Jakub Egit

Jakub (Jacob) Egit (1908- ) was a Zionist leader and Soviet soldier. In 1945 Egit began an experiment to relocate 50,000 Jews in the town of Dzierżoniów (formerly Reichenbach a recovered territory from the Third Reich) near Wrocław in Silesia, Poland. Initially Egit was supported by the communists in his endeavour to ensure that "here in this land, which Germans had cultivated for so many years, the Jews could exact retribution and justice by making the former German territory a Jewish settlement". Egit's plan to set up a Yishuv went well for three years. Starting with a small group of Kazettlers - KZ (Concetration Camp) survivors - the ''Yishuv'' quickly grew to encompass schools, hospitals, kibbutzim, orphanages and a book publishers in Wrocław. It ended, however, in 1948 when the communists changed their policy, Egit was put in jail and the majority of Dzierżoniów's citizens emigrated to Israel. From 1950 Egit was editor in Warsaw of 'J'idysz Buch. Due to continued harrassment Egit emigrated to Canada in 1957 where he became a prominant member of Canada's Jewish community. In 1991 he published his autobiography Grand Illusion (Toronto: Lugus)

More recently Egit has become a target for Polish Catholic anti-Semitic revisionists who deny the holocaust and seek to source the rise of communism to a Jewish conspiracy.

Sources

Microcosm: Portrait of a Central European City Norman Davies and Roger Moorhouse.

Grand Illusion Jacob Egit