Buchmil, Joshua Heshel
BUCHMIL, JOSHUA HESHEL
BUCHMIL, JOSHUA HESHEL (1869–1938), Zionist leader. He was born in Ostrog, Volhynia, and from 1896 to 1903 studied agriculture and law at the University of Montpellier (France), where he was a member of the Zionist student organization, Atidot Israel. In 1896 Herzl assigned him the task of persuading the Ḥovevei Zion of Russia to participate in the First Zionist Congress, and he succeeded in this, visiting cities and villages in the south of Russia and in Lithuania. A militant opponent of the *Uganda Scheme, Buchmil was a member of the *Democratic Fraction of the Zionist Organization and one of its leading spokesmen. In 1906 he was sent by the *Odessa Committee of the Ḥovevei Zion to Ereẓ Israel to study the economic and legal aspects of Jewish colonization there. After the Revolution of 1917, he joined the Central Zionist Committee of Russia. In 1921 he left for Poland and in 1923 went to Ereẓ Israel where he worked for *Keren Hayesod. He published articles on current topics in the Zionist press in Russian, French, and Yiddish and also wrote Problèmes de la renaissance juive (1936), with a biographical essay by Avraham Elmaleh.
bibliography:
Tidhar, 9 (1958), 3287–89; I. Klausner, Mi-Katoviẓ ad Basel 1890–97, 3 (1965), index.
[Yehuda Slutsky]