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2,144 records
Khvol’son, Daniil Avraamovich
(1819–1911), orientalist. Daniil Khvol’son was born in Vilna. He received a traditional rabbinical education but then studied French, German, and Russian. To complement his traditional education, he moved to Riga. There,…
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Kielce
(Yid., Kielts), city in southeastern Poland. Until the end of the eighteenth century, Kielce belonged to the bishops of Kraków, who forbade Jews to settle there. The partitions of Poland brought the city under Russian ru…
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Kiev
(Ukr., Kyiv; classical Heb., Kiyov), capital of Ukraine. Jewish settlement in Kiev dates to the first years of the city, in the ninth century, when it was the capital of Kievan Rus’ and an important stop on the trading r…
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Kikoin, Isaak Konstantinovich
(1908–1984), physicist; one of the creators of the Soviet atomic bomb. Isaak Konstantinovich (patronymic originally Kushelevich) Kikoin was born into the family of a teacher. His father had both an excellent traditional …
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Killing Centers
Camps created by the Nazis (at Auschwitz-Birkenau, Bełżec, Sobibór, Treblinka, Majdanek, and Chełmno) to murder Jews. As the slaughter of Jews in the Soviet Union got underway in the summer of 1941, primarily by firing s…
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Kipnis, Itsik
(1896–1974), Yiddish fiction writer. Itsik Kipnis was born into a family of craftsmen in Sloveshne, Ukraine. As a child, he studied at heder and with private teachers; he later worked with his father as a tanner. In 1920…
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Kipnis, Menakhem
(1878–1942), singer, critic, photographer, and ethnographer of Yiddish song. Born in Uzhmir, Volhynia, Menakhem Kipnis was a cantor’s son who entered the world of Jewish music at a young age. He served as a cantor’s assi…
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Kisch, Alexander
(1848–1917), rabbi, educator, and publicist. Alexander Kisch came from an established family in Prague, where his father, Joseph Kisch, was director of the first modern private school in the city’s Jewish quarter. Beginn…
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Kisch, Egon Erwin
(1885–1948), journalist, writer, and political activist. The twentieth-century image of the reporter as adventurer-hero is deeply indebted to the self-fashioning of the “roving reporter,” as Kisch called himself in the t…
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Kisch, Guido
(1889–1985), lawyer and historian. Guido Kisch (son of Rabbi Alexander Kisch and an older brother to noted medical scholar Bruno Kisch) was born in Prague; he studied law at the German university there and received his h…
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Kishinev
Capital city of the Republic of Moldova. From the beginning of the sixteenth century, Kishinev (officially, Chişinău; Yid., Keshenev) was in the principality of Moldova (Moldavia), which was annexed to the Russian Empire…
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Kiss, József
(1843–1921), poet and editor. József Kiss was born in Mezőcsát; both his grandfathers had moved to Hungary from Lithuania. His father, István Klein, was a poor merchant who sent his son to study in a yeshiva. Kiss, howev…
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Klaczko, Julian
(1825–1906), political activist and journalist. Julian Klaczko was born to a wealthy merchant family in Vilna. Influenced by his father’s Haskalah ideology, he was educated in both Hebrew and Polish, and was tutored by S…
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Klaipėda
Port city on Lithuania’s western border with Germany. After World War I, Klaipėda (Ger., Memel) and its surrounding district were severed from Prussia by the Treaty of Versailles. In 1923, Lithuania annexed the entire ar…
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Klausner, Yosef
(1874–1958), critic, researcher, and editor. Yosef Klausner was born in Olkeniki, near Vilna. In 1885, his family moved to Odessa and he became involved in the activities of the Ḥibat Tsiyon movement and in organizations…
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Kleinbaum, Moyshe
(1909–1972), Zionist leader and publicist. Moyshe Kleinbaum (Sneh) was born in Radzyn Podlaski, Poland, to a traditional Zionist family. In 1935, he graduated as a physician from the University of Warsaw. During his coll…
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Klemperer, Gutmann
(1815–1882), rabbi, historian, and essayist. Gutmann (Gumpel) Klemperer was born into a family that had been in Prague for several generations. His father was a leader of the Zigeuner Synagogue, and his mother stemmed fr…
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Kletskin, Boris Arkadevich
(1875–1937), Yiddish publisher. Born in Horodishche (now in Belarus), Boris Kletskin and his family moved to Vilna, the city with which his name would thereafter be associated. An only child of wealthy parents, he receiv…
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Kleynkunst
A genre of Yiddish performance, kleynkunst (“little art”; also known as minyatur teater [miniature theater]) developed in the early twentieth century, primarily under the influence of Russian and Polish literary cabaret.…
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Kloyz
The Yiddish term kloyz (pl., kloyzn) is apparently derived from the Latin claustrum or clausum, which refers to a building or closed complex of structures connected to a monastery. The term first appeared in Ashkenazic c…
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