Grave Of Yiddish Writer Der Nister Unearthed At Gulag Site
Graphic by Angelie Zaslavsky
(JTA) — Researchers from Israel and Russia discovered the grave of an influential Jewish writer and resistance fighter known as Der Nister who perished in communist purges at a former Soviet camp for political prisoners.
The final resting place of Pinchus Kahanovich, an anti-fascist fighter and one of the 20th century’s most influential writers in Yiddish, was found earlier this month near the coal mining village of Vortuka, located in Russia near the Arctic Circle.
Scholars pinpointed the burial place of Kahanovich using testimonies and blueprints of the gulag that existed there.
The researchers commemorated the burial place with a barbed-wire wreath shaped like a Star of David, the news website NewsRu reported Tuesday.
Kahanovich was a member of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, a unit of resistance fighters made up of political prisoners whom Joseph Stalin, the leader of the Soviet Union until his death in 1953, released for propaganda fighters when his pact with Nazi Germany collapsed in 1941, after Adolf Hitler’s army invaded the Soviet Union. Most of the committee’s members were rearrested in the 1950s, convicted on trumped-up espionage charges and killed.
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