Death of A. S. Zacks Well-known New York Journalist and Member of Editorial Staff of Yidlish Daily “

Abraham Simch Zacks, a member of the editorial staff of the Yiddish daily, the “Day”, died here this afternoon after a long illness.

Mr. Zacks, who was 53 years of age, was born in Lithuania, and studied at the Yeshibah of Shavli. He entered the revolutionary movement when he was 17, translating a number of Socialist works into Yiddish. He afterwards went to Warsaw, where he was arrested in 1901 on a charge on Socialist activity and was sentenced to six months’ imprisonment. He began his journalistic activity in 1902 in the “Yiddishe Folkscajtung”, where he wrote on social and economic problems. At that time he began to combat the widespread belief among Jewish Socialists that nationalism and socialism were incompatible. The following year he went to Berlin, and entered the University, studying at the High School of Agriculture. He then returned to Lithuania and for a number of years he taught scientific agriculture to the children of the Jewish colonists at Slobodka, near Kovno. In 1908 he went to America, where he wrote for the “Zukunft” and edited the weekly “Jewish Workers’ World” in Chicago until it became in 1918 the Chicago edition of the “Jewish Daily Forwards”. He was also at one time editor of the “Zukunft”. In 1914 he joined the “Day”, leaving it for a time to work with Mr. Herman Bernstein in the “Hajnt”, afterwards returning to the “Day” as a member of its editorial staff. He published a number of books in Yiddish, English and German, on the principles of Socialism and on political economy. He also published “Worlds in Ruin”, in which he described the collapse of Jewish life in Poland and Russia as a result of the war. It also appeared in English in the “American Hebrew” and the “American Jewish Chronicle”, and in Hebrew in the “Hatoren”.

He was Director of the National Radical Yiddish Teachers’ Seminary and a lecturer in the New York Yiddish People’s University. In 1925 he became President of the Yiddish Journalists’ and Writers’ Organisation of America, the I. L. Peretz Organisation. He was also one of the initiators of the Yiddish Scientific Institute in Vilna.