Julius Brutzkus
Julius Davidovich Brutzkus or Judah Loeb Brutzkus or Joselis Bruckus (
He was born in 1870 in
In 1907 he became one of the Editors of the journal "Sunrise" (Rassvet), together with Zeev Jabotinsky.
In 1917 he was elected to Russian Constituent Assembly on the Jewish list representing Minsk Governorate.
On April 23 1920 he was arrested in Moscow by Cheka (OGPU- KGB name at a time) together with 106 delegates of the Russian Zionist Conference.
In 1923 he served as Minister for Jewish Affairs in the Lithuanian government and was elected to the Lithuanian Parliament in November of that year.
Since early 1900th was one of the leaders of the World Jewish Health Society, the OSE. In 1924 Julius Brutzkus moved to Berlin, and in 1934 to Paris, where he led the OSE.
He tirelessly devoted himself to the effort of saving European Jews. A former minister in the Lithuania government, he convinced the Consul of Lithuania in Marseille to issue citizenship papers for Jews detained in camps in France. Brutzkus utilized his status to access the camps and distributed hundreds of documents, also to non-Lithuanian nationals, before he was arrested in 1940 and sentenced to six months in prison by Vichy regime in France. He escaped to USA where he became a leader of the Union of Russian Zionists.
In 1949 moved to Israel to Petah Tikva, where he died on January 29 1951. In 2022 B'nai Brith awarded Julius Brutzkus with a Certificate of the Jewish Savior of the Holocaust (posthumously). [2]
Throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries Brutzkus authored a vast array of articles and books in
Brutzkus was an ardent
Selected works
- "Pershi zvistki pro Evreev n Polshchi ta na Rusi". Nankovyi Zbirnyk. 24 (1927), pp. 3–11
- "Bukhara." Encyclopaedia Judaica, vol. 4. Berlin 1929. p. 1126.
- Der Handel der westeuropäischen Juden mit dem alten Kiev, in "Zeitschrift für die Geschichte der Juden in Deutschland", No. 2-3, Berlin 1931, pp. 97–110 in German
- "Di Geshikhte fun di Bergyiden oyf kavkaz." (History of the Jewish Mountaineers in Dagestan, Caucasia), YIVO Studies in History, vol.2. Vilna, 1937 (in Yiddish)
- "The Slavonic and East European Review, 22, 1944, pp. 108–124
References
External links
- [1] Posthumous Citation Award to Julius Brutzkus as a Jewish Holocaust Resquer
- [2] Jewish Telegraph Agency Announcement of the death of Julius Brutzkus, January 29 1951.
- BRUTZKUS, JUDAH LOEB BEN DAVID in the Jewish Encyclopedia
- Dr. Julius Yehuda Brutzkus public profile, with a comment of his grandson (a correction). In English
- Joselis Bruckus (1870–1951). In Lithuanian language.