Mediaמרדכי צאנין

Mordechai Tsanin

Mordechai Tsanin was a Yiddish writer, journalist and lexicographer in Israel, who founded and edited the Yiddish newspaper Lezte Neies.

1906 to 2009Founding the newspaper Lezte NeiesYiddish-Hebrew-Yiddish dictionaryReporting on destroyed Polish communities

Born: 1 April 1906, Sokołów Podlaski
Died: 4 February 2009, Israel
Occupation: journalist, lexicographer, newspaper editor, writer
Party: General Jewish Labour Bund in Lithuania, Poland and Russia

Mordechai Tsanin was born in 1906 in Sokołów Podlaski

Tsanin was born Mordechai Yeshayahu Cukierman in Sokołów Podlaski, then in the Russian Empire. He studied in a heder and a yeshiva. In 1921 his family moved to Warsaw, where he attended a Polish gymnasium.

As a young man he supported the Bund, a Jewish socialist party, and opposed Zionism. He published short stories and journalism in Warsaw Yiddish periodicals and edited a book review insert.

When World War II began he served in the Polish army, then fled to Lithuania and helped his family leave for Mandatory Palestine. He traveled through Japan, Shanghai and India and reached the country in 1941. In late 1945 he spent a year in Poland reporting for the New York Yiddish daily Forward on destroyed Jewish communities.

In July 1948 he founded a Yiddish weekly in Tel Aviv, and later founded Lezte Neies with two partners. The paper became a daily, and in 1960 he sold it to a company controlled by Mapai. He stayed on as editor until 1977.

He co-founded Beit Leivick in Tel Aviv and headed the Israeli association of Yiddish journalists. He also wrote a Yiddish Hebrew dictionary and received the Itzik Manger Prize. He died in 2009.