Zuckermann, Eliezer
ZUCKERMANN, ELIEZER
ZUCKERMANN, ELIEZER (1852–1887), pioneer Jewish socialist in Russia. Zuckermann came from a wealthy family of good lineage in Mogilev. When still a youth, he voluntarily taught needy children at the local talmud torah and began to contribute to the Hebrew periodicals, *Ha-Meliẓ and *Ha-Maggid. Influenced by Pavel *Axelrod, he became a socialist. In 1874 Zuckermann reached Vienna where he worked for a time in the printing press of * Ha-Shaḥar, which published his stories; he later stayed in a Russian-Jewish youth commune in Berlin. In 1877 he assisted A.S. *Liebermann in publishing *Ha-Emet. Zuckermann probably drafted the Russian manifesto issued by the Group of Jewish Socialists (Geneva, June 1880), calling upon Jewish Socialists to draw closer the Jewish masses and to propagate socialism in Yiddish. In the fall of 1879 he worked in St. Petersburg for the underground organ of the revolutionary organization Narodnaya Volya, but was arrested the following January and imprisoned in the fortress of Petropavlovsk. He was eventually sentenced to eight years' imprisonment and exile. After five years in a Siberian prison, Zuckermann was exiled to a remote village in the Yakutsk region, where he drowned himself.
bibliography:
E. Zuckermann, Kitvei (1940), incl. bibl.; Z. Kroll, ibid, 7–54; Deutsch, in: Zukunft (1916), 240–5.
[Yehuda Slutsky]