User:Danny/Centenary of Bund

ON THE OCCASION OF THE HUNDREDTH ANNIVERSARY OF THE JEWISH LABOR BUND (1897-1997)* by Marvin S. Zuckerman

A hundred years ago, in October 1897, under cover of the Jewish high holy days, in the attic of a small, rundown house on the outskirts of Vilna, thirteen Jewish intellectuals, writers and workingmen gathered together, illegally, from five different cities of the Pale, to form what they decided to call "Der Algemeyner Yidisher Arbeter Bund fun Rusland, Lite, un Poyln,&#8221;&#8212;&#8220;The General Jewish Labor Bund of Russia, Lithuania, and Poland&#8221;&#8212;which came to be known by the one word&#8212;BUND.

The organization which they formed came to play a large role in East-European Jewish life for the next close to 50 years until it was destroyed by the two great destroyers of our time, Hitler and Stalin, Nazism and communism.

Together with the Zionist movement, the Bund led the masses of East-European Jewish life into the modern era, with their heads held high, full of pride, unafraid, and ready to do battle.

And what was the Bund ready to do battle for? For Jewish honor, for cultural autonomy, social-democracy, Yiddish language and literature, full civil rights in the lands in which they lived, and a trade union movement to fight for better working conditions and decent pay.

In the course of time, they drew tens of thousands of Jewish working people to their organization, as well as thousands of Jewish youths, intellectuals, and students, young men and women who abandoned the kheydorim and yeshivas on the one hand, or left the gymnasiums and universities on the other, to enter into, build, work together with the poor laboring Jewish masses in the new free, fighting atmosphere of the Bund, where they could express themselves, not only as socialists but as Jews.

And in the course of time, the Bund organized Jewish trade unions, built schools for children, published scores of newspapers and magazines, organized "zelbst-shuts" or self-defense organizations to fight off pogromists and fascist, antisemitic hooligans. It built a summer camp and sanitorium for children. It created choral groups, sports organizations, evening classes, consumers' and producers' co-operatives, libraries, dramatic groups, literary clubs, schools for children, and other institutions which served the poor, working-class Jews of Eastern-Europe.

Here is how the revered Bund leader, Vladimir Medem, expressed himself in 1919 on the meaning of the Bund:

Listen carefully to the word "bund." It comes from the word "to bind." Bind together into one complete entity all separate things with a tie. To join feeble energies into one huge power. Put your ear to the chest of the Jewish worker and listen; his heartbeat is strong and steady. Look into the eyes of the comrade; they are wide open and clear. Take his hand; it is strong and hardened. How come? How is it that a single person, a grain of sand in this huge desert of a world, a tiny drop in the turbulent sea of life which surrounds you with thousands of brutal enemies, which destroys a whole world, grinding countries and states into dust, drowning in its depths countless human existences, how is it that in the middle of this enormous whirlwind stands a person with sparkling eyes, undaunted by the storm? Look, comrade, into your own soul. There you will read the answer: you have a home, a family, a basis to stand on; you can feel that around you, above you, and within you there is a great force that supports, embraces, and carries you, makes you strong, and does not let you fall. Do you know, comrade, the name of this enormous force? Do you know what is the name of your home, your family, your existence, your hope? Stand up comrade! Lift up your head and sing the old "Shvue"!* This is the Bund!1 The Bund led successful strikes throughout the Pale, strikes among the weavers of Lodz, the brushmakers of Warsaw, the leatherworkers of Lublin, slaughterers, coachmen, garment workers, etc., all over the Pale.

