Photo: Birobidzhaner Shtern

Esther Rosenthal-Schneiderman (Trana-Esther Fuchs) ‒ is one of the most prominent figures in the history of Jewish scholarship and culture. In 1926, this Polish Communist and graduate of Warsaw University was covertly sent to the Soviet Union. She was both a witness to and a participant in the events surrounding the development of Jewish scholarship and culture in Ukraine, the activities of the Institute of Jewish Proletarian Culture, its involvement in establishing the Jewish autonomy in the Far East, and the Stalinist repressions that claimed many of her friends and colleagues. The personal archive of this writer, publicist, and educator has revealed previously unknown facets of her life, though much of it remains unresolved.

The name of writer, publicist, and educator Esther Rosenthal-Schneiderman is well known to researchers of Russian-Jewish history. Famous historians have repeatedly drawn upon her articles and books published across various countries and periodicals, interviewing her and citing her work. Reminiscences of her tenure at the Institute of Jewish Proletarian Culture (IJPC) and her involvement in the construction of Birobidzhan are reflected in the works of A. Greenbaum, P. Novak, H. Sloves, S. Lipshitz, M. Altshuler, Y. Ro'i, L. Berger, L. Brenner, A. Avneri, and others, who had the opportunity to hear about these events directly from a first-hand participant.

However, only a select few knew that from 1926 to 1958, Trana-Esther Fuchs, born on June 7, 1896, in Częstochowa, lived in the Soviet Union under this assumed identity. Born into a large, impoverished Jewish family and possessed of an intellectual curiosity, she managed to graduate from Warsaw University and become a prominent activist in the local branch of the Jewish Zionist-Socialist Workers Party. To evade arrest for her revolutionary activities, she fled to the USSR using a forged passport under the name of Sara Moiseevna Schneiderman.

From her first days on Soviet soil, she was received with great warmth and cordiality. In the Soviet political climate, Esther's personal life acquired new meaning, and she gained a circle of influential acquaintances within the Polish representation of the Comintern, including Sofia Dzerzhinskaya, the wife of F. E. Dzerzhinsky. The Comintern assigned the young educator to Kyiv to train Polish cadres for a future socialist Poland. Esther began teaching Polish at the Kyiv Polish Labor School. Given her command of Yiddish, she simultaneously joined the IJPC as a research fellow. After completing her postgraduate studies in pedagogy, she was appointed Head of the Pedagogy Department at the Kyiv Polish Pedagogical Institute in September 1933. However, the purging campaign initiated at the time targeted both her school and the faculty and student body of the institute. Consequently, the institute was closed; over half of the faculty and postgraduate students, and more than a third of the students, fell victim to repression. Esther, however, was bypassed by these measures.

The period of her work at the Institute of Jewish Proletarian Culture is the most well-documented part of Esther's biography. During the 1920s and 1930s, she published numerous methodological brochures, manuals, and articles in periodicals such as "Di Yidische Shprakh," "Forpost," and "Ratnbildung," as well as in collective volumes on schooling and pedagogy for various age groups.

Her memoirs describe the profound interest shown by the institute's scholars in the scientific expedition of KOMZET, which surveyed the Birobidzhan region in 1927. She witnessed the inception of the Birobidzhan project, a process vividly and truthfully recorded in her book "Birobidzhan fun der Noent" ("Birobidzhan from Up Close"). The book reflects the aspirations of Soviet Jews to build a Jewish homeland, as well as their shattered hopes a decade after the resettlement began. The memoirs chronicle remarkable events concerning the activities of the IJPC, including correspondence with the expedition leaders, Professor Bruk and Academician Williams. A festive gathering at the institute dedicated to the first Birobidzhan Regional Congress is described in vivid detail, portraying it as a genuine national triumph attended by representatives of Jewish and Ukrainian science, writers, and party officials. Her memoirs reveal the passionate soul of a person who was then a dedicated supporter of the Birobidzhan project. Each chapter of this book required historical accuracy and documentary verification, which was difficult to achieve due to restricted access to the KGB archives in the USSR. Her memoirs shed light on the region's history, including accounts of anti-Jewish campaigns, making them an invaluable resource for scholars studying Soviet Jewish history and culture.

In historical records, apart from Schneiderman's memoirs, there are no other accounts of the 1932 visit to Birobidzhan by IJPC Director Iosif Liberberg and his deputy B. Guberman. She conveys with genuine enthusiasm the atmosphere of joy and excitement that prevailed at the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences when they presented their travel report. Esther colorfully quotes the institute leaders' descriptions of Birobidzhan’s nature and its rich mineral wealth. Following this meeting, it was decided that institute staff would travel to Ukrainian cities and towns to encourage the Jewish poor to resettle in Birobidzhan. Esther, paired with the eminent scholar Nokhem Shtif, along with other staff members, embarked on a month-long mission. As Esther describes, Liberberg’s call to move to Birobidzhan was answered by many of her acquaintances from Kyiv, Kharkiv, and Odesa, including economists, physicians, educators, journalists, librarians, and preschool teachers, all traveling in the hope of building a better life. The impact of this campaign was evident: in 1932, over 50 percent of the settlers arriving in Birobidzhan originated from Ukraine.

