[Congressional Record Volume 144, Number 66 (Thursday, May 21, 1998)]
[Senate]
[Pages S5347-S5348]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                           MORDECHAI STRIGLER

 Mr. MOYNIHAN. Mr. President, today is a bittersweet day at the 
Jewish Theological Seminary in New York City where the annual 
commencement ceremony will include an unprecedented presentation of a 
posthumous honorary doctorate to Mordechai Strigler, the talented 
editor of the Yiddish Forward who died last week at the age of 76.
  I rose almost a year ago today to share with the Senate the news of 
the Forward's centenary. This remarkable newspaper, which once helped 
hundreds of thousands of new immigrants learn about their new homeland, 
now prints Yiddish, Russian and English weekly editions. The Yiddish 
edition has gone from a daily press run of 250,000 copies to a weekly 
run of 10,000, but has retained much of the literary excellence and 
social conscience that has so characterized the Forward during its 
storied history.
  Mordechai Strigler was born in 1921 in Zamosc, Poland, and was sent 
to study in a yeshiva at age 11. In 1937 he began work as a rabbi and 
teacher in Warsaw.
  When the Germans occupied Poland in 1939, he tried to escape to 
Russia, but was caught at the border. He spent

[[Page S5348]]

a few months at the Zamosc ghetto with his parents and then five years 
in several concentration camps. In Buchenwald, he was a member of the 
Resistance and served as a covert teacher for the children incarcerated 
there. He was liberated on April 11, 1945.
  After the war, he began writing furiously and prolifically for the 
next 53 years until his death. He chronicled the slave-labor camps and 
death factories in a six-volume Yiddish series called ``Oysgebrente 
Likht'', which means ``Extinguished Candles''.
  In 1955, Strigler published two volumes called ``Arm in Arm with the 
Wind,'' a historical novel about Jewish life in Poland in the 17th and 
18th centuries.
  His newspaper career began in Warsaw just before the war and 
flourished in Paris after the war. In France, he served as editor of 
Unzer Vort (Our world), a Yiddish daily.
  While in New York, he was offered the editorship of the Kemfer, a 
position he held until 1995. He published such classic Yiddish writers 
as Abraham Reizen, H. Leivik, Chaim Grade, and Jacob Glatstein.
  In 1978, Strigler was awarded the Itzak Manger Prize in Jewish 
Literature, one of the most distinguished prizes in the field.
  He became editor of the Yiddish Forward in 1987, following the 
retirement of Simon Weber, and he remained at its helm until last 
month.
  ``The death of Strigler marks not only a sad transition for his 
colleagues in the Yiddish, Russian, and English editions of the Forward 
but also a milestone in the area of Yiddish-language journalism and the 
literature of the Holocaust,'' the English-language Forward said in an 
obituary.
  I ask to have printed in the Record the English edition of the 
Forward's moving editorial tribute to this talented journalist.

                           Mordechai Strigler

       Mordechai Strigler, the editor of the Yiddish Forward who 
     died Sunday at the age of 76, was one of the giants. Born at 
     Zamosc, Poland, he became famous at a young age as a genius 
     of Talmud. He was apprenticed to the greatest sages of his 
     time. He was at the barricades in Warsaw when the Germans 
     invaded. He fled toward Russia, but was captured by the 
     Nazis, who cast him into concentration camps. His parents and 
     three of his seven sisters perished. He himself was in, among 
     other camps, Maidenek, Skarhisko and Buchenwald, where he was 
     a member of the Resistance and where on liberation he was 
     spotted by Meyer Levin, who wrote about his heroism in his 
     memoir ``In Search''. Levin told of Strigler gathering 
     children secretly in the barracks and teaching them Yiddish 
     and Hebrew. He had lost his pre-war manuscripts during the 
     war. It is said that upon liberation he began writing 
     furiously. He continued until weeks before he died. He turned 
     out cycles of poetry and novels, as well as biblical 
     commentaries and analysis of rabbinic responsa and thousands 
     of items of journalism--editorials, dispatches, criticism and 
     feuilletons. Moving to Paris immediately after the war, he 
     became editor of Unzer Vort and joined the Labor Zionist 
     movement. As editor of the Yiddisher Kemfer and, later, the 
     Yiddish Forward as well, he maintained a courteous and gentle 
     exterior, but it belied an extraordinary toughness. No matter 
     how others around him might fume, he would go on doing what 
     he thought was right. His achievements are well known. He 
     touched Jews the world over, inspired his colleagues and set 
     a standard to which all the editors of the Forward, in 
     Yiddish, Russian, and English, look up.
       Yet for all these achievements, there was a dimension to 
     Mordechai Strigler that remained a mystery, even to many of 
     us who worked in the same editorial rooms with him for years. 
     It had to do with his spiritual journey. Had history taken a 
     different turn, it is as a Torah sage that he might be 
     remembered today. But the Holocaust shook his faith and led 
     him to quarrel with God. He emerged to write poetry and 
     fiction. He entered the political fray for the labor faction. 
     Hope came to him from the establishment of the Jewish state, 
     which became, along with Jewish unity, his abiding passion. 
     After he reached America, he began corresponding with a young 
     woman in Jerusalem, Esther Bonni, a scientist. When they 
     finally met in Israel, a romance developed and marriage 
     followed. After the birth of their daughter, Leah, the 
     glimmer of Strigler's spiritual life began to shine again. 
     Leah talked at his funeral of Strigler's enduring attachment 
     to text and of his powers as a teacher. He was obsessed with 
     the accuracy of citations of Torah and Talmud, so that 
     whenever she asked a question, he would insist on checking 
     sources, even though he almost always knew the references by 
     heart. In recent years, his intimates relate, he had occasion 
     to lay tefillin. Even then it was said that he had not again 
     become a believer but was merely observing a mitzvah. Yet as 
     he lay dying at Roosevelt Hospital, his daughter read to him 
     for days from the Bible, holding the text in one hand and 
     here father's hand in the other. His daughter and wife sang 
     prayers in Yiddish and Hebrew, which for precious moments 
     brought him out of his coma. This is how this editor who had 
     lived and chronicled and tragedies and triumphs of our 
     century spent his last days--called back to consciousness, 
     however fleetingly, by the languages of the Jews.

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