The Bund played a leading role in the 1905 revolution throughout the Russian empire.2

And also in that year, in 1905, the Bund organized the Jewish working people of Czarist Russia into armed bands of zelbst-shuts (self-defense) units which successfully fought off pogromists who were attacking Jewish towns and neighborhoods all over the Pale.3 Listen to Zalmen Shazar's (the third President of Israel) account of how, in his youth, the Bund and the Zionist zelbst-shuts together fought off pogromists in his shtetl, Stolpce: This time we were ready. We knew that agitators had come from afar. We saw peasant women coming into town with empty wagons, and we knew they were coming to loot and wanted to be able to take the stolen goods home. In the morning, our comrades were on the street ready with iron rods, lead bars, and whips with rounded pieces of lead at their tips. The commandants of the units of ten, armed with revolvers, stationed themselves at many points in the marketplace. At noon, when the peasants poured out of the white church, rabid and worked up, ready to assault the Jews, one of the outside agitators gave the signal and started to lead the peasants to break into the shops. Then all at once our unit commanders fired their revolvers--in the air, not hurting anyone. The shots came from all sides of the marketplace, creating panic and confusion among the crowd of attackers. The horses broke wild, the peasant women began screaming as though they were being slaughtered. One wagon collided with another. With what seemed their last gasp, the peasants ran in fear from the Jews firing all over the marketplace. It took only a few             minutes before the marketplace was emptied of the aroused              pogromists.

No, Stolpce, pride of my youth, I cannot believe that you were led like sheep to the slaughter.4

The Bund attracted some of the finest leaders, spokesmen, and intellectuals the Jewish people, or for that matter, any people, possessed: Vladimir Medem, Henryk Erlich, Victor Alter, Arkady Kremer, Noyekh Portnoy, to name a few. The Bund gave rise to a movement that fostered ethics, honesty, democratic values--and its leaders displayed these virtues at the head of their mass, a mass that inspired them, and who were, in turn, inspired by their remarkable leaders.

*      *       *       *

The Bund was the only Jewish party which made the advocacy of the Yiddish language and literature part of its program. It was the only party to argue that Yiddish was a language on a par with all the other modern European languages, possessing a grammar and a syntax, and with as much right to status as all the other recognized languages of the world. And many of the Yiddish writers repaid the Bund with their loyalty and creativity. Listen to this account by Mark Schweid (my translation) of an episode in the life of I.L. Peretz. It was on the occasion of a celebration of Peretz's 25th jubilee as a writer at a party in his home at the address that had become famous throughout the new Yiddish literary world, No.1 Ceglana Street, Warsaw:

The guests were in an elevated mood when there was ring at the door and two young, unknown personages let themselves in. They were poorly dressed workingmen. They spoke quietly with Peretz and asked him to go with them into another room. Peretz excused himself from the committee and went into another room with the two young people. A few minutes later he emerged with his face alight with enthusiasm; in his hand was an old book. The workers quietly left and then Peretz called out, "Do you know who that was? A delegation from the Bund.  They sent me an official greeting with this gift." The Polish-speaking guests grew pale with fright and looked towards the door. In the word "Bund" they smelled Siberia and the gallows. Dineson calmed them with a quiet act. The official greeting of the Bund he cautiously removed from Peretz's hand and burned in the lighted candle on the table. He gathered the ashes carefully on a piece of paper and threw them into an ashtray. The book, a copy of Peretz's Yiddish Library, Peretz hid deep among his most precious documents that he held dear his whole life.

The book, greasy, smeared, torn-up from use, came from the            Tenth Pavilion of the Citadel Prison where it had been                 secretly circulated from one political prisoner to the next. Many single letters were underlined with pencil which encoded messages from one prisoner to the next. After this event Peretz would write with deep sincerity: "I belong to no party, but I feel closest to the Bund." And years later he would say: "I found my socialism in the Prophets of the Bible."5

The Bund forged a mass movement which struggled against the Leninist-Bolshevik line on the one hand, and against what it conceived of as a narrow, chauvinistic, unrealistic, nationalist dream on the other.

Let me deal with the question of the Bund vis-à-vis the Communist movement first.

