Jacob Friedmann

Jacob Friedmann was born in 1910 in Melnytsia-Podilska

Jacob Friedmann was born in 1910 in Melnytsia in Galicia. He descended from Rabbi Israel Friedman of Ruzhin, the founder of the Ruzhin Hasidic dynasty. In 1919 his family moved to Czernowitz in Bukovina, where he lived until 1941, apart from the years 1929 to 1932 in Warsaw.

He began publishing his poems in Czernowitz. In 1941, when Romania occupied the city during World War II, he and his wife Kenia were deported to Transnistria. He escaped from there to the Bershad ghetto.

After the Holocaust he returned to Bucharest and worked to revive Yiddish culture. He tried to reach the Land of Israel, but the British caught him and held him in a detention camp in Cyprus. He immigrated to Israel in 1949.

In Israel he first lived in Beit Dagan and moved to Ramat Aviv in 1959. He wrote poems, plays and liturgical poems in Yiddish, and some were translated into Hebrew. He also wrote for Davar under the pen name Y. Nemdirf. He died in Tel Aviv in 1972, and his archive is held by the National Library.