📚 Save Big on Books! Enjoy 10% off when you spend £100 and 20% off when you spend £200 (or the equivalent in supported currencies)—discount automatically applied when you add books to your cart before checkout! 🛒

Copyright

Yankev Leshchinsky

Published On

2024-09-16

Page Range

pp. 153–158

Language

  • English
  • Yiddish

Print Length

6 pages

11. Suicides

  • Yankev Leshchinsky (author)
  • Robert Brym (translator)
  • Eli Jany (translator)
Chapter of: The Last Years of Polish Jewry: Volume 2: The Permanent Pogrom, 1935–37(pp. 153–158)
Christian and Jewish suicides taking place in Poland are different. Christian suicides are generally a result of severe poverty. Some Jewish suicides are too. However, many Jewish suicides occur because of persistent and growing hopelessness, not severe poverty. Leshchinsky recounts several such cases in addition to “normal” suicides of Jews “saving themselves from death by starvation.” He also notes the existence of an epidemic of abandoning Jewish children up to eight years old. Some Jewish parents are unable to provide their children with food and abandon them in the faint hope that they will be taken to a Jewish orphanage or that someone will take pity on them and feed them. 18 February 1936.

Contributors

Yankev Leshchinsky

(author)

Robert Brym

(translator)
SD Clark Professor of Sociology Emeritus at University of Toronto
Associate of the Centre for Jewish Studies at University of Toronto
https://utoronto.academia.edu/RobertBrym

Robert Brym, FRSC, is SD Clark Professor of Sociology Emeritus and an Associate of the Centre for Jewish Studies at the University of Toronto. His latest works include Robert Brym and Randal Schnoor, eds, The Ever-Dying People? Canada’s Jews in Comparative Perspective (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2023) and “Jews and Israel 2024: Canadian Attitudes, Jewish Perceptions,” Canadian Jewish Studies/Études Juives Canadiennes (38: 2024), 6–89. For downloads of Brym’s published work, visit https://utoronto.academia.edu/RobertBrym

Eli Jany

(translator)
PhD student at University of Toronto

Eli Jany is a PhD student in the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures and the Centre for Jewish Studies at the University of Toronto. He has translated poems by Sarah Reisen (In geveb, 12 May 2020, https://ingeveb.org/texts-and-translations/three-poems-reisen) and, with Robert Brym, co-translated volume 1 of The Last Years of Polish Jewry and “Jewish Economic Life in Yiddish Literature: Yitskhok Ber Levinzon and Yisroel Aksenfeld,” East European Jewish Affairs (53, 1: 2024), both by Yankev Leshchinsky.