The General Jewish Workers’ Bund

Abstract

The General Jewish Workers’ Bund, founded illegally, in Vilna, in 1897, ultimately became a significant political movement among Jews living in the tsarist empire. The Bund played a major role in organizing the Russian Social Democratic Workers’ Party, created self-defense groups to combat antisemitic violence, and was heavily involved in combating tsarism. It was characterized by its sympathy for Marxism, its advocacy of national cultural autonomy for Russian Jewry, and its critique of Zionism. The Bund opposed Lenin’s ideas on party organization from the beginning of the 20th century onward. This opposition presaged the bitter disagreements between leading Bundists on the one hand and the Bolshevik Party on the other following the overthrow of the Provisional Revolutionary government in October 1917. But the Bund ultimately split over its relationship to Bolshevism into two, opposing, organizations—the Kombund (eventually absorbed into the Communist Party) and the Social Democratic Bund (which was later hounded out of the Soviet Union). In the Second Polish Republic, the Bund succeeded in attracting considerable support, despite obstacles, in many major cities (and in specific, smaller, communities with significant Jewish populations). It published numerous periodicals, organized trade unions, fostered a constellation of organizations devoted to children, youth, women, physical education, and education, supported secular, Yiddish language, cultural institutions, and ran electoral campaigns. By the late 1930s, the Bund was regularly winning seats on municipal councils and in Jewish communal elections in important Jewish communities in Poland, including Warsaw, Lodz, Vilna, Bialystok, and Lublin. The invasion of Poland, in 1939, by both Germany and the USSR, put an end to the Bund’s heyday. In the eastern portions of what had been the Polish Republic, Bundist leaders were arrested by the Soviet secret police. Some died or were executed while being held prisoner in the USSR. In Nazi-occupied Poland, Bundists generally suffered the same fate as did the rest of the Jewish population. Many Bundists in Nazi-occupied Poland were murdered. Others died of hunger or disease. A modest number of Bundists survived the Second World War, and attempted to reestablish the Bund in postwar Poland. Once, however, Poland became a Communist state, the Polish Bund was liquidated. Bundist organizations, made up all but exclusively of emigres and refugees, operated in the decades following the end of the Second World War in many countries around the world. Few of these organizations, however, survived the passing of the immigrant generation.