Esther Frumkina

Khaye Malka Lifshitz, born in Minsk to an affluent maskilic family, received an unusually thorough modernized Jewish education at home, including modern Hebrew, as well as a modern Russian education. After graduating from a Russian gymnasium in Minsk, she studied at the St. Petersburg Pedagogical University, married Boris Frumkin, and in 1901 became a member of the Jewish socialist Bund and took on her nom-de-guerre, Ester Frumkina. In the years that followed, she emerged as the most important woman within The Bund leadership. Moving back and forth between the Russian and the Austro-Hungarian Empires, Frumkina championed a Yiddishist line within The Bund, arguing for the importance of cultivating a Yiddish-language secular-socialist culture and a Yiddish school system that would underpin it, even as she staked out sharp opposition to the idea that Jews were a nation with shared national interests across class lines. After several years of renewed Bundist activity after the 1917 Revolution in Russia, Frumkina became a member of the Soviet regime and of the Communist Party’s Jewish Section (Yevsektsiia), where she worked to promote state support for a robust secular-socialist Yiddish educational and cultural sphere while also taking a leading role in suppressing Jewish religious life. From 1921 to 1935, she was vice rector of the Communist University for Western National Minorities (KUNMZ), where she taught Leninism. Targeted in the Communist Party’s internal purges of the late 1930s, she died in a Soviet forced labor camp.