Baruch Charney Vladeck, acknowledged leader of Jewish laborites in america and influential member of the city council, died last evening in Mt. Sinai Hospital where he had been taken Friday after being stricken with coronary thrombosis in his home. He was 52 years old.
Statements of tribute came today from many of the organizations and persons with whom Mr. Vladeck had been associated in his active and varied career, including the Joint Distribution Committee, the Jewish Labor Committee, the American ORT Federation, Mayor F.H. LaGuardia, City Council President Newbold Morris and Senator Robert F. Wagner.
Funeral services will be held at 10 a.m. Wednesday from the Jewish Daily forward building, of which newspaper he was general manager for 20 years and which appeared today with a black-bordered front page. surviving him are his widow, Mrs. Clara Richman Vladeck; three children, William and Stephen Vladeck and Mrs. Norbert Bromberg; four brothers, Max, Charles, Samuel and Daniel Charney, the latter of whom is in Paris with a sister, Miss Miriam Charney.
Born in Dookorah, Minsk, Russia, Baruch Charney received a traditional Jewish education and early became active in the revolutionary liberal movement, for which he spent many of his youthful years in a czarist prison before immigrating to the united states in 1908. He had adopted the name Vladeck, a popular Russian name, for the purposes of his radical activities.
After an intensive education here, Mr. Vladeck joined the staff of the Forward in 1908 and ten years later became general manager. His political career began two years after his naturalization when he was elected to the board of Aldermen as one of its first socialist members. The early resolutions he sponsored — for city charter revision, low cost housing, etc — indicated the trend of his political thought.
Defeated for a third term as alderman in 1921, he was not active in politics until the formation of the american labor party, under whose banner he was elected to the city Council in 1937 and whose forces he led, for a time as leader of a coalition majority and later as minority leader. He attained a reputation in the council as a hard worker, a forthright and sometimes satiric speaker and sponsor of many progressive measures.
Mr. Vladeck’s interest in low-cost housing led him to participate as an officer in several housing projects, and in 1934 mayor Laguardia named him a member of the new York City Housing Authority. In Jewish philanthropic and social work, he helped to bring labor support to the joint distribution committee, of which he was a director; was a director of the HIAS Immigrant Bank and in 1932 was elected president of the American ORT Federation.
Perhaps his greatest significance in American Jewish life was as the spokesman and molder of the non-Zionist laborite viewpoint. chairman of the Jewish labor committee, which is said to represent unions with a total membership of 500,000, he was hostile to the Zionist philosophy, believing that Jews should fight their battle for survival as citizens of their respective countries. however, in later years he became interested in colonization in Palestine because of the concrete accomplishments of the colonists and the urgency of the refugee problem. He visited Palestine a year ago, and found much that he saw there to praise.
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.
