Communists attacking the Bund during the Thirties

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Chana Szlang Gonshor, born in 1919 in Warsaw, remembers an attack by Jewish communists on the Medem Sanatorium, a Bund-run educational and clinical facility for children and youth at risk for tuberculosis. This is a piece of Polish history. The tensions, confrontations and battles between the Jewish communists of the Communist Party of Poland (Polish: Komunistyczna Partia Polski, KPP) on one side and the Jewish socialists of the Bund on the other side. The Bund sometimes was supported by Polish socialist workers of the PPS (Polska Partia Socjalistyczna,) in their confrontations with the communists and National Democrats (Endecja).




Polish Jewish children in the Medem Sanatorium in Międzeszyn, Poland

The Medem Sanatorium Educational and clinical facility for children and young adults at risk for tuberculosis. This sanatorium, which functioned in Międzeszyn near Warsaw between 1926 and 1942, was named after Bundist leader Vladimir Medem (1879–1923), and was the best-known establishment of the Bund and of TSYSHO (the Central Yiddish School Organization) in Poland. The clinic was funded by donations from Jewish unions in Poland and American Jewish workers’ organizations. Until 1935, public money (from municipal authorities and health insurers) also covered some of the costs. Children generally stayed for two to six months, and the waiting list for admission was long. Some children remained for more than a year, and quite a few returned for further treatment. The sanatorium accommodated an average of 140 children during the winter and about 350 in summer. After the Germans invaded Poland, the Medem Sanatorium was first shut down and then looted in September 1939. The Bund’s underground organization decided to reopen the clinic a few months later. Despite rapid deterioration in the facility’s conditions, the teachers nonetheless remained true to the educational concepts of the TSYSHO and continued to admit children; for example, 130 pupils arrived from a Polish-language Jewish orphanage. The children and remaining staff were deported to Treblinka on 22 August 1942.


A part of the movie de Mir Kumen On (1936) from Aleksander Ford about the Bund 'Medem Sanatorium' Educational and clinical facility for children and young adults at risk for tuberculosis in Międzeszyn near Warsaw. It is hard to watch the film if your realise that six years later these children were killed in Treblinka.

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Chana Szlang Gonshor, born in 1919 in Warsaw, describes the Medem Sanatorium, a Bund-run educational and clinical facility for children and youth at risk for tuberculosis.

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Chana Szlang Gonshor, born in 1919 in Warsaw, describes her childhood home in Warsaw and the activities of Jewish youth organizations that were a haven to impoverished children.

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The three core values of the Bund were:

- 1) Socialism; the solidarity of, with and between Polish Jewish workers and Polish workers in Poland.

- 2) Yiddishkayt (Jewishness in the sense of Jewish culture, Yiddish language and Jewish identity), preserving the Polish Jewish idenity due to the Yiddish language of the Ashkenazi Polish Jews.

The Jewish Labour Bund, while not initially interested in the Yiddish per se as anything more than a vehicle to exhort the masses of Jewish workers in Eastern Europe, soon saw the language and the larger Yiddish culture as a value and promoted the use of Yiddish as a Jewish national language in its own right;[1] to some extent, the promotion of Yiddish was part and parcel of the Bund's opposition to the Zionist movement, and its project of reviving Hebrew.

- 3) Doikayt: The concept of Doikayt (lit. "hereness", Yiddish = do-ikayt, do'ikayt; German = Da-keit; French = "ici-té") was central to the Bundist ideology, expressing its focus on solving the challenges confronting Jews in the country in which they lived, versus the "thereness" of the Zionist movement, which posited the necessity of an independent Jewish polity in its ancestral homeland, i.e., the Land of Israel, to secure Jewish life.

The word ‘doikayt’, meaning ‘hereness’ in Yiddish, was the slogan of East-European Jewish socialists- we must struggle, with feet firmly planted where we stand, for the liberation of ourselves and all other people.



Arnold Zable – author, human rights activist and son of Yiddish-speaking immigrants – talks about the influence Bundism and Yiddish had on his life. He explains how this influenced his later career and activism.

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