Noach (Nojach) Pryłucki or Noach Prilutski (1 October 1882 in

Berdichev Berdychiv ( uk, Берди́чів, ; pl, Berdyczów; yi, באַרדיטשעװ, Barditshev; russian: Берди́чев, Berdichev) is a historic city in the Zhytomyr Oblast (province) of northern Ukraine. Serving as the administrative center ...

– 12 August 1941 in

Vilnius Vilnius ( , ; see also other names) is the capital and largest city of Lithuania, with a population of 592,389 (according to the state register) or 625,107 (according to the municipality of Vilnius). The population of Vilnius's functional u ...

) was a Jewish Polish politician from the

Folkspartei The Folkspartei ( yi, ייִדישע פֿאָלקספּאַרטײַ, , Jewish People's Party) was founded after the 1905 pogroms in the Russian Empire by Simon Dubnow and Israel Efrojkin. The party took part in several elections in Poland and Li ...

. He was also a Yiddish linguist, philologist, lawyer and scholar of considerable renown. Pryłucki was a respected attorney and was said to have had "leadership over the scattered (non-Zionist) national clubs, societies, and groups". In 1910–1936, Pryłucki was the editor of the Folkist newspaper ''Warszawer Togblat'' (The Warsaw Daily), later renamed as ''Der Moment''. In 1916 he was the founder and then became the leader of the Jewish People's Party in Poland (

), and was elected the same year at the municipal elections (under German occupation), where the Folkspartei gained 4 seats in

Warsaw Warsaw ( pl, Warszawa, ), officially the Capital City of Warsaw,, abbreviation: ''m.st. Warszawa'' is the capital and largest city of Poland. The metropolis stands on the River Vistula in east-central Poland, and its population is official ...

. In 1918 he became a member of the Provisional Council of State of the

Kingdom of Poland The Kingdom of Poland ( pl, Królestwo Polskie; Latin: ''Regnum Poloniae'') was a state in Central Europe. It may refer to: Historical political entities * Kingdom of Poland, a kingdom existing from 1025 to 1031 * Kingdom of Poland, a kingdom exi ...

. Elected as a member of the Legislative Sejm in 1919, he had to resign his seat because he was not a Polish citizen. After obtaining Polish citizenship, in 1922–1927 he was reelected to the

Sejm The Sejm (English: , Polish: ), officially known as the Sejm of the Republic of Poland ( Polish: ''Sejm Rzeczypospolitej Polskiej''), is the lower house of the bicameral parliament of Poland. The Sejm has been the highest governing body of ...

on the Bloc of National Minorities list. Pryłucki authored numerous books on Yiddish folklore, philology, culture and theatre, published in

. He once said of

Yiddish theatre Yiddish theatre consists of plays written and performed primarily by Jews in Yiddish, the language of the Central European Ashkenazi Jewish community. The range of Yiddish theatre is broad: operetta, musical comedy, and satiric or nostalgic ...

that it did not arise simultaneously with theatre in other European "national" languages; he conjectured that this was at least in part because the Jewish sense of nationality favoured

Hebrew Hebrew (; ; ) is a Northwest Semitic language of the Afroasiatic language family. Historically, it is one of the spoken languages of the Israelites and their longest-surviving descendants, the Jews and Samaritans. It was largely preserved ...

over Yiddish as a "national" language, but few Jews of the period were comfortable using Hebrew outside of a religious/liturgical context. After Soviet forces took Vilna in January 1941, he was appointed the head of the

YIVO YIVO (Yiddish: , ) is an organization that preserves, studies, and teaches the cultural history of Jewish life throughout Eastern Europe, Germany, and Russia as well as orthography, lexicography, and other studies related to Yiddish. (The word '' ...

Institute. He was murdered by the Gestapo in

(Wilno) in August 1941.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Prylucki, Noach 1882 births 1941 deaths People from Berdychiv Jewish Polish politicians Second Polish Republic Linguists from Poland Yiddish-language writers Linguists of Yiddish 20th-century Polish lawyers History of YIVO Folkspartei politicians Politicians who died in the Holocaust Polish Jews who died in the Holocaust 20th-century linguists