The Bund has set apart the sixteenth to the eighteenth of December for the celebration of the thirty-fifth Jubilee of its existence. Meetings are to be held and lectures delivered in many cities in Russia, Lithuania and Poland. In Poland alone the Bund has announced festivities in 200 towns in connection with the celebration. The celebrations are to conclude with a march to the Warsaw cemetery where Beinish Michalevitch, one of the founders of the Bund, lies buried and where a tombstone is to be set up in his memory.
The Bund was for a long time the only Jewish Socialist Party. It was formed at the conference in Vilna in 1897 out of the union between the Jewish Socialist groups in Russia.
Beinish Michalevitch, whose tombstone is to be inaugurated in connection with the present celebration, was born in 1876 and died in 1928. He was the son of a Jewish locksmith. He received a traditional Jewish education and his parents directed his studies towards becoming a rabbi. Until the age of 17 he was closely associated with the Chiboth Zion movement and with the cultural efforts that were being made to revive the Hebrew language. It was about this period that he began to take an interest in Socialism and entered the Brisk group of the Jewish Socialists, playing a leading role in the developments which led to the formation of the Bund in 1897. He suffered imprisonment several times under the Czarist regime for illegal activities. Apart from the periods in which Michalevitch was in prison the whole of his life from seventeen years of age until his death in 1928, was devoted to the work of the Bund.
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
