Emil Sommerstein

Emil Sommerstein

Emil Sommerstein (6 July 1883 – 25 May 1957[a]) 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.[1]

He attended a cheder as a child, then from 1894 the Higher Gymnasium in Tarnopol and subsequently the Hetman Stanisław Żółkiewski V Gymnasium in Lwów. In 1901 he entered the law faculty of Jan Kazimierz University in Lwów, receiving a doctorate in law in 1906; according to his own autobiography he also received a doctorate in philosophy in 1908.[1] During the First World War he served as an officer in the Austro-Hungarian Army.[1][2]

Sommerstein began practising criminal law in 1910 and opened his own practice in Lwów in 1913, appearing on the city's roll of advocates from that year.[2] He specialised in economic and financial law and published several books on those subjects in Polish between 1924 and 1928.[3] He served as vice-president of the Lwów Bar Chamber from 1925 to 1932 and thereafter as a member of the Supreme Bar Council in Warsaw, sitting on its executive committee.[b][2][1][4] He also sat on the supervisory board of the Bank for Cooperatives.[4]

He contributed to Polish and Jewish newspapers and periodicals, among them the Lwów Jewish daily Chwila.

Zionist activity

Sommerstein became involved in the Zionist movement as a student. In 1906 he founded the Zionist Students' League in Galicia, and he later chaired the Galician Zionist Federation. The Jewish Academic House established in Lwów in 1910, the first institution of its kind in Europe, was founded largely through his efforts.[3] He campaigned for the recognition of Jewish nationality at Jan Kazimierz University and opposed the assimilation of Jewish youth.[1]

After the First World War he entered the central leadership of the Zionist Organisation of Eastern Galicia, later of Eastern Małopolska, and also served in the leadership of the Zionist Organisation in Poland.[2] He was active in the Zionist Democrats Ichud in Galicia[1] and took part in the founding of the World Jewish Congress.[3]

Member of the Sejm

Sommerstein was elected to the first-term Sejm in 1922 on the list of the Committee of United Jewish National Parties from constituency no. 52, Stryj. He lost his seat in 1927 but returned in 1930, winning a Lwów mandate on the Zionist list of the Jewish National Bloc, and held Lwów again in the fourth and fifth terms.[4][5] From 1935 he was president of the Jewish Parliamentary Club in the Sejm and Senate.[1]

As a deputy he spoke in defence of prisoners and co-operated with communist and national-minority deputies.[2] He founded the first organisation of Jewish farmers, the Lesser Poland Union of Farmers, and in 1933 founded the Anti-Hitler Committee in Warsaw.[2]

Second World War

Following the Soviet invasion of Poland and the annexation of Lwów by the Soviet Union, Sommerstein organised a committee to assist Jewish refugees from Germany. He was arrested in Lwów on 27 September 1939 and held successively in prisons in Lwów, Kiev, Moscow, Saratov and Balashov, where he was repeatedly interrogated.[1]

Under the Sikorski–Mayski agreement he was formally released by a document issued on 19 November 1941 by the Saratov NKVD directorate, but was unable to make use of it: he had been admitted on 10 October 1941 to the prison hospital in Balashov with a severe infection of the right leg, and was transferred to the municipal hospital there on 9 April 1942. Until the spring of 1942 his fate was unknown and his wife had been treated as a widow. From the hospital he wrote to Stanisław Kot, the Polish ambassador in Kuybyshev, setting out his identity and the course of his detention; despite repeated interventions by the Polish embassy he was not permitted to leave.[1]

His wife Ida was deported into the interior of the Soviet Union on 13 April 1940 in the second mass deportation and later left with the Anders' Army for Jerusalem. His daughter Mira and her husband Joachim Marek Wolisz survived the German occupation on "Aryan" papers near Chełm.[1]

Sommerstein was released at the beginning of 1944 following the intervention of Wanda Wasilewska and brought to Moscow.[2][1]

Poland, 1944–1946

Union of Polish Patriots and the PKWN

From April 1944 Sommerstein headed the Legal Bureau of the Main Board of the Union of Polish Patriots (ZPP), and from 4 April 1944 sat on a ZPP commission drafting guidelines for the military penal code of the 1st Polish Infantry Division.[2] In July 1944 he became chairman of the Organisational Committee of Polish Jews in the USSR, formed under ZPP auspices, whose members included Jakub Berman, Ida Kamińska and Ber Mark.[6] In the spring of 1944 he was invited by the Soviet authorities to represent Polish Jewry in Moscow.[3]

