12 Facts About Shmerke Kaczerginski

Shmaryahu "Shmerke" Kaczerginski was a Yiddish poet, musician, writer and cultural activist.

Shmerke Kaczerginski was killed in a plane crash in Argentina in 1954, at the age of 45.

Shmerke Kaczerginski was born on 28 October 1908 in Vilna, Russian Empire, to Volf and Alte Shmerke Kaczerginski.

Shmerke Kaczerginski was sent to the Talmud Torah for his education, where he was "a good scholar and even better comrade".

Shmerke Kaczerginski was responsible for organisational work and editing, along with writing "animated, sometimes incendiary verses" that were extremely popular with the group's audience.

Shmerke Kaczerginski managed to avoid capture until 1942 by posing as a deaf and mute beggar.

Finally identified as Jewish, Shmerke Kaczerginski was sent to the Vilna Ghetto, where he married Barbara Kaufman and returned to writing in order to improve morale for the inmates.

Shmerke Kaczerginski founded the Vilna Museum of Jewish Art and Culture, later known as the Vilna Jewish Museum, the first post-Holocaust Jewish museum in Europe, with some of the recovered materials.

Shmerke Kaczerginski had begun working as a of Jewish music in 1944, considering the partisan and ghetto songs to be "the martyrs' last will and testament to future generations" and worthy of preservation.

Shmerke Kaczerginski's friends numbered in the hundreds, perhaps in the thousands.

In 1954 during the festival of Passover, Shmerke Kaczerginski found himself lecturing in Mendoza; after local anti-communists swore to boycott his lecture, he extended his time there for an extra day, speaking to hundreds about his experience as a Ghetto fighter.

Shmerke Kaczerginski himself has become "largely anonymous", and is little known outside of Yiddish language circles despite the enduring popularity of many of his songs.