Elias Tcherikower

Elias Tcherikower (; July 31, 1881 – August 8, 1943) was a Ukrainian Jewish historian and co-founder of the Yiddish Scientific Institute (YIVO).

Biography Tcherikower was born and raised in Poltava, Russian Empire (now Ukraine), He attended gymnasium in Odessa, and went on to university in Saint Petersburg. His participation in the Russian revolutionary movement led to his arrest at a Menshevik meeting during the 1905 revolution, after which he spent a year in prison.

He published his first article – an essay in Russian on the Yiddish writer Sholem Yankev Abramovitsh ("Mendele Moykher Sforim: An attempt at a critical characteristic") – in 1905, in the Russian-language Zionist journal Evreiskaia zhizn (Jewish life). Tcherikower contributed biographies and a variety of other articles to the Russian-language Jewish encyclopedia Evreiskaia entsiklopedia. Tcherikower was active at the Folks-Verlag (People's press), one of several Yiddish publishing houses that operated in Kyiv around this time.

In the spring of 1919, a wave of anti-Jewish violence spread through Ukraine, including Kyiv, and Tcherikower turned his attention to gathering documentation of the events in the Jewish communities, leading the "Editorial Board for Collecting and Investigating Material Pertaining to the Pogroms in the Ukraine." Among his collaborators were Nokhem Shtif, Jacob Lestschinsky, Jacob Ze'ev Wolf Latzky Bertholdi, and Nokhem Gergel. The archive assembled by these scholars eventually served as the basis of several historical works in Yiddish about the events.

When the Soviets gained control of Ukraine in 1921, Tcherikower and other Yiddish activists in Kyiv fled the city; he and his wife Riva (Rebecca), taking the archive with them, went first to Moscow and then to Berlin. During this period several Yiddish and Hebrew publishing houses were established in Berlin, providing Tcherikower and his colleagues opportunities to publish scholarly works in Yiddish. Tcherikower became the leader of the Historical Section of the new institute (one of four research divisions), which held its founding meeting on October 31, 1925 at Dubnow's apartment in Berlin.

In 1926 to 1927, Tcherikower played a key role in the preparation of the defense of Sholom Schwartzbard, who was on trial in Paris for the assassination of the Ukrainian leader Symon Petliura, and who had allegedly acted in retaliation for Petliura's role in the pogroms carried out by Ukrainian forces in 1919, during the Russian Civil War. In this work Tcherikower, assisted by his wife, brought to bear materials in the pogrom-related archive he and his colleagues had assembled.

In 1939 Tcherikower, then living in France, co-edited, with Yisroel (Israel) Efroykin (1884–1954), the new Yiddish-language journal Oyfn sheydveg (At the Crossroads), with Zelig Kalmanovitch as a major contributor. The three colleagues, who had all advocated for diaspora nationalism and Yiddishism, aimed to reevaluate their cultural and political views on the future of the Jewish people. and after his arrival in New York he served as the section's research secretary at YIVO's new headquarters there. He died in New York City in 1943.

Personal life Tcherikower's wife Riva, or Rebecca Tcherikower (née Teplitsky) (1884–1963) was his life partner from the time of his youth; they married around 1910.

Works In English "Jewish Martyrology and Jewish Historiography." Yivo Annual of Jewish Social Science, vol. 1 (1946), p. 9–23 In Yiddish Antisemitizm un pogromen in Ukraine in di yorn 1917–1918 [Anti-Semitism and pogroms in the Ukraine in the years 1917–1918]. Berlin: Yidisher literarisher farlag, 1923 Di Ukrainer pogromen in yor 1919 [The Ukrainian pogroms in 1919]. New York: YIVO, 1965