, but the paths are various and many and they lead to heights, to the abyss, to hell, and therefore it is good to rise up out of the abyss of his life, even if he deprives himself of all. And it does happen often that our footprints on the paths of life fade and disappear and there are those anxious to continue the march, but our poet knows that the dream, even in vain, was better than waking up and that, beyond the secular, it is good to hope for a miracle because the window to the next day is open and through it one can see the “radiance of space.”

Avraham Rosen's lyrical poetry is therefore caught between two poles: the pole of pain and the abysses of human existence and the pole of the reconciliation and the purification of the heart.

Avraham Rosen also created epic poetry, with his long poems and folk tales such as “Three in the Homeland,” “The Penitent,” “Shabbat Candles,” “The Miraculous,” and more - we see not only control over the material, but also a poetic, folk, essential rhythm.

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Mordechai Michaeli

Mordechai Michaeli (Frizant) was born in TRN”D (=1893-94). His father was a rich merchant who became impoverished and, being literate and observant, tried to give his sons a traditional Torah education as well. The family lived for a time in a village close to the city and the boy, Mordechai, spent most of the weekdays at his family's old house in the city and studied in the “Cheder.” On Friday nights, he would return to his father's house and on Sundays, when he could not afford to pay the fare to the city - and this happened quite often - he would walk to the city (a distance of 7-8 km) so that he did not abandon his Torah study.

The Zionist environment in which he grew up and worked during his teenage years instilled in him a strong desire for a Hebrew life in the land of the ancestors and in his twentieth year, he immigrated to the Land of Israel. There he felt as if he had returned home and the mental contrasts between dream and reality no longer existed for him. The Land of Israel, the land of his yearning ever since, received him with love and he was happy there even in his great suffering. He finished his studies at the Beit Midrash for teachers and at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and became a teacher at the “Tahkemoni” school. The fountain of his literary work also increased over the years and he wrote many stories and legends for children that excelled in their originality and special biblical style.

He died in the year TShY”Z (=1956-1957) in his beloved city of Jerusalem, which he did not leave from the day he immigrated to Israel until his last day.

I met Mordechai Michaeli in Jerusalem. He came there as a young man to become a student at the Beit Midrash for teachers founded by “Ezra.” In this institution, where the “rebellion of the Hebrew language” against “Ezra” was announced, his national feeling was also strengthened and his love for the Torah in general, and Israeli culture in particular, deepened. Add to this the serious spirit of the eternal city as well as the degree of his natural diligence and the honesty of his thinking - and you have the general outlines of Michaeli's character and spiritual essence. But this is not sufficient. A special softness of modesty, almost feminine, was spread over him. His soul abhorred all ugliness, all harsh and coarse speech.

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At the university he devoted himself to studying history and literature, and even published a few monographs. But the place of his life and satisfaction was the world of legend. In this world, he sunk into spiritual closeness out of the enthusiasm of intoxication and in it, his original creative power was revealed. This world of wonder, of miracles, of supernatural occurrences, became in his creation a reality with its own logic, with moral legitimacy. Michaeli's legend is not a matter of amusement, of entertainment, of amusing “tricks.” It is serious, it is imbued with serious emotions. And another fundamental quality is found in it: it is not ethereal, it does not blossom in the air of a rootless imagination, but finds its roots in some reality of being and a Jewish way of life. There is no religion, mitzvot, or tradition at its core, and even so it has the smell of “Judaism,” and it is infused with a Jewish atmosphere and saturated with Jewish folk innocence.

Michaeli chose the language and the style for his creation in the field of legend out of a special sense. Not an everyday language, secular language, but the language of the ancients with the grace of purity and innocence in it. The clear biblical language - without frills and embellishments - matches the design of his legends and is organic and adheres to their subject matter and their inner quality.

One of the most prominent figures in public, national, and cultural life in Dunayivtsi was Yosef Blank z”l. A multi-sided and multi-faceted personality, a dreamer and a realist; a scholar and a man of action. Gifted with great personal charm, which attracted the best forces from all strata of the people to the current of national revival.

