Ben Adir
Krutcha, White Russia 1878 - New York 1942
Ben-Adir, a pseudonym of Avrom Rozin, the first editor of Afn Shvel (1940-42) was born in 1878 in Krutcha, in present-day Belarus. He was descended from a rabbinical family; his mother was the daughter of the Krutcher Rabbi. As a child, Ben-Adir studied in kheyder with his grandfather, and then, at the age of fourteen, he became acquainted with Enlightenment literature in Hebrew. At age 16 he traveled to Odessa to take his exams as an external student and there he became fascinated by general and Jewish socialist ideas.
After the first Zionist Congress in 1897 he was, for a time, a supporter of Herzl’s political Zionism and an opponent of Ahad Ha’am’s spiritual Zionism. However, after quickly coming to the conclusion that Zionism could not solve all Jewish problems, he formulated his plan to create a party to seek measures to alleviate the needs of the Jewish people through territorial concentration. Three years later his program became the basis for the Seimist (Jewish Socialist Workers’) party.
Over the course of years Ben-Adir edited and participated in many publications in both Russian and Yiddish, among them the Russian collection Vozrozhdenye (Revival), of which he was the editor, and the magazine Ser”p (Socialist Workers’ Party), and the Yiddish Folks-shtime (Voice of the People), Dos Naye Lebn (New Life) (New York), Di Naye Tsayt (The New Era) (Kiev), and Der Veg: Zhurnal far Fragn fun Yidisher Emigratsye un Kolonizatsye (The Road: Journal for Questions of Jewish Immigration and Colonization) (Berlin).
Until 1933 he lived in Minsk, Kharkov, Paris, Kiev, Kovno, Tel-Aviv and Berlin. From Berlin, as one of the editors of the Algemeyne Entsiklopedye, he went back to Paris together with the rest of the editorial board. There, under the shadow of rising Hitlerism, his territorial ideology grew stronger. In 1935 he founded and directed the Freeland League and in 1940, after the collapse of France, he came to New York where he founded and edited Afn Shvel, the first incarnation of our magazine, published then by the American Freeland League. He died in 1942.