In 1898 it was the Bund that organized the first Russian Social-Democratic Federation meeting from which Dan, Martov, Lenin, Plekhanov, Axelrod, Zasulich, and all the other founders and shapers of the coming Russian revolution were to play such an important role on the world stage. The historian Bertram D. Wolfe calls the Bund at that time, "the largest and best organized body of workingmen inside the Russian empire."6

It is a matter of interesting historical fact, that it is because of the Bund that the Leninist/Communist faction in the Russian Social Democratic Federation was able to acquire the name Bolshevik&#8212;or majorityite faction. Remember that the Bund had actually organized the first meeting of the RSDF in 1898. In 1903 at the second convention of the RSDF, Lenin, who was chairing the meeting at the time, knew that the Bund wanted to propose at that convention that the Bund be recognized as the representative in the Federation of the specifically Jewish socialist labor movement in the Russian empire. He also knew that the Bund representatives would vote against him and his group on issues important to him, and that they, together with the Dan and Martov group, would constitute a majority that would outvote him on his program. And because he knew further that the Bund would walk out of the convention if its proposal should be defeated, and because he knew the Dan-Martov group would vote against the Bund on this one issue, thus insuring the defeat of the Bund proposal, he made sure to place the Bund's proposal for autonomy on Jewish matters first on the agenda. Sure enough this strategy worked. The Dan-Martov group voted against the Bund's proposal for Jewish autonomy, the Bund walked out, now leaving Lenin's group with a majority&#8212;thus enabling him to name his group the Bolsheviks&#8212;the majority&#8212;and leaving the label Menshevik&#8212;the minority&#8212;for the Martov-Dan group. Thus it was due to the Bund's insistence on Jewish autonomy within the Russian Social Democratic Federation, and Lenin's unscrupulous parliamentary maneuvering, that Lenin was able to arrogate the name Bolshevik for himself and his group.7

*	*	*	*

The Bund participated in a significant way in the first 1917 Revolution, its leaders and members playing a prominent role.8 As for its antipathy to the Communist Party, the Bund was always in opposition to the antidemocratic, dictatorial approach of Lenin and his followers. Here are the words of another greatly revered leader of the Bund, Henryk Erlich, speaking on that subject in 1918:

Is the Soviet government a workers' government? "No! It            has no right to call itself a workers' government.  It has no right to speak in the name of the Russian working class."9

Another Bundist leader, Vladimir Medem, put it this way:

Socialism is the rule&#8212;the true rule, not the fictional rule&#8212;of the majority, which must in the end take its fate into its own hands. A socialism based on the rule of the minority, however, is absurd....[The Bolsheviks] stay in power only because their terror has destroyed and made powerless all of their opponents.10

And a 1921 convention of the Bund put it still another way:

The difference between us and the Communists lies in the fact that they believe in the rule by the party and we believe in rule by the whole working class. We say the working-class government must be answerable to the whole class; the Communists, on the other hand, say that if the working class doesn't like the Communist Party government, the working class must still accept the will of the government and not the reverse. The chief error of the Communist Party lies in its effort to turn the might of the working class into a dictatorship of the central committee of the party over the proletariat.11

*    *    *    *

As for its struggle with the Zionists, let me begin by saying that both Bundism and Zionism, from our point in time, can be viewed as two sides of the same coin. And that coin is the Jewish response to the nationalist, revolutionary ideas and movements sweeping Europe in the nineteenth century. It began in the Jewish East-European world in that same century with the haskole, the Jewish enlightenment, which brought the first breath of modernism into the closed off, medieval world of East-European Jewry. From the haskole, from the Jewish enlightenment movement, a straight line can be drawn to the emergence of modern Zionism and that peculiar blend of Jewish nationalism and socialism called, the Bund. The Bund being a socialist, Marxist party, disavowed any nationalistic programs. On the other hand, the Bund expressed a form of nationalism by championing Jewish civil rights, cultural autonomy, Yiddish language and literature, a modern Yiddish school structure, and all the other things I've already mentioned that addressed specifically Jewish needs and concerns. In that sense the Bund was also nationalistic. As the great Russian early Social Democrat, Lenin's teacher, Plekhanov, once wittily put it--"Bundists?--Zionists who suffer from seasickness."