Not only did Zionism give him fantasies and national pride, vision and hope; not only the “Hovevei Zion” movement whose center was the Odesa Committee found in him one of the most enthusiastic and active personalities - but also in the field of education and culture was he the central dynamic force in Dunayivtsi.

He was the initiator and organizer of the Hebrew educational enterprises in the city. From Bǎlți in Bessarabia he brought the poet Ya'akov Fichman to Dunayivtsi, who taught Hebrew to the youth for two years. From Courland

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he invited the learned and polished and somewhat depressed Dr. Knopping, who served as a teacher in a “Improved Cheder” that was founded at the time. Yosef Blank was one of the most active in the management of this “Improved Cheder,” intended for the children of the affluent, and a “Talmud Torah” for the children of the poor.

He would donate his limited time on Saturday afternoons to teach Mishna to artisans and simple people. A kind of Jewish version of the Russian popular movement “Going to the People.”

The problem: “Hebrew or Russian,” which stirred up emotions in those days, or even “Hebrew or Yiddish,” didn't worry him.- What is this “Hebrew or Yiddish?” He loved them both like twins born to the same parents. Well-versed in the ancient sources, a faithful reader of the new Hebrew literature, he was at the same time in love with every artistic work that appeared in Yiddish.

The first sounds of the folk songs of Warshawsky, heard in the city, came from the house of Yosef Blank. He sang them together with his sons, accompanied by a violin that his eldest son played.

All the books of the “Tushiya,” “Ahiasaf,” and “Moriah” publishers in Hebrew lived peacefully in one basket with the writings of Shalom Aleichem, Mendele, and Peretz in Yiddish. In his house were found the magazines “Ha-Shilo'ah,” “Ha-Tzofeh,” and “Ha-Tsfira,” together with the newspapers “Haynt” and “Moment” from Warsaw and the “Gut Morgen” of Lewinsky which appeared in Odesa, where he also published from the fruit of his pen for many years.

He established associations, organized clubs especially for the youth, and instilled in all strata of the people enthusiasm, national pride, and faithfulness to the Zionist struggle.

The saying that “there is a good man who demands and there is no good man who fulfills” did not apply to him. He infected his sons and daughters with his enthusiasm and his deep belief in the revival of the nation, and he did his best to educate them as Jews and free and proud people at the same time. When he decided in 1913 to send his two young daughters to Israel to work as pioneers and to continue their studies at the same time, his sister came at him indignantly: why is he sending children at a tender age to such a distant place. - “Children, you say? I sent people” - he replied.

His extensive Zionist activities often caused him friction with the Tsarist authorities. The Zionist movement was declared, as we know, to be an illegal political organization and Zionist work was conducted under the guise of the legal Odesa “Hovevei Zion” committee. And here it happened, that Yosef Blank, together with all the members of the committee of the Zionist Federation in Podolia, “were caught” in the house of the lawyer Schleifer in Kamyanets Podilskyy and prosecuted for belonging to an illegal organization. It was in the days of the blackest reaction after the short “spring” of 1905 and all the members of the committee were expected to be sentenced to imprisonment from six months to three years. But a miracle happened: the investigating judge was a liberal person and a personal friend of the lawyer Schleifer and the trial ended well.

Yosef Blank visited Israel for the first time in 1914 and settled there in 1925. In 1926 he went to Chernivtsi to visit his sons and died suddenly in Vatra Dornei in Bukovina.

I heard a lot about the Zionist activities of Yosef Blank already in my youth. His reputation preceded him in the towns of Podolia and Bessarabia. He was known as an outstanding propagandist and his influence on the Zionist youth was strong. I was a young girl when I left my town of Briceni in 1904 and went to study in Belz, the district city of Bessarabia. I came to the house of Itta and Yisrael Steinberg (brother of the writer Yehuda Steinberg). Their home was a meeting place for the Zionist youth. I, a passionate Zionist from my youth, started with a group of friends in community action. We organized a Zionist association and its meetings were mostly held at the Steinberg's house. There, too, many mentioned the name of Yosef Blank.

