Itzik Feffer

Itzik Feffer (September 10, 1900 – August 12, 1952), also Fefer (Yiddish איציק פֿעפֿער, Russian Ицик Фефер, Исаàк Соломòнович Фèфер) was a Soviet Yiddish poet executed on the Night of the Murdered Poets during Joseph Stalin's purges.

Itzik Feffer was born in Shpola, a town in Zvenigorod uyezd (district) of Kiev guberniya, Imperial Russia.

During the Second World War, he was a military reporter with the rank of colonel and was vice chairman of the Soviet Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee (JAC). He and Solomon Mikhoels traveled to the United States in 1943 in a well-documented fund-raising trip.

In 1948, after the assassination of the JAC Chairman Solomon Mikhoels, Feffer, along with other JAC members, was arrested and accused of treason. Feffer had been an informer for the NKVD (predecessor of the KGB) since 1943. Feffer reportedly cooperated with the investigation, providing false information that would lead to the arrest and indictment of over a hundred people, but at the trial, he made openly nationalistic statements and expressed pride in his Jewish identity. Feffer had also allegedly been one of the "most loyal and conformist Yiddish poets", who had helped to enforce strict ideological control over other Yiddish writers, and had a history of denouncing colleagues for their "nationalistic hysteria". However, in 1952, Feffer, along with other defendants, was tried at a closed JAC trial, and executed on August 12, 1952, at Lubyanka prison.

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