MOYSHE YAKOB

MOYSHE YAKOB (1856-1932)

            He was born in Gorlits (Gorlice), western Galicia.  He was for many years a religion teacher in the state schools for Jewish children in Austria of yore.  He lived in Gorlits, Nay-Sandz (Nowy Sącz), Vienna, and Cracow.  From 1920 he worked as censor for the Yiddish and Hebrew press and for the Yiddish theater in Cracow.  He authored pamphlets and textbooks, such as: Der driter mai (May 3rd) (Cracow, 1891), 16 pp.; Zot haberakha (This is the prayer), “a collection of the most important and necessary matters for Jewish youth” (Nay-Sandz, 1886), 48 pp., with a preface in Hebrew in which he explained his aim of translating the prayers “into zhargon [Yiddish], the spoken language of my people, so that students for whom the language of the country is alien should understand what they are praying.”  It included a short dictionary of 1,000 necessary Hebrew terms from the Bible and prayers explained.  He was also the author of several textbooks for Jewish children, written in Polish.  He died in Cracow.

Source: Gershon Bader, Medina veḥakhameha (The state and its sages) (New York, 1934), p. 150.

Khayim Leyb Fuks