On one of the evenings while I was sitting in my room, a man about 45 years old appeared, tall, handsome, with a black beard that added to his face, and introduced himself: Yosef Blank. He said that he wanted to talk with me a bit and that's how our acquaintance began.

The conversations between us were ongoing. Every time he visited Belz for his business, he would come to me. He also visited our association. Under his influence, we began to engage in cultural work and held lectures on the essence of political Zionism and on the practical work in the Land of Israel. After the lectures, we sang the songs of the Land of Israel in a group. The connection with the country grew stronger. Yosef Blank also insisted on the need for practical work: collecting funds for Keren Kayemet, which was not an easy task in those days because of the vigorous opposition to Zionism in various public circles. In our conversations, Yosef Blank always guided me, advised and inspired, speaking as friends with surprising simplicity.

I learned a lot from these conversations and so they are etched in my memory. I was certainly not the only one among the Zionist youth that Yosef Blank would meet with and inspire. This individual approach was an interesting innovation in those times and there was a great blessing in it.

In 1905 I returned to my parents' house and the days - the eve of the revolution and the pogroms.

The Jewish youth in Russia, and of course also in our town, were under the influence of Marxist socialism. There were heated arguments between them and our Zionist association. Both sides would invite respected speakers. Socialist Zionist speakers from all its streams would come to our association, but mainly - from “Po'alei Tsiyon” from the Land of Israel. We had arguments with outside forces, but things were not right at home either. The rift between the “Tsiyonei Tsiyon” and the territorialists grew deeper.

Yosef Blank would also visit me at home, and in the association he would demand to study Hebrew history thoroughly: without a thorough knowledge of the people's history, it is impossible to understand our connection with the Land of Israel. The days of the Seventh Congress were approaching, the first after Herzl's death, a Congress in which the decision should be made: Zion or Uganda. Spirits were agitated. Yosef Blank's hectic work began. He would come to us often, gather the members of the association, and prove that only the Land of Israel would solve the homeland question for the people of Israel.

He was a good orator, his lecture was clear, he spoke with true youthful fervor and also influenced the territorialists in our association. Despite being under the influence of Po'alei Tsiyon, we chose him as a delegate to the Congress. I remember that once I had to consult him on an urgent matter in connection with the congressional elections. I went to his hotel. They brought me into his room and here he is standing in a tallit and tefillin -

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and praying. With a wave of his hand, he invited me to sit down and he continued his prayer. When he finished, he came over to discuss with me the matter I had brought to him.

In 1907-1908 I studied in Odesa and already worked among Po'alei Tsiyon. And here comes Yosef Blank to Odesa because of Zionist matters. We met and from our conversations I realized that his view on Zionism in general had not changed. Nevertheless, he encouraged me in my work. All roads lead to Zion, he said. The friendship between us had not been damaged.

We met several times in Israel and I had the impression that he was also active in the Zionist party there. But it was clear to me that the man was sick. In 1926 he went to Chernivtsi to visit his family and died there.

A marvelous figure, humility with precious virtues of the spirit. From the outside - simplicity and innocence mixed with folkiness, and from the inside - qualities and contributions of a distinguished person.

Because the man was whole, whole in his soul and spirit, and he did not know “the rift in the heart” that his contemporaries suffered. These were “carried by the wind.” “The air drifted” beyond the Pale of Settlement and he remained “a soft chick” but faithful “under the wings of the Shekhinah.”

Indeed, the highlight of his life and work on earth was mainly his educational work in the Zionist area according to the version of Ahad Ha'am because only this elevated man was his teacher to help in the wandering “of the crossroads of his ways” and he stuck to his teachings until the end of his life.

