Dr. Isaac Steinberg, founder and secretary general of the Freeland League for Jewish Territorial Colonization, author, editor and one-time member of the Bolshevik Government, died here yesterday. He was 68.
Born in Dvinsk, Russia, and sentenced by the Czarist regime to Siberian exile for revolutionary activities as a student, Dr. Steinberg was allowed to go to Germany where he completed his law education at Heidelberg University. He became a theorist and writer for the Social Revolutionary Party and, after the Bolshevik Revolution, became Commissar of Justice in Lenin’s first government. He soon fell before fleeing to Germany in 1923. He was a strictly Orthodox Jew and observed Jewish religious rituals even when be served in the Lenin government.
Until the rise of Hitlerism, Dr. Steinberg remained in Germany writing books and a prize-winning play on Communism. In 1933 he fled to England where he began working in behalf of Jewish refugees from the Nazis. He founded the Freeland League, whose objective was the agricultural resettlement of Jews in lands outside Palestine. He spent six years in Australia working on plans for Jewish colonization. In 1933 he published “In the Workshop of the Revolution.” Dr. Steinberg also edited bi-monthly magazines in English and Yiddish.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
