Early life and career Yehudah Leib Levin was born in
Minsk,
Belarus to a well-established
Ḥasidic family. His father, Rabbi Baruch Chaim Levin, was a well-to-do merchant and scholar with a close relationship to Rabbi Shlomo Chaim Perlov of
Koidanov, and his mother Miriam was the daughter of Ḥasidic
rebbe Moshe of Kobrin. Levin married at the age of 17 and went to live with his father-in-law in the
shtetl of Puchowitz, where he discovered the
Chabad movement and diligently studied its doctrine and literature. He is known as the author of
epic poem in three parts, also concerning the social condition of the Russian Jews.
Zionism As a reaction to the
1881 pogroms, Levin began to draw away from the socialist circles. He initially advocated for emigration to the United States; in an October 1881 letter to the Hebrew weekly
Ha-Magid, he wrote: Nonetheless, Levin shortly thereafter joined the
Ḥovevei Zion movement in Kiev and became an active supporter of
emigration to
Palestine. He publicly expressed agreement with
Leon Pinsker's
Auto-Emancipation, and in 1884 translated into Hebrew
Benjamin Disraeli's novel
Tancred, which visualizes the return of the Jews to their land. Levin was forced to leave Kiev in 1887 because of his Zionist activities. He settled in the small town of
Tomashpil where, while continuing his literary work, he worked at a sugar factory owned by the Brodsky family. In 1890, he completed the poem "Daniyel be-gov ha-arayot" ('Daniel in the Lions’ Den'), highlighting the struggle against anti-Semitism and Levin's outspoken support of Zionism; the poem was not published until 1898 because of censorship. At the
Sixth Zionist Congress in 1903, he was among the "
Territorialists" who supported the
plan to provide temporary refuge in
British East Africa for European Jews facing
anti-Semitism.
Later life Levin returned to Kiev after the
Soviet regime closed the Brodsky sugar factory following the
Russian Revolution in 1918. His later years were marked by poverty in his daughter's home and persecution by the
Yevsektsiya. He attended clandestine Zionist meetings in the city until he died on 30 November 1925. A selection of his memoirs, articles, and poems was published in 1968 as
Zikhronot ve-Hegyonot ('Memoirs and Essays'). ==External links==