Dembo, Isaac

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DEMBO, ISAAC

DEMBO, ISAAC (1846–1906), physician and communal worker, born in Ponevezh, Lithuania. He graduated from the military academy of medicine in 1870 and volunteered as a doctor in the Russian-Turkish War of 1877. Subsequently Dembo undertook a campaign to defend Jewish ritual slaughter against allegations of cruelty made by antisemites in Russia and abroad. He took part in a conference of the Russian Association for the Protection of Animals in 1891. To prove his point, Dembo also carried out experiments in Russia in the laboratory of the Russian physiologist I. Pavlov, and abroad in the laboratories of Du Bois-Reymond, Hoppe-Seyler, and Munk, among others, as well as in slaughterhouses. His Das Schaechten was translated into English (The Jewish Method of Slaughter, 1894), French, and Hebrew.