GERSHON ZIBERT

GERSHON ZIBERT (December 1, 1888-August 8, 1946)

            He was born in Warsaw, into a family of business employees.  He studied in a Polish high school.  He worked as a tutor in wealthy homes, so as to study further.  Around 1906 he joined an illegal circle of students.  From 1907 he was one of the important leaders in the so-called “Komi Union”—of business and office employees in Warsaw.  For a time he worked as a teacher of Polish in Krinski’s High School in Warsaw.  During WWI he worked with particular energy in various areas of the Jewish labor movement.  In 1917 he was arrested by the Germans and deported to a camp, from which he escaped to Berlin.  He returned to Warsaw in 1918 and greatly developed his activities in general politics and those of the Bund further.  Over the course of ten years, he served on the Warsaw city council and for a time was also secretary of the presidium.  He became known for a speech in Yiddish in 1927 which caused a storm among anti-Semitic city councilmen.  In 1920 he was secretary of the statistics division of the Joint Distribution Committee in Poland.  He was active as well in HIAS (Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society), ORT (Association for the Promotion of Skilled Trades), and Tsisho (Central Jewish School Organization), on assignment for which in 1939 he traveled to South Africa, where he remained and looked into doing something to establish help for the Polish Jews in the ghettos.  He wrote for the local press, traveled around giving speeches in Yiddish and English, participated in the Board of Deputies in organizing a division on information on relatives, and upset the Board in March 1945 by writing a call to local Jews to take an active role in proclaiming a day of sadness on behalf of the murdered Jews.  Zibert began his writing activities in Polish and later switched to Yiddish.  His first article—the speech that he was to give at the grave of Bronisław Grosser in 1912—was published in Di tsayt (The times) in St. Petersburg, that same year.  He was later one of the revivers of the Bundist press in Poland.  He was a regular contributor to: Lebns-fragn (Life issues) in Warsaw (1916-1918); later to Folkstsaytung (People’s newspaper), which, aside from his work as a Sejm correspondent, he published articles on general political and particularly Jewish issues.  He became ill on the train, going from Cape Town to Johannesburg and was taken to De Aar, Cape Province, where he died in the hospital.  The Johannesburg Bundists removed his body to Johannesburg and buried him there.

Sources: M. Sh., in Afrikaner idishe tsaytung (Johannesburg) (August 6, 1946); Y. Lifshits, in Unzer tsayt (New York) (August-September 1946); S. Dubnov-Erlikh, in Doyres bundistn (Generation of Bundists), vol. 2 (New York, 1956), pp. 57-61.

Khayim Leyb Fuks