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While still a boy in his father's house, the “town rabbi” filled him up with Gemara, Rashi, and the Toseftas and after that - the fruit of the joys of Hebrew thought and creation. Upon reaching his matriculation, he began to engage in private teaching and trained quite a few students in his city in Hebrew and its literature (the writer of these columns was also honored to be counted among them). Through close contact with the youth, he recognized and appreciated the fresh forces stored in them for the benefit of the Zionist movement and its future and, together with some of his friends, founded the Zionist youth association “Ha-Techiya,” which had a prominent record in the history of Zionism in Ukraine.

Due to his delicate health, he was forced to leave teaching and, with his immigration to Israel, he worked for some years as the secretary of the teachers' federation. Despite the difficulties of absorption, he became fond of the country as he was endeared to all his acquaintances and all those he knew for the pleasantness of his speech and the beauty of his manners, however, the great and cruel suffering that came upon the Jewish settlement during the First World War determined his death while he was still middle-aged.

I met him back in my youth. Short, quick in movement and speech, and with dreamy eyes. He was a wholesale grain merchant and on the days of the fairs in our city, you could see him standing since morning by his warehouse, wearing old and dusty clothes and weighing the sacks of grain that the peddlers around the market were buying from the farmers and bringing to him for sale. Usually, he did not have it easy in business. Even in the years of economic good fortune in our city, success did not shine on him and, if he sometimes had a year of good business, then those that came after them ate up all the good until it was not known that they had happened.

He was also a man of the book. When he returned home from the labor market, emotional and thought poor, he stripped away his many troubles and worries, along with his ragged and dusty clothes, and as a Hebrew scholar

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and outstanding student, wore the garments of emotion and contemplation and worked diligently reading and studying books. His library contained the best of Hebrew literature, starting with the masterpieces of Hebrew poetry and philosophy from the Middle Ages and ending with the collections of the Enlightenment period, the periodicals “Ha-Shilo'ah” and “Ha-Dor,” the poems of Y. L. Gordon and Bialik, the books of “Ahiasaf,” “Tushiya,” and more.

And not only he alone enjoyed his library. All of us, the studying youth in the city, were inspired by it and tasted the taste of reading in the selection of Hebrew literature because his home was a meeting place for us and in it, we felt ourselves as part of our own. He would be with us as with his sons and, with his good taste and knowledge, he would guide us along the paths of Hebrew culture and its revival. He would encourage the first steps of “the writers” among us (among them M. Michaeli, S. L. Blank, and the writer of these columns) and would himself, from time to time, publish reports and articles in the Hebrew press.

The Zionist movement, especially the one that came out of the Beit Midrash of Ahad Ha'am, as well as the revival of the Hebrew language and literature, fascinated the man from the beginning of their awakening and over time, they became the fundamental principle in his private life as well, in which he thought and worked day and night and to which he devoted the best of his energy and spirit. I remember, when I was young, that I saw him on one of the Shabbats sitting wrapped in a tallit in the Sadigura Synagogue during the morning prayer and, as the congregation read the “Psukei de-Zimra” with the cantor in a loud voice, he sang pleasantly and enthusiastically “Ha-Matmid” by Bialik by heart. He was entirely glowing and radiant with excitement and the elation of spirit as an enthusiastic Hasid at the time of spiritual elevation.

During the days of the Bolshevist revolution in Russia, he migrated with his family to the United States, where he was engaged in selling Hebrew books. And see, it's a miracle! Even within the 49 gates of the diasporic existence, which he found in his new place of residence, he did not stop planning his dream of the good and the beautiful in renewed Judaism and also dared in his old age to challenge the authorities of the Russian Revolution who brutally oppress the Jews of their country and rule the soul of the Jewish people without mercy. He did this mainly in his series of articles, which he published in “Ha-Do'ar” under the title “Letters from Russia.” At the time, the letters made an impression on the Jews of the United States and they opened their eyes to see what was happening behind the Iron Curtain.

Such was the man in his youth and in his old age, a dreamer and a fighter, honest and sincere and loyal to his people and his spirit until the end of his days.

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