Elias Tcherikower
| Elias Tcherikower | |
|---|---|
| Born | 1881 Poltava |
| Died | 1943 (aged 61–62) New York City |
| Occupation | Historian |
| Known for | Historian of Russian Jewish life and anti-Jewish violence; co-founder of Yidisher Visnshaftlekher Institut (YIVO) |
| Spouse(s) | Rebecca Tcherikower (married circa 1910-1963) |
Elias Tcherikower, Eliahu Tcherikower, Elias Tscherikower, I. M. Cherikover (1881-1943), was a Russian-born Jewish historian of Judaism or the Jewish people.
Tcherikower was born and raised in Poltava (Ukraine), in the Russian Empire, where his father was a pioneer of the Hovevei Zion movement. He attended gymnasium in Odessa, and went on to university in Saint Petersburg. His participation in the Russian revolutionary movement led to his arrest at a Menshevik meeting during the 1905 revolution, after which he spent a year in prison.
He published his first article – an essay in Russian on the Yiddish writer Sholem Yankev Abramovitsh ("Mendele Moykher Sforim: An attempt at a critical characteristic") – in 1905, in the Russian-language Zionist journal Evreiskaia zhizn' (Jewish life). For the next ten years he wrote mainly in Russian; after 1915 most of his work was in Yiddish. Tcherikower contributed biographies and a variety of other articles to the Russian-language Jewish encyclopedia Evreiskaia entsiklopedia. He was also active in the Society for the Promotion of Culture among the Jews of Russia, an educational and civic association founded in 1863; he edited the society's journal and wrote a history of it that appeared in 1913 (Istoriia obshchestva dlia rasprostraneniia prosveshcheniia mezhdu evreiami v rossii).
During the First World War, Tcherikower spent time in the United States, arriving in New York City in the summer of 1915. There he had contact with the socialist Zionist leader and Yiddish linguist Ber Borochov, who was a childhood friend, and, under Borochov's influence, began to write in Yiddish for socialist- and nationalist-oriented Yiddish journals and newspapers. He returned to Russia sometime after the outbreak of the revolution in 1917, and then in late 1918 moved to Kiev, in the newly independent state of Ukraine. At that time, under the Ukrainian People's Republic, ethnic minorities, including Jews, had been granted a degree of cultural and political autonomy. Tcherikower was active at the Folks-Verlag (People's press), one of several Yiddish publishing houses that operated in Kiev around this time.
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