Following the decree establishing the Birobidzhan district as the Jewish Autonomous Region, Iosif Liberberg was elected Chairman of the Executive Committee at the first Congress of Soviets. Following him and other institute scholars, Esther departed in May 1935, "...having been reassigned by the Central Committee of the CPSU(b) to work in the Jewish Autonomous Region of the Far Eastern Krai." She was appointed head of the Birobidzhan Regional Pedagogical Office and also taught 6th-grade mathematics at Kalinin Secondary School No. 1.

Accounts of the Birobidzhan period of her life lack the previous enthusiasm and pathos. Almost immediately, Esther encountered distrust from the first secretary of the regional party committee, M. Havkin, who soon labeled her "the professor's wife." At every opportunity, he sought to emphasize her uselessness and characterize her, along with other scholars who had arrived with Liberberg to establish Jewish statehood, as a burden to the region. The memoirs clearly reveal the friction between the party and Soviet authorities, as well as the factional rivalry that developed between Havkin and Liberberg. This historical chronicle of the Birobidzhan project offers detailed portraits of the main figures from 1927 up to the Stalinist purges of 1937–1938. It is Schneiderman who records the sayings popular among Birobidzhan residents at the time: "Those from Kyiv organize, and those from Smolensk liquidate," and "Liberberg shaft, Havkin lakht" ("Liberberg creates, Havkin laughs").

Esther lived in Birobidzhan for just over two and a half years, witnessing the grand initial plans, the subsequent campaign against Liberberg following his arrest in Moscow, and the ensuing repressions, which eventually targeted her as well, resulting in her being twice expelled from the party. She was deeply affected by the arrests of her colleagues and acquaintances in the region. In a chapter titled "The Empty Fanzas," she describes the events of late 1937 as a profound tragedy, when Korean collective farms suddenly emptied overnight: "...the entire population of small Korean villages and the largest Korean village, Blagoslovennoye, vanished. The doors of all Korean schools were closed; there were no teachers, and no students left." She does not conceal her affection and respect for the region's Korean population. Her account of Korean life in the Jewish Autonomy is one of the few written records that portrays not only their administrative and social structures but also their daily life and hospitality.

Among the documents in Esther's personal archive, several materials translated from Yiddish into Russian (translated by I. and R. Merkin) were discovered, including "Requiem," which was included in the fourth volume of her memoirs, "Birobidzhan fun der Noent." This piece recounts the life stories of her repressed acquaintances. She proposes compiling a lexicon of the Birobidzhan settlers who arrived from both the Soviet Union and various corners of the world. It is known that over 1,500 Jews from 14 countries arrived in the region, and Esther believed their names should not be forgotten.

In the concluding section of "Requiem," she writes: "I have recounted the tragic fate of only a few from an entire legion of foreign settlers who perished in Soviet camps. Deep in my heart, I wish that a monument would be erected in Jerusalem to tell of the enthusiasm with which they came to Birobidzhan in their quest to build a Jewish Soviet state, and how cruelly they were deceived. There is also an urgent need for an organization to collect testimonies from those who are still alive."

Before her eyes unfolded the tragedy of the Stalinist repressions of 1937–1938, a dark chapter in the history of the Jewish Autonomy. During this period alone, 2,714 people were repressed in the JAR. In 1937, 809 people were arrested (including 159 Jewish men and 31 Jewish women), and 191 were executed. In 1938, 1,905 people were arrested (including 193 Jewish men and 31 Jewish women), and 879 were executed. In total, 1,070 people were executed in the JAR over these two years[1]. Among the victims were heads of enterprises and organizations, specialists, cultural figures, writers, journalists, and Jewish settlers. Following Stalin's death, all of them were rehabilitated.

In the chapter "The Exterminated Leaders of Birobidzhan," Esther names acquaintances who ended up in the chambers and cellars of the NKVD, many of whom never returned. Following their arrests, she and Nison Rosenthal, whom she had met in Birobidzhan, fled secretly to the Caucasus, where they were unknown.

The city of Nalchik and the Kabardino-Balkarian Pedagogical Institute began a new, highly dramatic chapter in her life, marked by flight from advancing German troops, active pedagogical and scholarly work, preparation of her doctoral thesis, and public activity. This period concluded with a return to Kyiv in 1948, where Esther and Nison officially registered their marriage. From that time on, she used the surname Rosenthal-Schneiderman.

