(J. T. A. Mail Service)
The life story of Prof. Rudolf Lasarewitch Samoilowitch, captain and leader of the expedition of the Ice-Breaker “Krassin,” which was instrumental in rescuing several members of General Nobile’s Polar Expedition is related in the “B. Z. am Mittag” here.
Prof. Samoilowitch was born in South Russia in 1880. He studied at the Academy of Mines in Freiburg. On returning to Russia he worked as a mining engineer. In 1908 he was arrested by the Ochranka, the Czarist political police, and was exiled to Archangelsk on the Arctic Sea. There he began his studies of the region and published a book on the subject which attracted attention. He extended his investigations, took part in a number of expeditions to Spitzbergen and the North, and showed that he was not only a scholar, but also an organizer and leader of ability.
In Spitzbergen he arranged the exploitation of the coal wealth on the island and during the Great War supplied coal from Spitzbergen to the factories in Petersburg. After the Bolshevik revolution of November, 1917, he returned to his work in the Arctic regions. Acting for the Russian Academy of Science and with the support of the Supreme Economic Council in Moscow, he organized a number of scientific expeditions on a large scale, with the cooperation of a large number of leading experts and minerologists.
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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.
