Leyb Gorfinkel

Leyb Gorfinkel was born in 1896 in Kaunas

Leyb Gorfinkel was born in 1896 in Kovno, now Kaunas, then part of the Russian Empire. His father, Zvi-Hirsch Gorfinkel, was ordained at the Volozhin yeshiva. He studied in a heder and then at the Russian gymnasium in the city.

He studied law at Petrograd University and also in Kiev and Kovno. He lived for a time in Gomel and returned to Kovno at the end of 1918.

In 1919 he helped found the Zionist Yiddish daily Di idishe shtime and became its first editor. He served as secretary and then vice chair of the Jewish National Council of Lithuania. He was a member of the Lithuanian Seimas from 1923 to 1927 and joined the Kovno City Council in 1924.

In 1940 Soviet authorities arrested him for Zionist activity. From 1941 to 1944 he was deputy to Elchanan Elkes, head of the Ältestenrat of the Kovno Ghetto, and he was arrested and tortured in 1944. After the ghetto was liquidated he was sent to the Kaufering camp near Dachau.

After the war he headed the Organization of Jewish Refugees in Italy in Rome. He immigrated to Israel in 1948 and became the state's first registrar of cooperative societies, serving until 1962. A week before his death in 1976 he was interviewed by Claude Lanzmann for the film Shoah, and he was buried at Har HaMenuchot.