Creator Bio

Eliyohu Gutkowski

1900–1943

Eliyohu Gutkowski was a teacher and archivist in the Warsaw ghetto. Originally from Kalvarija (now in Lithuania), he was educated in Łódź and later in Warsaw. Gutkowski was active in the Right Po‘ale Tsiyon movement. Along with Antek Zuckerman, he compiled a Yiddish anthology of Jewish history, Payn un gvure, for educating young people clandestinely in the Warsaw ghetto. The anthology included readings from the Jewish past about Jewish courage and Jewish martyrdom and became one of the earliest symbols of cultural resistance in the ghetto. Gutkowski was also on the executive committee of Emanuel Ringelblum’s Oyneg Shabes archive. Gutkowski did much important work for the archive, including key studies about economics. He was also a liaison to Zionist youth movements, especially Dror. Gutkowski was killed, together with his wife and son, during the ghetto uprising in 1943.

Entries in the Posen Library by This Creator

Primary Source

Suffering and Heroism in the Jewish Past in Light of the Present

Restricted

Text

A major segment of the Jewish people—the Jewish communities in Western and Central Europe—is today experiencing one of the most difficult moments in all of Jewish history. Although we Jews as a people…