JUDAICA - Wisdom In Torah

dropkin, celia
join officially the Zionist movement. He went to Ereẓ Israel
in 1922. The Jewish population of Drogobych totaled 1,924
in 1765, 2,492 in 1812, 8,055 in 1865, 8,683 in 1900, and 11,833
(about 44% of the total population) in 1921.
[Nathan Michael Gelber]
Holocaust and Postwar Periods
When World War II broke out, the town with its 17,000 Jews
came under Soviet occupation. The authorities arrested the
Zionist leaders and closed the Hebrew schools. Jewish refugees
from western Poland found shelter in Drogobych, but
most of them were deported to the Soviet interior. The Germans
entered Drogobych on June 30, 1941, and immediately
staged a pogrom with the help of the local Polish and Ukrainian
population. About 400 Jews were brutally murdered
outside the courthouse and at the Jewish cemetery. Another
300 were executed in the nearby Bronice forest in November.
In March 1942 some 2,000 Jews were sent to the *Belzec extermination
camp. The second mass deportation took place
on August 8, with the dispatch of 2,500 Jews to the same destination,
while another 600 were shot in the town itself. The
ghetto was established in September. The remaining 9,000
Jews, some of whom were refugees from the nearby villages,
were crowded into it. Toward the end of October an additional
group consisting of 2,300 Jews was sent to Belzec, and
200 hospital patients were murdered. The surviving Jews began
building hideouts or sought shelter in the nearby forest.
However, the Germans thwarted their efforts by continuing
the Aktion for the whole month of November 1942 and by ordering
the death sentence for all non-Jews caught sheltering
Jews. For a while the process of extermination did not affect
those Jews conscripted for forced labor in the local petroleum
industries. The Bronice forest became a mass grave for
the Jews of Drogobych and vicinity, including all members of
the Judenrat. On February 15, 1943, 450 were executed there,
including 300 women. In March 800 from the labor camps
were murdered. The remnants of the Jewish community tried
to save themselves by hiding or by escaping to Hungary via
the Carpathian Mountains, while a few tried to obtain “Aryan”
papers. When the Soviet army entered Drogobych in August
1944, some 400 Jews were still alive.
After the war, Drogobych was ceded to the Ukrainian
S.S.R., and most of the Jews left for Poland in transit to Israel
and other countries.
[Aharon Weiss]
Bibliography: N.M. Gelber (ed.), Sefer Zikkaron le-Drohobich,
Boryslav ve-Hasevivah (1959); M. Balaban, Z historji Żydów w
Polsce (1920), 129–46.
DROPKIN, CELIA (1887–1956), Yiddish poet. Born Zipporah
Levine in Bobruisk, Belorussia, daughter of a lumber
merchant, Dropkin was raised by her widowed mother. Taught
Jewish subjects by a rabbi’s wife, she graduated from the Novosybko
(Russian) gymnasium. She tutored in Warsaw, before
continuing her studies in Kiev. There, the Hebrew writer
Uri Nissan *Gnessin encouraged her writing of Russian po-
etry. Returning to Warsaw, then to Bobruisk, Dropkin married
Samuel Shmaye Dropkin in 1909. She and their first child
(born 1910) joined him in New York in 1912. Five of their six
children survived into adulthood. In New York, Dropkin
wrote Russian poems which she translated into Yiddish (1917)
and published in Di Naye Velt and Inzikh (1920). Throughout
the 1920s and 1930s, her works appeared in avant-garde publications
of Di *Yunge and the Inzikhistn: Onheyb, Poezye, and
Shriftn. Dropkin’s poems – notable for their explicit sexuality,
whether about love, motherhood, or death – earned her a reputation
as a leading woman poet. Her short stories and poems
also appeared in Abraham *Liessin’s *Tsukunft. Only a single
volume of Dropkin’s poems appeared during her lifetime: In
Heysn Vint (“In the Hot Wind,” 1935). Widowed in 1943, she
spent her last years painting in oils and water colors. Her last
published poem appeared in Tsukunft (April 1953).
Three years after Dropkin’s death, her children published
an expanded edition of her poetry, short stories, and paintings:
In Heysn Vint (1959) includes the poems of the 1935 edition,
as well as uncollected and previously unpublished poems,
selected by Sasha Dillon. Another poem, “Shvere Gedanken”
(“Heavy Thoughts”), was later discovered on a tape recording
and appeared in Yidishe Kultur (1990). Poems and stories
in English translation appeared in I. Howe and E. Greenberg
(eds.), A Treasury of Yiddish Poetry (1969); I. Howe et al.
(eds.), Penguin Book of Modern Yiddish Verse (1987); F. Forman
et al. (eds.), Found Treasures: Stories by Yiddish Women
Writers (1994); R. Whitman (ed.), Anthology of Modern Yiddish
Poetry (1995); J. Chametzky et al. (eds.), Jewish American
Literature: A Norton Anthology (2001); S. Bark (ed.), Beautiful
as the Moon, Radiant as the Stars: Jewish Women in Yiddish
Stories (2003).
Bibliography: LNYL, 2 (1958), 540–1; Rejzen, Leksikon, 1
(19262), 742–3; Y. Yeshurin, in: In Heysn Vint, Poems, Stories, and Pictures
(1959), 271–3; S. Dillon, in: ibid., 263–9; G. Rozier and V. Siman,
in: Dans le vent chaud: Bilingue yiddish-francais (1994); J. Hadda, in:
N. Sokoloff et al. (eds.), Gender and Text in Modern Hebrew and Yiddish
Literature (1992), 93–112; K. Hellerstein, in ibid., 113–43.
[Kathryn Hellerstein (2nd ed.)]
DROPSIE, MOSES AARON (1821–1905), U.S. attorney,
businessman, philanthropist, and patron of Jewish learning.
Dropsie was born in Philadelphia to a Dutch-Jewish immigrant
father and a Christian mother. He embraced Judaism at
the age of 14, and ultimately became a vigorous proponent of
traditional Judaism in America. Dropsie made his livelihood
in the jewelry business until he was 28, when he began the
study of law. He was admitted to the bar in 1851. Although his
practice was largely in business law, Dropsie became a scholar
in legal history and published a number of works on Roman
law, including one on the trial of Jesus. Dropsie invested very
early in streetcar ventures and became the president of two
traction companies. He served as chairman of the commission
that supervised the construction of the South Street bridge
across the Schuylkill River in 1870. An early organizer of the
24 ENCYCLOPAEDIA JUDAICA, Second Edition, Volume 6