In 1940, Levit graduated from the Romanian
Bogdan Petriceicu Hașdeu Lyceum in
Chișinău and entered the
Chișinău Pedagogical Institute. On 6 July 1941, he was mobilized in the
Red Army to build field fortifications east of the
Dniester, where his battalion was encircled but managed to escape. In October 1941, Bessarabians were withdrawn from the front and sent to the rear; Levit worked at a factory in
Astrakhan. After the evacuation of the enterprise, he continued his studies at the History Faculty of the Chișinău State Pedagogical Institute (evacuated to
Buguruslan). After graduating in October 1945, he became a junior researcher at the Institute of History, Economics, Language and Literature of the Moldavian branch of the
Academy of Sciences of the USSR (from 1961, the
Academy of Sciences of Moldova). Between 1962 and 1987, he headed the Department of the History of Southeastern European Countries. From 1980 to 1987, he taught modern history at the Chișinău Pedagogical Institute. Beginning in 1991, he became chief researcher and head of the Department of Jewish History and Culture (Judaica) at the Institute for National Minorities of the Academy of Sciences of Moldova (later the Institute of Interethnic Relations). From the mid-1990s, he lived in the
United States (in
Fort Lee, New Jersey), where he collaborated with the New York–based
Yiddish newspaper
Forverts. He was the author of numerous scholarly and popular works on the modern history of
Romania,
Moldova, and
Bessarabia, international relations, and World War II. From the early 1990s, he also focused on the history of the
Holocaust in Romanian-occupied territories of Bessarabia,
Bukovina, and Transnistria. He received the
State Prize of the Moldavian SSR (1972) for co-authoring the two-volume
History of the Moldavian SSR. Levit’s most significant scholarly contributions were his late works on Bessarabia’s short-lived independence and the establishment of the
Moldavian Democratic Republic in 1917–1918, including
The Movement for the Autonomy of Bessarabia in 1917. The Formation of Sfatul Țării. Proclamation of the Moldavian Democratic Republic (1997) and the 500-page
The Fateful Year. The Moldavian Republic: From the Proclamation of the Moldavian Republic to the Abolition of Bessarabian Autonomy (2000, both later translated into Romanian in 2003 and 2008). He also authored
The Bessarabian Question in the Context of International Relations: The Paris Peace Conference (2012) and the two-volume
The "Jewish Question" in the Politics of the Antonescu Dictatorship (2015, 2017). He contributed to the encyclopedia project
The Holocaust in the Territory of the USSR (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2009 and 2011). Levit was married to Inna Petrovskaya (from 1959) and had a son, Alexander (born 1961). He died on 11 February 2021, in
Fort Lee, New Jersey. ==Views==