Famous Sons
and other people with ties to Lida who've shown up on the internet or elsewhere
- David Blaustein (1866 - 1912), New York Board of
Education official, emigrated from Lida in 1886. See the Jewish Encyclopedia online
- Paul Brem
heroically saved his pregnant wife from the "line of death" in Lida.
After many tribulations in the forest, during which his wife was
killed, he and their daughter and his second wife came to the US.
- Miriam Brysk nee Miasnik
was from Warsaw, but her family escaped to Lida when the Nazis took
Poland in 1939. Saved from the 1942 mass murders at the last minute
because her father was a surgeon, the family was taken by partisans
later - for the same reason. She's now an artist.
- Rabbi David ben Aryeh Loeb of Lida was a Rabbi of the late
17th century, serving in Mainz, Amsterdam & L'viv. He may
have
died in 1698. See the Jewish Encyclopedia online
- Helen Degen Cohen (Halina Degenfisz), poet and novelist.
Autobiographical "The Edge of the Field" won a prize. Some of her poetry
is on the
web. Her
story of returning to see the woman who hid her as a child is
online.
- Rabbi Isaac Moses Darshan [Darszon], also known as the
Kelmer
Maggid (1828-1899), from Lida, was a main preacher of the Musar
movement. See the Jewish
Encyclopedia online;
look for Moses Isaac of Kelmy
- Rabbi Aryeh Loeb Deiches was an early Rabbi in Lida; See
the Jewish Encyclopedia
online under Deiches, scroll down to his son Samuel.
- Ella Garber
MD, (-2005) gynecologist and obstetrician, graduate of Jagiellonian
University, Krakow was born in Lida. She was on the faculty of Albert
Einstein College of Medicine. She was the sister of Frances Dworecki,
who donated her autobiography to this site.
- Bernard Gorin, journalist (1868-) See the Jewish Encyclopedia online
- Rabbi Elijah Akiva Kamenetsky (1798-1875) was A. B. D.
Lida & subsequently St. Petersberg. See Rosenstein,
Neil, The Unbroken Chain NY, London, Jerusalem:
CIS Publishers, 1990 page 409 for his ancestry & descendants.
- Tamara
Katz nee Kaplinski (1914-2004) was born in Lida. Her parents and
husband, Abraham Dworzinski, were shot in a mass murder in
Lida in 1941, leaving her with her 3-year-old son Nathan. She
evaded the May 19, 1942 mass murder by hiding in an outhouse with
Nathan. Peasants who had worked with her father hid her for a few nights; she moved
among families who'd known her father until a cousin heard she was
alive, and sent someone to take her to the Bielski brothers. She stayed
there until she got false papers, and spent the rest of the war
on the run. She married another partisan, Abraham Katz, in 1944. On being widowed
in 1957, she got a job as bookkeeper in an antiques store [she'd been
trained in bookkeeping in Lida], eventually learning the business and running her
own store. She was active in Hadassah and a charter member of the U.S.
Holocaust Memorial Museum. Another
obituary.
- Artist Alex
Katz's father was from Lida [offline as of 12/2003; http://www.alexkatz.com]
- Rabbi Mordechai ben Asher Klatzko (1797-1883)
. Rabbi in Lida from 1864 until his death. See
the Jewish Encyclopedia
online
- Rabbi Phillip Lazowski, born in Belitsa, Holocaust
survivor, author of Faith and Destiny, 1975. He returned
to Belitsa in 1999 to lead services for the reburial of 36 Holocaust
victims whose remains were discovered during a construction
project. A story ran in the Hartford
Courant 19 and 20 Sept. 1999.
- Aaron
Leibowitz born in Lida, emigrated to the US in the
1930s. He served in World War II in the US army, and was awarded
a Purple Heart
for wounding on Omaha Beach during the D-Day invastion. His
mother and nine siblings were murdered in the Holocaust. He
worked in a kosher butcher shop.
- Arkadii Beinusovich Migdal (1911 - 1988), member of the
USSR Academy of Sciences from 1966, Professor at the Institute of
Physical Engineering in Moscow from 1944. Coauthor of a book on
quantum mechanics. [Soviet Encyclopedia].
- Rabbi
Lev Ovchinski graduate of Lida Yeshiva, murdered in Holocaust
- Dr. Harry Polachek
(1913-2002) was born in Lida and emigrated in the 1920s. He had a
doctorate in mathematics from Columbia U and was ordained Rabbi
from the Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary. During World
War II, he was a mathematician at Aberdeen Proving Ground. He
remained with the Navy labs, becoming Director of the Applied
Mathematics Lab. He received the Navy Distinguished Civilian
Service Award for his pioneering work in computer applications. (The
more informative link above doesn't mention Lida. That datum is
in a much briefer death
notice).
- Yakov Popko (Pupko) (1922-)(scroll
down to the bottom) was a Zionist in Lida, and imprisoned by the
Soviets because of it. He finally managed to emigrate in 1958.
- Rabbi
Isaac Jacob Reines (1839 - 1915), founder of the Lida Yeshiva,
and the Zionist Mizrachi
movement. His entry from The Jewish
Encyclopedia, and that of his son Moses.
- Ralph
Rose - http://www.clarku.edu/departments/jewishstudies/rosefolder/rosepage.html -This page, which has been taken down, had a photograph
and short biography of Ralph Rose, a businessman & philanthropist
whose family was from Lida & who endowed a chair at Clark
University in Massachusetts. Similar details of his life can be
found in a press release from 1996
archived on Shamash.
Since this is an archive of the entire day's
postings, use your browser's search feature to find the reference to
Rose. As of 5/2005, listserve archive searching on Shamash has
been disabled , along with which this page is no longer up.
- Rabbi Elijah ben Benjamin Schick, (1809- 1876), Rabbi in
Lida for a time; born in Vasilishki. See the Jewish Encyclopedia online
- Dr. Stefan E.
Warschawski (1904-1989)
was born in Lida. His family moved to Koenigsberg during World War I,
where he graduated Gymnasium and entered University there to study
mathematics, moving to Goettingen after 2 years. When his advisor
moved to Basel, Warschawski did, too. On graduation, he was
offered a position at Goettingen, which he occupied from 1930
until Hitler came to power. He was able to come to the US and obtain a
position at Washington University in St. Louis. After several moves, he
settled at the University of Minnesota, where he built up the
Mathematics Department. In 1963 he moved to UC San Diego's La Jolla
campus as department chair.
Copyright © 2003 Irene Newhouse
HTML by Irene Newhouse
Lida Area Page
Lida District Home Page
Jewishgen | ShtetLinks