Mikhl Levitan

Born in Nadezhnaya, Russian Empire (today in Ukraine), to a family of Jewish farmers, Mikhl Levitan had a traditional Jewish education before completing his teacher certification. Becoming an early advocate for secular Yiddish culture and education, Levitan cofounded a pioneering Yiddishist elementary school in the Demievka (Demyevka) neighborhood of Kiev (Kyiv) shortly before World War I. Continuing his Yiddishist educational work throughout and beyond World War I, Levitan ultimately joined the Communist Party and the Yevsektsiia in 1919. Moving to Moscow, he worked within the Soviet regime as an administrator of Jewish education, edited a number of Yiddish pedagogical and philological journals, served on the board of the Moscow Yiddish State Theater, contributed to Soviet Yiddish literary journals, and later served as an editor of the Kiev Institute for Jewish Proletarian Culture’s Di royte velt. He seems to have been killed in the Stalinist purges of the late 1930s.