Galant, Eliahu (Ilya) Vladimirovich
GALANT, ELIAHU (Ilya) VLADIMIROVICH
GALANT, ELIAHU (Ilya ) VLADIMIROVICH (1868–after 1929), historian of Ukrainian Jewry. Galant, who was born in Nezhin, Ukraine, taught Jewish religion in high schools in Kiev. His studies of the persecution of Ukrainian Jewry from the 17th to the 19th centuries, particularly the blood-libels charged against them, appeared in Yevreyskaya Starina and other Russian-Jewish papers. In 1919 Galant was associated with the establishment of a Jewish Historical-Archeographical Commission, known as the "Galant Commission," founded under the auspices of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences. The commission's task was to conduct research on the history of Ukrainian Jewry based on government archival material, which was not accessible under the czarist regime. The commission's work was interrupted by the ensuing civil war and it was not revived until 1924 with Galant as secretary. He edited the first two volumes of its proceedings, Zbirnyk prats Zhydivskoy istorychno-arkheografichnoy komisiyi (1928–29). Shortly afterward, Galant became suspect to the *Yevsektsia, which criticized his work, and was forced to discontinue his scholarly activities in 1929.
bibliography:
A. Greenbaum, Jewish Scholarship in Soviet Russia 1918–41 (1959), passim; B.A. Dinur, Bi-Ymei Milḥamah u-Mahpekhah (1960), 393–7.
[Yehuda Slutsky]