Grzegorz Smolar

Grzegorz Smolar was born in 1905 in Zambrów

Smolar was born in Zambrów, where his father David made soda water. He finished 4 years of primary school in 1912. In 1918 and 1919 he helped found a left-wing Zionist youth group, and in 1920 he sat on the local revolutionary committee during the Polish-Soviet War.

He joined the Communist Party of Poland in Warsaw and was sent to Kiev to work for the Komsomol. He studied at the Communist University of the National Minorities in Moscow and joined the Soviet Communist Party in 1925. In 1928 he was sent to Vilnius, where he was arrested and jailed for 3 years, and in 1936 he was sentenced again, to 6 years.

Freed after the Red Army invasion, he edited the Yiddish paper Bialystoker Shtern. In the Minsk Ghetto he led an underground military group in 1942, then escaped and fought as a partisan in the Naliboki forest.

In 1946 he returned to Poland and worked for the Central Committee of Polish Jews, which he chaired from 1949 to 1950. He chaired the Jewish social and cultural society until 1962 and edited Folks-Shtime until 1968. During the March 1968 events his party membership was revoked.

In 1970 he moved to Israel through Paris, under a deal tied to the release of his son Aleksander. He worked at the National Library and Tel Aviv University and published memoirs in Yiddish and 1 book in Hebrew. He died in Tel Aviv in 1993 and was buried at Kibbutz Shefayim.