He was a signatory of the PKWN Manifesto of July 1944 and, on the Committee's move to Lublin, became head of its Department of War Reparations (Resort Odszkodowań Wojennych).[1][7] Contemporary sources record him in that office: the Jewish Telegraphic Agency identified him in 1944 as a Jewish member of the PKWN and head of its reparations department,[8] and the United States Department of State likewise described him as head of the Department of War Reparations in the PKWN.[9] Rabbi Leon Thorne, who dealt with him in Lublin in 1944, recorded that his brief concerned Polish claims for indemnities from Germany and had no formal connection with Jewish affairs.[10] His ordinance of 21 September 1944 on the investigation and assessment of war damages survives in the Committee's records.[11] Aid to the surviving Jewish population was handled by a separate PKWN body, the Department for Aid to the Jewish Population, headed by the Bundist Szlomo Herszenhorn.[12]

Sommerstein joined the State National Council (KRN) on 25 July 1944 as a legal expert, served in August on the commission investigating German crimes at Majdanek, and contributed to the drafting of the land reform.[2]

Central Committee of Polish Jews

A Jewish Committee formed in Lublin in the summer of 1944 was reorganised later that year as the Provisional Central Committee of Polish Jews and subsequently as the Central Committee of Polish Jews (CKŻP).[c][12] Sommerstein became its first chairman, representing Ichud.[1] The historian August Grabski notes that he was the only member of the Committee's leadership who had been a figure of national standing in pre-1939 Jewish politics in Poland.[1]

He played a significant part in obtaining Soviet agreement to the repatriation of Polish Jewish citizens from the USSR, a process that eventually brought some 140,000 people to Poland;[13][2] he is reported to have raised the question with Stalin himself before leaving Moscow.[d][1][3] He advocated the "productivisation" of Jewish labour and the formation of Jewish co-operatives, and it was largely through his efforts that the Joint resumed operations in Poland. He declined to support the Zionist Coordination, which organised the clandestine emigration of Jews from Poland known as the Bricha.[1] He sat on the editorial board of the Yiddish newspaper Dos Naye Lebn.[3]

Sommerstein raised the question of postwar violence against Jews publicly, listing in a speech to the KRN on 21 July 1945 a series of localities in which Jews had been killed.[14] In November 1945 Stanisław Mikołajczyk told an American diplomat that Sommerstein had said it was unfortunate for the majority of Jews that so many prominent Jewish figures sat in the Lublin group, as it suggested that Jews generally favoured Moscow; according to the same account, Sommerstein opposed decrees intended to encourage Jews to remain in Poland, favouring instead permission for them to emigrate to Palestine, on the grounds that few had survived and most could not resume life in their former homes.[9] Thorne, who met Sommerstein at his Lublin office in October 1944 as a delegate to the committee from Rzeszów, recorded that Jews continued to regard him as their representative despite his formal portfolio and approached him for official intervention; Thorne's own visit concerned some thirty Jews being held behind the front lines by Soviet forces.[10] According to Thorne, Sommerstein also secured the provisional government's agreement to appoint three Jewish chaplains to the Polish Army, in which several thousand Jewish soldiers were then serving under Marshal Rola-Żymierski; he recruited Rabbi David Kahane, a prewar Hebrew teacher in Lwów, and Thorne himself, who was commissioned with the rank of captain.[15]

His public endorsement of the new Polish authorities and of the Soviet Union, and his criticism of the Polish government-in-exile and of Anders' Army, drew criticism from fellow members of Ichud.[1] His daughter later recalled that he did not hold these offices entirely of his own volition,[1] and Thorne, calling on him shortly before leaving Poland, described him as powerless to help, in the hands of the communist group that had by then taken over Jewish communal life in Poland.[16]

Later life and death

In April 1946 Sommerstein led a CKŻP delegation to the United States, where he addressed public meetings on the condition of the surviving Polish Jewish community.[1][17] He was succeeded as chairman of the CKŻP by Adolf Berman.[18] In the United States he was reunited with his daughter and with his wife Ida, who had flown from Palestine. While preparing to return to Poland he suffered a paralysis from which he never recovered; his wife died in 1954, and he remained in the care of his daughter, Mira Temczyn.[1]

He died in Middletown, New York, and in accordance with his will was buried in Tel Aviv.[1]

Notes

  1. ↑ Polish institutional sources, including the POLIN Museum's Virtual Shtetl and the Institute of National Remembrance, give the date of death as 25 May 1957. The Jewish Telegraphic Agency obituary, published on 27 May 1957, reported that he had died the previous day, giving 26 May.
  2. ↑ Fałowski states that he held the office of vice-president and subsequently president of the Lwów Bar Chamber; the Institute of National Remembrance gives vice-president from 1925 to 1932, followed by membership of the Supreme Bar Council from 1932.
  3. ↑ Accounts of the sequence differ. The POLIN Museum's glossary places the Lublin committee in July 1944, the provisional committee in October 1944 and the renaming in November; its biography of Sommerstein gives November 1944 and February 1945 respectively; the Jewish Historical Institute dates the transformation to 12 November 1944 and a further change of name to a charter of 26 May 1946.
  4. ↑ The POLIN Museum's biography presents this as report rather than established fact. Encyclopaedia Judaica places the encounter in the context of his invitation to Moscow in the spring of 1944 and states without qualification that he was received by Stalin.

