Bernstein-Kogan (Cohen), Jacob
BERNSTEIN-KOGAN (Cohen), JACOB
BERNSTEIN-KOGAN (Cohen), JACOB (1859–1929), Russian Zionist leader. Bernstein-Kogan, who was born in Kishinev, studied medicine in St. Petersburg and Dorpat. After the wave of pogroms in southern Russia in 1881, he devoted himself to Ḥibbat Zion and Zionism. As a delegate to the First Zionist Congress, he was elected to the Zionist Actions Committee. He administered an information center called the Zionist "post office," which informed Zionist branches in Russia, numbering about one thousand, of developments in the movement. He was a leading member and ideologist of the *Democratic Fraction (1901) and was one of the leaders of the Russian Zionist opposition to the *Uganda Scheme. Settling in Ereẓ Israel in 1907, he worked as a doctor in Lower Galilee and in Petaḥ Tikvah. He was a founder of the Medical Association of Ereẓ Israel (1908). Conflicts with the conservative settlers of Petaḥ Tikvah induced him to return to Kishinev in 1910. He moved to Ereẓ Israel again in 1925, but accepted a proposal of the *American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee to serve as a physician in the Jewish agricultural settlements in the Ukraine.
bibliography:
M. Bernstein-Cohen (ed.), Sefer Bernstein-Cohen (1946); I. Klausner, Oppoziẓyah le-Herzl (1960), index; D. Smilansky, Im Benei Dori (1942), 51–59; Tidhar, 1 (1947), 192–3; A.L. Jaffe (ed.), Sefer ha-Kongress (19502), 307–10; J. Yaari-Poleskin, Ḥolemim ve-Loḥamim (19643), 89–92.
[Yehdua Slutsky]