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Herschel Himmelfarb, Jewish Labor Leader, Dead; Fled from Nazis to U.S.

January 22, 1964
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Herschel Himmelfarb, a Jewish trade union leader in pre-war Poland and a leader of the Jewish Labor Committee in New York, died in Montefiore Hospital here yesterday at the age of 75.

General Secretary of the Tallors Union of Warsaw, the Polish-born leader joined the Jewish Labor Bund in his youth. Arrested several times for anti-Czarist activity, he fled to London in 1907 and went to Russia when the 1917 revolution took place. In 1918 he returned to Poland where he was elected to the Warsaw Kehilla. In 1938, when the Bund elected 16 of 20 Jewish members of the Warsaw City Council, he was one of them.

He fled to Vilna when Hitler invaded Poland, leaving behind his first wife and two children who were murdered by the Nazis. Arrested when the Red Army moved into Vilna, he was released later and came to the United States in 1950 with the aid of the Jewish Labor Committee.

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