The Bundist argument with the Zionists was a simple one. We are here, not there, in Palestine. The Jews are a world people now, like it or not. All the Jews of the world will never fit into Palestine. There will always be a Jewish diaspora. To deflect the energy and passion of the Jewish people away from the struggle here for our civil rights and a decent socialist world here, is the wrong thing to do. We are here, and we need to struggle here. As I.L. Peretz once put it,

Zionism cannot be the solution for the whole Jewish people. We can't return to the cradle. We have grown in the Diaspora. And the Diaspora is our battlefield. We do not run away from the battlefield.12

This attitude was articulated by Medem with his "Do-i-kayt" program--his "hereness" program. Since we are not there, but here, we have to fight for a better "here"--a socialist world with dignity and rights for every minority, every people or ethnic group, every language and culture, including the Jewish people and their language, Yiddish. And as the great Bund leader, Henryk Ehrlich, said, writing in 1938 about the Zionist dream for a Jewish nation in Palestine:

What can a Jewish Palestine be, under the best of                 circumstances [emphasis in original text]? If a Jewish state should arise in Palestine, its spiritual climate will be: eternal fear of the external enemy (the Arabs); and eternal struggle for every foot of ground and for every bit of work with the internal enemy (Arabs)....Is this a climate in which freedom, democracy, and progress can grow? Indeed, is it not the climate in which reaction and chauvinism ordinarily flourish? Even...Zionist publicists who visit the Holy Land affirm the tremendous influence of clericalism, despite the fact that manual workers play such a prominent part in the Zionist organization. An eventual Jewish state cannot offer itself as a spiritual center to the Jewish masses        of the goles [diaspora] lands, and as a center for                     immigration....The Zionists themselves have already                    significantly reduced their ambitions today:  in a memorandum submitted by the representatives of the Jewish Agency to the Council of the League of Nations during its September session in 1937, they speak of Palestine as only a partial solution to the Jewish question.13

How prophetic and insightful his words seem now.

History decided this quarrel, or rather Hitler and Stalin decided it for them. Who was right? Perhaps they were both right. From our perspective now, it is clear that they both fought a brave, honorable fight for Jewish pride and worth and life.

*      *       *       *

In the 30's the Bund organized mass protest demonstrations and walkouts in Poland.

During these years preceding the war and the holocaust, Polish antisemitism bore down hard on the Jews of Poland. The Bund "rallied multitudes to strikes, protests, and demonstrations against the violence of pogroms and the denial of Jewish rights. On March 16, 1936, for example, after a pogrom in Przytyk in which four Jews were killed and several score wounded, the Bund called a general strike: `Three and a half million Jews went out on strike.  At noon all Jewish workers left their work; all Jewish stores shut down; Jewish pupils walked out of school.  The streets of Poland were filled with a fiery people, proud, and battle ready.'"14

A year later, the anti-Semitic Polish government issued a decree that all Jewish students attending Polish universities must sit on separate, segregated benches in the back of the classroom. In response, in October 1937 "all Jewish parties joined [with the Bund] in issuing a general strike call to protest the infamous introduction of ghetto-benches for Jewish students at the universities."15 And the Bund was repaid by the loyalty and devotion of the Jewish working masses of Poland. By 1938, on the eve of the holocaust, in the municipal elections in Poland of that year, in 89 Polish cities and towns, the Bund received 55% of the votes cast for all Jewish parties. The Bund's greatest strength was, of course, in the large industrial centers, like Lodz and Warsaw--but the Bund drew support from a wide range of Jews now--from hasidim on the right to proletarians on the left.16 It was in the municipalities of Poland, that the subsidies for health and educational institutions were allocated--and as a result of their strength on these governing bodies, the Bundist representatives "became communal spokesmen and aggressive advocates of financial aid to all Jewish institutions, including yeshivas and religious institutions."17.

*      *       *       *

When the war came at the end of 1939, the Bundists found themselves caught in a vise: Nazi hangmen on the west, Communist torturers and executioners on the east. Where to run? There was no escape. Stay in place, and the German Gestapo and SS arrested, tortured and killed you; run to the east and the Russian NKVD arrested, tortured and killed you. And thus it was for those Bundist leaders who could not successfully hide or manage to escape to Shanghai, or America, or wherever. Thus it was that the two great leaders of the Bund in interwar Poland, Ehrlich and Alter, were arrested and tortured and killed by the Communist regime with the horrible defamation that they were Nazi spies. And there were many other Bundist leaders who met the same fate from the NKVD.

