Vladimir Davidovich Medem

General Jewish Labour Bund Social democracy 1879.7.30.–1923.1.9. ○ Died of illness

Bund ideologue who argued for federation at the Second Congress

Born in Libau, the son of an army doctor who had converted from Judaism to Lutheranism, he studied at a Minsk gymnasium and at Kiev University. Expelled in 1899 for a student strike and sent to Minsk, he joined the General Jewish Labour Bund in spring 1900; he learned Yiddish only at twenty-two. Arrested in 1901, he escaped abroad and studied in Bern, joined the Bund's Foreign Committee in 1903 and represented the Bund that year at the Second Congress of the RSDLP, which he left with the other Bund delegates when the congress rejected the federal principle. He was elected to the Bund Central Committee in 1906 and sat in the presidium of the party's Fifth Congress in 1907. In 1915 to 1920 he led the Bund in Poland and headed its secular Yiddish schooling, but, opposing Bolshevism, found himself isolated; he emigrated to the United States in 1921 and died of illness in New York in 1923.