Esther Frumkin

Esther Frumkin (; 1880 – 8 June 1943), born Malkhe Khaye Lifshitz and also known as Mariya Yakovlevna Frumkina, was a Belarusian Bundist revolutionary and publicist and Soviet politician who was a prominent leader of the General Jewish Labour Bund in Lithuania, Poland and Russia, and later of the Yevsektsiya in the Soviet Union. An ardent proponent of the Yiddish language, her political position on Jewish assimilation satisfied neither traditional Jews nor the Soviet leaders.

Education and family background Khaye Malke Lifshitz was born in 1880 in the city of Minsk, then part of the Russian Empire.

Her grandfather was a Hasidic rabbi and scholar, while her father, Meyer Yankev Lifshitz, was educated in secular and Jewish studies and wrote poetry and prose. Her mother, Basya, came from the Katzenellenbogen and Romm families of Vilna.

Esther was educated at home until the age of 11, studying Hebrew, the Talmud, and texts associated with both the maskilim and Zionist movements of her time. She then attended the gymnasium in Minsk, and went on to study philology and Russian literature at the Pedagogical University in Saint Petersburg. The Bund, in which Frumkin became a prominent leader, was an antizionist movement. She subsequently edited Bundist periodicals and wrote extensively on Jewish education. She stressed the need to impart elementary education in Yiddish in secular schools for the children of Jewish workers. In 1910, she published Tsu der Frage vegn der Yidisher Folkshul (On the Question of the Jewish Public School), which advocated secular elementary education in Yiddish for Jewish working-class children.

Frumkin was arrested by the tsarist police in September 1907 and released shortly afterward. In 1908, she went into exile in Austria and Switzerland. She was arrested again in late 1912 and banished to Siberia. She escaped and spent most of World War I in hiding.

When the Kombund dissolved in March 1921, Frumkin joined the Russian Communist Party and declared, “Bundism will continue to exist as long as there is a Jewish proletariat.” While continuing to promote Yiddish culture, Frumkin played a central role in the Yevsektsiya's campaign against Jewish religious organizations in the early 1920s, which resulted in the forced dissolution of rabbinical institutions. These campaigns formed part of the Yevsektsiya's broader drive against organized Jewish life; the Jewish sections' first conference in 1918 had resolved on the "systematic destruction" of Zionist and religious institutions, and the Yevsektsiya subsequently carried out the closure of the kehilla, Hebrew-language schools, and yeshivas and the suppression of Zionist parties. Frumkin's Russian-language antireligious pamphlet Doloy ravvinov! (Down with the Rabbis!, 1923) was distributed in hundreds of thousands of copies and drew sharp criticism from contemporary Jewish observers in the West. Several memoirists nevertheless recalled instances in which Frumkin intervened on behalf of those targeted, including helping to secure the release of the Maggid of Minsk from prison, extending students' exemptions from labour drives to yeshiva students, and voting to return a house of study that the Yevsektsiya had seized in Vitebsk.

In 1908, Frumkin attended the Czernowitz Language Conference, where she opposed Y. L. Peretz's proposal to create a worldwide Jewish cultural organization and argued that Yiddish should be declared the only Jewish national language. The conference rejected that position and instead adopted a resolution declaring Yiddish "a national language of the Jewish people". In the years that followed, educators such as Dveyre Kupershteyn and Sofia Gurevitsh established elementary and secondary schools with instruction in Yiddish.

Controversy Despite having championed Yiddish, Frumkin is a controversial figure in Jewish history. In A Price below Rubies: Jewish Women as Rebels and Radicals, Naomi Shepherd writes that "no woman was more admired or more hated by Jews under the first phase of Soviet rule; no woman in Eastern Europe achieved such stature in Jewish politics." In fall 2019, the Workmen's Circle offered an online course on Jewish radicals that included Frumkin. Yet she has been associated with antisemitism by writers as divergent as the far-right figure Frank L. Britton, whose The Hoax of Soviet “Anti-Semitism”: Jews, Zionism, Communism, Israel and the Soviet Union 1918–1991 (Ostara Publications) includes Frumkin's "Address on 'National Minorities' to the Second Congress of the Communist International" (1920), and Dara Horn, whose essay "The Cool Kids: Self-mutilation as a Jewish cultural strategy and the sad history of the Yevsektsiya" appears in Tablet: A New Read on Jewish Life.