Emil Sommerstein

Emil Sommerstein (6 July 1883 – 25 May 1957) was a Polish-Jewish lawyer, Zionist activist and politician. A leading figure in the Zionist movement in Eastern Galicia, he sat in the Sejm of the Second Polish Republic from 1922 to 1927 and again from 1930 to 1939, chairing the Jewish Parliamentary Club from 1935.

Arrested by the NKVD in Lwów in September 1939, Sommerstein spent more than four years in Soviet prisons and prison hospitals. Released in early 1944, he was appointed head of the Department of War Reparations in the Soviet-backed Polish Committee of National Liberation (PKWN). He later became the first chairman of the Central Committee of Polish Jews, in which capacity he played a significant part in obtaining Soviet agreement to the repatriation of Polish Jews from the Soviet Union, a process that eventually brought some 140,000 people to Poland. He travelled to the United States with a delegation in 1946, suffered a paralytic illness there, and never returned to Poland.

Early life and education Sommerstein was born on 6 July 1883 in the village of Hleszczawa in the Trembowla district of Galicia, then part of Austria-Hungary and now in Ukraine. His father, Leon Braude, came from a rabbinical family; because his parents never registered their religious marriage in the civil registers, he took the maiden name of his mother, Minna Sommerstein.