In the late 1940s and early 1950s, the campaigns against cosmopolitanism and bourgeois nationalism launched in Kyiv eliminated any hope of restoring Jewish life. With a sense of dread, bitterness, and the loss of all hope for justice or a return to normalcy, Esther describes the fates of former Stalinist prisoners. These circumstances likely influenced her decision to return to Poland in 1958, where she resumed teaching and published several textbooks. However, in the late 1950s and early 1960s, rising anti-Semitic sentiment in Poland prompted a mass emigration of Polish Jews to Israel. Esther and Nison immigrated to Israel in 1962.

In Jerusalem, E. Rosenthal-Schneiderman worked at the Hebrew University's Center for Research and Documentation of East European Jewry. It was during this period that she realized she would find no peace until she recorded the truth about her difficult childhood, her hopes and disappointments, her flight from Poland, her lost friends, the collapse of the Birobidzhan project, and other matters that weighed heavily on her. She began publishing in the New York-based monthly "Di Tsukunft," the Tel Aviv periodical "Ba Zikh," and notably in the "Yerusholayimer Almanakh," which featured more than ten of her publications. In total, she published about 30 creative works in Yiddish and at least seven translated into Hebrew. Unfortunately, a comprehensive bibliography of her publications in other editions remains uncompiled.

Between 1974 and 1982, three volumes of her memoirs, "Oyf Vegn un Umvegn" ("On Paths and Detours"), were published in Yiddish in Tel Aviv. The Yiddish works of E. Rosenthal-Schneiderman held a central place in the memoir literature of that era. As historian M. Altshuler noted in a review of her publications, these memoirs stem from "...the very thick of the Soviet experiment in its brief Jewish iteration," offering a vivid and authentic narrative. Esther was an active participant in the creation of Soviet Jewish educational and cultural institutions in Ukraine. She was acquainted with nearly all the prominent figures of "domestic" Yiddish studies, including Nokhem Shtif, Elye Spivak, Meir Wiener, Max Erik, and many others, all of whom she portrayed remarkably in her memoirs.

Her memoirs were reviewed by prominent scholars and writers in Israel and France, including Aryeh L. Avner, Liber Brenner, Mordechai Altshuler, and Lili Berger.

Three decades after her death, scholars in Israel, the United States, and Russia simultaneously turned their attention to the study of Rosenthal-Schneiderman's creative legacy. The author's access to the personal archives of Esther and her husband, preserved at the Central Archives for the History of the Jewish People, became a notable event in the scholarly community. Researching these personal documents, letters, correspondence, photographs, and press clippings in Hebrew, Yiddish, English, Polish, and Russian has allowed scholars to uncover previously unknown pages of her life and career. This research culminated in the monograph "Esther Rosenthal-Schneiderman: Personal Archive and the Birobidzhan Trace" (2022).

Among contemporary historians, Emma Zohar, a doctoral scholar at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, has utilized E. Rosenthal-Schneiderman's memoirs in her research. For Dr. Paul Stevenson (USA), encountering the work of this Jewish memoirist inspired a strong desire to introduce the history of Birobidzhan to English-speaking readers, leading him to begin translating "Birobidzhan from Up Close" from Yiddish into English. Reference to her work is also evident in the research of G. Estraikh, B. Kotlerman, and A. Zaremba. Yisroel Nekrasov, a Jewish poet from St. Petersburg, has translated this book on the history of the JAR into Russian.

Dov-Ber Kerler, a professor at Indiana University who met with E. Rosenthal-Schneiderman several times in Israel, considers her one of the five greatest Jewish female memoirists of the late 19th and 20th centuries directly associated with Yiddish culture. In his view, the method of documentary memoir-writing developed by Esther ensured the factual accuracy of her emotionally charged recollections. Esther's literary talent was highly recognized in Israel. In 1969, she received the prize of the journal "Di Goldene Keyt" ("The Golden Chain"), and in 1979, she was awarded the State Prize of the Yiddish Writers’ Union in Israel.

At Jerusalem's largest cemetery, Har HaMenuchot, Nison and Esther found their final resting place. Their graves lie side by side—a arrangement presumably chosen by Esther after burying her husband in 1970. Her headstone bears an inscription in Hebrew: Esther-Trana Rosenthal-Schneiderman, daughter of Feivel Fuchs. Below it are three simple words: "Writer, Distinguished Teacher." While it is unknown who commissioned this concise epitaph, this phrase from her Book of Life will endure as a testament to the life work recorded in her memoirs.

[1] Iosif Brener, "Two Stages of the Development of Jewish Autonomy in the USSR." Jews of Europe and Asia. Scientific and Publicist Almanac of the Euro-Asian Jewish Congress. Issue 4-5 (2022-2024). Jerusalem and Herzliya: JRIEA and the Center for University Teaching of Jewish Civilization at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 2024, p. 293