Leyb Rochman

Leyb Rochman was born to a Hasidic family in Minsk-Mazowieki, Poland. He moved to Warsaw in 1930 and studied at a yeshiva. In 1936, Rochman left the Hasidic world and became a Yiddish journalist, a career he continued after the war. His confessional diary, kept while in hiding, which also described the liquidation of the ghetto in Mazowieki, became an early classic of Holocaust literature. In 1950, he moved to Jerusalem and became the Israel correspondent for the New York–based Yiddish daily Forverts and a Yiddish broadcaster for Kol Israel. He was awarded the President’s Prize for Literature in 1975.