References

  1. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 Rusiniak-Karwat, Martyna. "Sommerstein Emil". Virtual Shtetl (in Polish). POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews. Retrieved 10 August 2026.
  2. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 "Sommerstein Emil". Biuletyn Informacji Publicznej (in Polish). Institute of National Remembrance. Retrieved 10 August 2026.
  3. 1 2 3 4 5 6 Skolnik, Fred, ed. (2007). "Sommerstein, Emil". Encyclopaedia Judaica. Vol. 19 (2nd ed.). Detroit: Macmillan Reference USA.
  4. 1 2 3 Fałowski, Janusz (2001). "Działalność posłów żydowskich w Sejmie V kadencji" (PDF). Państwo i Społeczeństwo (in Polish). I (1).
  5. ↑ "Sommerstein Emil". Encyklopedia PWN (in Polish). Retrieved 10 August 2026.
  6. ↑ "Związek Patriotów Polskich w ZSRR". United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Retrieved 10 August 2026.
  7. ↑ "Polski Komitet Wyzwolenia Narodowego w Lublinie" (in Polish). Polish State Archives. Retrieved 10 August 2026.
  8. ↑ "JTA Correspondent Reports 1,000,000 Jews Exterminated at Majdanek; Finds 1000 Survivors". Jewish Telegraphic Agency. 1944. Retrieved 10 August 2026.
  9. 1 2 "Memorandum of Conversation, by the Chief of the Division of Eastern European Affairs (Durbrow), 9 November 1945". Foreign Relations of the United States: Diplomatic Papers, 1945, Europe. Vol. V. Washington: United States Government Printing Office. 1967. pp. 404–409. Department of State Publication 8343.
  10. 1 2 Thorne, Leon (2018). Magilow, Daniel H.; Thorne, Emanuel (eds.). It Will Yet Be Heard: A Polish Rabbi's Witness of the Shoah and Survival. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. pp. 188–189. ISBN 978-1-9788-0165-3.
  11. ↑ "Polski Komitet Wyzwolenia Narodowego (Sygn. 185): finding aid" (PDF) (in Polish). United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Retrieved 10 August 2026.
  12. 1 2 "Centralny Komitet Żydów w Polsce (CKŻP)". Wirtualny Sztetl (in Polish). POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews. Retrieved 10 August 2026.
  13. ↑ "Dr. Emil Sommerstein, Longtime Leader of Polish Jewry, Dead". Jewish Telegraphic Agency. 27 May 1957. Retrieved 10 August 2026.
  14. ↑ Engel, David. "Patterns of Anti-Jewish Violence in Poland, 1944–1946". Yad Vashem. Retrieved 10 August 2026.
  15. ↑ Thorne, Leon (2018). Magilow, Daniel H.; Thorne, Emanuel (eds.). It Will Yet Be Heard: A Polish Rabbi's Witness of the Shoah and Survival. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. pp. 190–191. ISBN 978-1-9788-0165-3.
  16. ↑ Thorne, Leon (2018). Magilow, Daniel H.; Thorne, Emanuel (eds.). It Will Yet Be Heard: A Polish Rabbi's Witness of the Shoah and Survival. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. p. 242. ISBN 978-1-9788-0165-3.
  17. ↑ "Dr. Sommerstein, Visiting Heroes to Describe Resistance of Polish Jews". The Jewish News. Detroit. 21 June 1946. p. 5. Retrieved 10 August 2026.
  18. ↑ "Central Committee of Jews in Poland". Virtual Shtetl. POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews. Retrieved 10 August 2026.

Further reading

  • Grabski, August (2015). Centralny Komitet Żydów w Polsce (1944–1950). Historia polityczna. Warsaw. (in Polish)
  • Pacholczykowa, Alicja. "Sommerstein Emil", in Polski Słownik Biograficzny. (in Polish)
  • Emil Sommerstein Papers, RG 389, YIVO Archives, New York (1944–1946).
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