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

Berdichev Berdychiv (, ) is a historic city in Zhytomyr Oblast, northern Ukraine. It serves as the administrative center of Berdychiv Raion within the oblast. It is south of the administrative center of the oblast, Zhytomyr. Its population is approximat ...

– 12 August 1941 in

Vilnius Vilnius ( , ) is the capital of and List of cities in Lithuania#Cities, largest city in Lithuania and the List of cities in the Baltic states by population, most-populous city in the Baltic states. The city's estimated January 2025 population w ...

) was a Jewish Polish politician from the Folkspartei. 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 ( Folkspartei), and was elected the same year at the municipal elections (under German occupation), where the Folkspartei gained 4 seats in

Warsaw Warsaw, officially the Capital City of Warsaw, is the capital and List of cities and towns in Poland, largest city of Poland. The metropolis stands on the Vistula, River Vistula in east-central Poland. Its population is officially estimated at ...

. In 1918 he became a member of the

Provisional Council of State The Provisional Council of State (; German: ''Provisorische Staatsrat im Koenigreich Polen'') was the first government of the Kingdom of Poland, a new state created by the military authorities of Germany and Austria on some Polish lands during t ...

of the

Kingdom of Poland The Kingdom of Poland (; Latin: ''Regnum Poloniae'') was a monarchy in Central Europe during the Middle Ages, medieval period from 1025 until 1385. Background The West Slavs, West Slavic tribe of Polans (western), Polans who lived in what i ...

. 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 (), officially known as the Sejm of the Republic of Poland (), is the lower house of the bicameralism, bicameral parliament of Poland. The Sejm has been the highest governing body of the Third Polish Republic since the Polish People' ...

on the

Bloc of National Minorities Bloc may refer to: Government and politics * Political bloc, a coalition of political parties * Trade bloc, a type of intergovernmental agreement * Voting bloc, a group of voters voting together * Black bloc, a tactic used by protesters who wear ...

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 Ashkenazi Jewish community. The range of Yiddish theatre is broad: operetta, musical comedy, and satire, satiric or nostalgic revues; melodr ...

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 (; ''ʿÎbrit'') is a Northwest Semitic languages, Northwest Semitic language within the Afroasiatic languages, Afroasiatic language family. A regional dialect of the Canaanite languages, it was natively spoken by the Israelites and ...

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 (, , short for ) 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. Estab ...

Institute. He was murdered by the

Gestapo The (, ), Syllabic abbreviation, abbreviated Gestapo (), was the official secret police of Nazi Germany and in German-occupied Europe. The force was created by Hermann Göring in 1933 by combining the various political police agencies of F ...

(Wilno) in August 1941.

References

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