Gergel, Nachum

In January 1915, Gergel joined the ECOPO (Jewish Committee for Assisting Victims of War), and in September 1915 was elected its chairman. Since September 1916, Gergel worked in the Central Committee of the EKOPO in Petrograd. In May 1918, he was elected president of ECOPO and continued to lead him until his departure to Germany in 1921.

During this period, Gergel also served on the ORT Management Committee (Society for Manual Labor - an international Jewish philanthropic and educational organization). In July 1920 (until 1921) he was elected chairman of the IDGESCOM committee. During World War I, Gergel rallied and led a group of activists fighting against the Jewish accusation of spying for Germany. After the order of the Russian government on the eviction of Jews from the frontline areas of Courland and Kovno, Gergel organized the resettlement of thousands of Jewish families in the Poltava province.

In his youth, Gergel was a member of the Bund , later joined the Zionist Socialist Workers Party (SSRP) and was elected to its Central Committee. After the February Revolution of 1917, he was elected as a deputy from the SSRP to the Petrograd Soviet of Workers 'and Soldiers' Deputies. After the union of the SSRP with the Jewish Socialist Workers 'Party (EWPR), Gergel became a member of the Central Committee of the new party of the United Jewish Socialist Workers' Party (OESRP) and was soon elected to the All-Russian Committee of this party.

In early 1918, Gergel was appointed chairman of the bureau of the Ukrainian Ministry of Jewish Affairs. After the coup and seizure of power by the hetman Skoropadsky in April 1918, Gergel became the de facto head of the Ministry. ^[one]

In the years 1918-21, many bloody Jewish pogroms occurred in Ukraine. During this period, Gergel was an active member of the Committee for Assistance to Victims of Pogroms. At the same time, he was the head of the Office of Assistance to Pogrom Victims at the People’s Security Commissariat. In December 1919, Gergel was appointed representative of the Committee for Assistance to Pogrom Victims at the Red Cross Society , where he worked until the liquidation of this Committee by the Soviet Government in May 1920. Along with this work, Gergel tirelessly collected materials and statistics on Jewish pogroms, which were later published in Europe.

Studies of Jewish pogroms published by N. Gergel are often cited as evidence that the Ukrainian People’s Army, under the command of Simon Petlyura, was the organizer and participant of many pogroms. Alexander Solzhenitsyn in an early version of his book “Two Hundred Years Together” writes: “According to a study of pogroms conducted by N. Gergel in 1951, out of 887 massacres of pogroms, Ukrainian troops carried out Simon Petlyura.” In a later edition of the book, Solzhenitsyn replaces a reference to N. Gergel with the words "According to Jewish sources ..." ^[3] . Some other authors do the same, citing Gergel’s data without mentioning his name — for example, Gennady Kostyrchenko in Stalin’s Secret Policy. Power and anti-Semitism. ” ^[4] . It is important to note that the study referenced by A. Solzhenitsyn was conducted by N. Gergel in the 1918 – early 1920s and was published in 1928 in Berlin in Yiddish ^[5] . The figures of the victims of the pogroms, cited by N. Gergel, are considered conservative and are based on eyewitness accounts and newspaper reports collected in the Jewish historical archive Mizrah, created in Kiev, after being transported to Berlin, and even later to New York . An English translation of an article by N. Gergel was published in 1951 in the Yearbook of the University of Jewish Studies (YIVO) in New York under the heading: "Pogroms in Ukraine in 1918-1921." " ^[6]

At the end of 1921, N. Gergel arrived with his family in Berlin , where his diverse social activities continued. He began by forming the OZE Foreign Committee (Jewish Health Society). In 1922, he was elected to the secretariat of the Committee and served as editor of the OZE Bulletin. During this period, N. Gergel worked in the Mizrakh-Yiddish Historische Archiv, in which he kept materials from his research on Jewish pogroms. In 1923, N. Gergel was elected Chairman of the ORT. In 1925 he came to the USA as a delegate from OZE ^[7] . In 1926, N. Gergel was appointed expert of the Joint (American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee) on Russian Jews. N. Gergel initiated the creation of Di Algemeyne Entsiklopedye - the first large Jewish encyclopedia in Yiddish. The implementation of this project was the goal of his second trip to the United States.

N. Gergel was one of the founders and an active member of the Institute for Jewish Studies (YIVO) in Berlin. At the YIVO conference in Vilna in 1929, he was elected a member of the Board of Management. He was the editor of the economic and statistical section and one of the authors of the annual YIVO Bleter . ^[8] His research on the economic and social situation of Jews in the early Soviet period was published in his book On the Status of Jews in Russia (Warsaw, 1929)) ^[9]

N. Gergel collected more material than he managed to publish in his short life. His large monograph, The Ministry of Jewish Affairs at Hetman ( Das Judische Ministerium Unter Getman ), has not yet been published. ^[10]

• Yiddish Book: Gergel, N. Di Lage fun di Yidn in Rusland , 259 pages, Warsaw, 1929.
• Article in English: Gergel, N. "The Pogroms in the Ukraine In 1918-1921", YIVO Annual of Jewish Social Science, New York, 1951, pp. 237-252.
• Yiddish article: “Jews in the Communist Party and the Communist International” ( Shriftn far Economisch und Statistisch 1928).
• Articles in the YIVO Bleter Yearbook (e.g.: 1931, pp. 62-70)
• A series of articles by N. Gergel was published in the New York newspaper Zukunft (The Future) in the 1920s and early 1930s.