Bruck, Grigori

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BRUCK, GRIGORI

BRUCK, GRIGORI (Ẓevi Hirsch ; 1869–1922), Russian Zionist. He was born in Chernigov, Ukraine, graduated in 1893 as a physician from Kiev University, and worked as a doctor in Gomel. From his youth, he was a member of the Ḥovevei Zion and the Zionist movement, and at the Third Zionist Congress he was elected regional representative for Belorussia. In 1901 he became government-appointed rabbi in Vitebsk. In 1905 he was elected to the first Duma on the Constitutional Democratic (Kadet) Party ticket. When the Duma was dissolved, he was a signatory to the protest of the radical delegates (the Viborg Manifesto) and was arrested and removed from his official rabbinical post. Opposing the *Helsingfors Program (1906) which required the Zionists to act as a political party in the Diaspora, he retired from the Zionist leadership. During World War i he served as a doctor in the Russian Army. At the 1917 Russian Zionist Conference in Petrograd he again opposed the participation of Zionists as a party in the Russian Revolution. In 1920 he settled in Ereẓ Israel.

bibliography:

K.I. Silman (ed.), Z. Bruck. Alim le-Zikhrono (1929); Sefer Vitebsk (1957), 109–28.

[Yehuda Slutsky]