*    *    *   *

During the holocaust, the years of Bundist underground, illegal, conspiratorial work stood them in good stead. The Bund took a leading role in the resistance to the Nazi criminals. Couriers were sent all over occupied Poland with money, messages of encouragement, food, and weapons.18 Resistance groups were organized in all the ghettos. A united fighting organization with the Zionists and the Communists was eventually formed to fight together for Jewish lives and honor. The Bund played a leading role in the Warsaw ghetto uprising, in Vilna, in Bialystok, in Czenstochowa, and elsewhere.19 During the Nazi occupation the Bund managed to publish illegally scores of underground newsletters and flyers, encouraging the people, urging resistance, warning the Jews of where the transport trains were taking them to. In 1942, the Bund sent one of its members, Zalmen Friedrych, to determine exactly where the transports from Warsaw were taking the Jews and what was happening to them there. Through the cooperation of a Polish Socialist railway worker, Friedrych smuggled himself close to Treblinka, where he met Azrel Wallach, Maxim Litvinov's nephew, who had just escaped from Treblinka. Wallach described the gas chambers there. Friedrych came back to report to the Bund. The Bund lost no time in informing the ghetto population through its illegal publication,Sturm.20

The first public resistance to the Nazis was made by the Warsaw leader of the Bund in Warsaw--Artur Zyglboim.21 When the Nazis formed the Judenrat in October 1939, Zyglboym among them, they instructed the Judenrat to tell the Jewish populace of Warsaw to cooperate in moving within the new ghetto to be walled off. Artur was the only representative among the Judenrat to push the Judenrat to defy this order. He said under no circumstances should the Jews voluntarily submit to this order. Here are his own words addressed to the Judenrat in October 1939:

You have taken an historic decision. It appears that I have been too weak to convince you that we cannot permit ourselves to do this. I feel, however, that I do not possess the moral strength to participate in the execution of this decree. I also feel that I would no longer have the right to go on living if a ghetto were set up and my head remained whole. Therefore, I must relinquish my mandate as a member of the Council. I realize it is the Chairman's duty to inform the Gestapo immediately of my resignation, and I am ready to accept the consequences of this action, but I cannot act otherwise.21

Outside the Judenrat Building a crowd of more than 10,000 Jews had massed, agitated and panicked. Addressing the crowd, Artur urged the people to maintain their courage and dignity; he called upon them to refuse to go into a ghetto; he urged them to remain in their homes and resist if they were forced to leave. No one, he said, should go willingly into a ghetto.22

His defiance did not succeed in keeping the ghetto from being formed, and of course he had to then go into hiding. He was then smuggled across Nazi Germany and occupied Europe to England, where he occupied the post of Bundist representative in the Polish government in exile in London. There he struggled tirelessly to make the allied governments aware of the terrible atrocities being committed against the Jews under the Nazis. His attempts to get the allied governments to act in some way as to save the Jews from the holocaust having failed, when the news of the Warsaw ghetto uprising reached him in London in 1943, he decided to take his own life in protest, hoping in this way to succeed in death where he had failed in life. He left this famous open letter to the world, from which I read:

With these, my last words, I address myself to you, the Polish Government, the Polish people, the Allied Governments and their peoples, and the conscience of the world.

News recently received from Poland informs us that the Germans are exterminating with unheard-of savagery the remaining Jews in that country. Behind the walls of the ghetto is taking place today the last act of a tragedy which has no parallel in the history of the human race. The responsibility for this crime&#8212;the assassination of the Jewish population in Poland&#8212;rests above all on the murderers themselves, but falls indirectly upon the whole human race, on the allies and their governments, who so far have taken no firm steps to put a stop to these crimes. By their indifference to the killing of              millions of hapless men, to the massacre of women and                  children, these countries have become accomplices of the               assassins....

