Shmuel Schneerson AKA Yosef Dolhan-Polonsky
Forgotten Alter Rebbe's Einiklach - Zionist Hero from Riga
I am working on a catch-all post about Gulag Victims from the Schneerson family. Wanted to post on the upcoming holiday, but will not have complete info. There are many new names. Some names have taken me into unexpected rabbit holes. On the other hand, there is so much information about other kedoshim, they deserve a separate post.
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Shmuel Schneerson, Born in Riga in 1888 - Shot in Murmansk in 1937. [he was 49] Article about this man in the Sakharov archive (many pages about Russian Zionists there), translated below in the entirety:
Shmuel belonged to the older generation of Zionists. He was born in 1888 in Riga, in a religious Hasidic family. Later, he operated with the underground nickname Yosef Dolhan-Polonsky.
Like any Jewish boy from a religious family, he began his studies in a Heder. After the Heder he did not limit himself to religious education, studied the Russian language, literature, Hebrew and new Hebrew literature, was fond of popular science books.
In 1914, when Riga was on the front line of WWI, the Schneerson family, already without a father, left for Vitebsk [still a mystery why many moved from Lithuania during WWI, or why Rashab moved from Lubavitch to Rostov, going to write this off to the herd instinct]. Like all refugees, it was very difficult for them to live there. Shmuel had to work, he had the responsibility to take care of the family's food. But at the same time he continued to study. In 1917, he joined the Zionist Party and was elected to its organizing committee. Influenced by Trumpeldor [the name sounds different now], a HeHalutz cell appeared in Vitebsk; Shmuel, joined, created an agricultural farm for the Hachshara (הכשרה) so that the Halutzim could prepare for peasant labor in Eretz Israel. In 1922, at the HeHalutz (החלוץ) congress in Kharkov, Shmuel was elected to the central committee.
The Haholutz movement was not unified, it consisted of several parties: the main ones were the "Tseyrei Zion" and "Zionist Socialists". In addition, the HeHalutz could also include comrades who did not belong to any of these parties. In those years, there were sharp disputes between the various currents in the HeHalutz. Shmuel made great efforts to ensure that the matter did not come to a split.
In 1923, a split nevertheless occurred, and part of the split movement turned into a "Labor National HeHalutz". Shmuel was elected to the central committee of this party and actually led its activities throughout the Soviet Union. On his initiative, agricultural farms were created to prepare for work in Eretz Israel. Shmuel personally organized three farms on the borders with Serbia, Galicia and Latvia for the illegal transfer of members of the movement from the Soviet Union to these countries and from there to Eretz Israel. All this was strictly forbidden. In April 1926, Shmuel managed to get permission from the Soviet authorities to travel to Danzig, where HeHalutz World Congress was being held. After the congress, he intended to return to the Soviet Union and continue his underground activities, but the congress delegates from Eretz Israel persuaded him to go with them so that he could get acquainted with the country and see the foundations of the future state. Among those who, especially persistently, persuaded him was Chaim Arlozorov, a delegate from the Yishuv and a close friend of Shmuel Schneerson [another Chabad einikle, his zeide: אליעזר ארלוזורוב. Chaim Arlozorov himself would be famously assassinated in Israel in 1933].
Shmuel Schneerson yielded to the insistence of friends. In 1926, he arrived to Eretz Israel, settled in Petah Tikva and found a good job, but the situation of members of the Zionist movement in Russia did not give him peace. He was tormented by the thought that he had deceived his comrades: after all, he left for the congress as their representative, but did not return, and therefore did not fulfill their instructions. The more severe the persecution of Zionists in the Soviet Union became, the more he suffered from remorse.
When Shmuel received a letter informing him that all the kibbutzim of the Hachshara system he had created had been destroyed, and many Zionists had been thrown into prison, he appealed to the leadership of the ha-Poel ha-Tsair party in Eretz Israel with a request to send a delegation to the USSR on behalf of the party to help comrades. The party refused to send a delegation, and in 1927 Shmuel returned to the USSR alone. His arrival breathed new life into the HeHalutz movement. He helped resume the work in urban and rural cells in Ukraine and the work of the center in Moscow [I guess there was at least one Schneerson who commited to face the fate of his suffreing flock after all…].
In 1928, he was arrested in Moscow and sentenced to three years in a “political isolation” ward in the city of Verkhneuralsk. After leaving the detention center, he was exiled to the city of Norilsk in the Far North. After serving his sentence, he received a passport with the usual “39” for the former exiles, which meant a ban on living in Moscow and other central cities. He chose Chernihiv as his place of residence in Ukraine. There he met other members of the Zionist movement, including [Israel] Shkolnik, with whom he had worked together before. In 1934, Shmuel went to Moscow to seek permission to travel to Eretz Israel. He received an entry visa and travel money from Eretz Israel thanks to Ekaterina Peshkova [first wife of Maxim Gorky]. But upon arrival to Moscow, he was arrested and deported to Murmansk. In 1937, he was rearrested again in Murmansk and sentenced to imprisonment in the camp “without the right of correspondence”. Such a sentence meant execution.