Of the three and a half million Polish Jews (to whom must be added the 700,000 deported from the other countries) in April, 1943, there remained alive not more than 300,000 Jews, according to news received from the head of the Bund organization and supplied by government representatives. And the extermination continues.

I cannot remain silent. I cannot live while the rest of the Jewish people in Poland, whom I represent, continue to be liquidated.

My companions of the Warsaw Ghetto fell in a last heroic              battle with their weapons in their hands. I did not have the honor to die with them, but I belong to them and to their common grave.

Let my death be an energetic cry of protest against the               indifference of the world which witnesses the extermination of the Jewish people without taking any steps to prevent it. In our day and age human life is of little value; having failed to achieve success in my life, I hope that my death may jolt the indifference of those who, perhaps even in this extreme moment, could save the Jews who are still alive in Poland.

My life belongs to my people in Poland and that is why I am sacrificing it for them. May the handful of people who will survive out of the millions of Polish Jews achieve liberation in a world of liberty and social justice....

I take my leave of all those who have been dear to me and whom I have loved.23

*       *        *

After the holocaust, after the war, the few remaining remnants of what had been a proud, strong, mass movement among Jews, picked themselves up and began again&#8212;as the Yiddish poet and Bundist Leivik put it, "Ikh heyb zikh oyf vider un shpan avek vayter&#8221;&#8212;&#8220;I pick myself up again and stride on farther." They assembled in Poland, in Paris, in the DP camps, in New York, Buenos Aires, Mexico City, Montevideo, wherever they managed to get to, and, yes, in Israel. And in these cities and places the Bund lives on. A powerful mythos, movement, ethic, like the Bund&#8212;an ecclesia militanta as one historian dubbed it24--cannot just disappear. It lives on in small but devoted groups; it manages to publish newspapers and magazines and continues to publish position papers and articles analyzing world events and politics from a Bundist perspective.25 Its attitude towards Israel is a positive one&#8212;it is for a strong and prosperous Israel. But because of its antichauvinistic background, a belief-system grounded in internationalism and fairplay and justice for all peoples, it does not allow its positive attitude towards Israel to prevent it from being critical when Israel needs criticism. It is an attitude that most American Jews, including the Zionist movement here and elsewhere, has finally come to see the wisdom of. And the Bund has a devoted following inside Israel itself. They are loyal Bundists. And the Bundist comrades there are just as loyal and devoted to the future of Israel as the most nationalistic right-wing Israeli--but, ah, what a wonderful difference between them.

So the Bund, in spite of everything has a present, a vastly diminished present, but it lives, nevertheless&#8212;and as long as I live, there will be at least one Bundist in Los Angeles&#8212;but I know there are many more, many of them here today. But does the Bund have a future? Perhaps not. Not as it did, certainly. But so many of its ideas, so many of its ideals are still relevant today. Do-i-kayt&#8212;being here, now, with our Jewishness, figuring out how to be Jewish here and now, not there&#8212;because we are not there. Social Democracy&#8212;more relevant than ever&#8212;the only answer, I believe, to the injustice, poverty, umentslikhkayt (inhumanity) of the world, an undogmatic, flexible social democracy that places justice and common sense above doctrine and dogma&#8212;it is social democracy that has saved the democratic industrialized nations of the world from collapse and chaos and has brought a degree of social justice and decency to the working classes of these nations. And, finally, cultural, secular Jewishness that draws on the religious past for its rich moral tradition, folk-history, and folk-celebrations. The Jews of the diaspora cannot sustain a Jewish life by simply facing toward Jerusalem. We are here, they are there. What is to become of us here? The Bund long struggled with this question and perhaps modern, acculturated Jewry here and elsewhere in the Diaspora can learn from the Bund.

*          *            *

One hundred years ago the Bund launched a new Jewish answer to anti-Semitism, poverty, and the question of how to be Jewish. For 100 years, it has struggled, fought, overcome, and written a glorious chapter in the history of the Jewish people. Nothing can take that away. It remains forever. The Hitlerites and the Stalinists crushed it. But the Bund and its approach to Jewish life and to the world live on.

Zol lebm der Bund; long live the Bund!

Thank you.