Passover, Alexander
PASSOVER, ALEXANDER
PASSOVER, ALEXANDER (1840–1910), Russian jurist. The son of an army surgeon, Passover was born in Uman, Ukraine, and graduated from Moscow University in 1861. He was denied a professorship because of his refusal to renounce Judaism, and became a prosecutor's secretary at the Moscow District Court. Passover was admitted to the Odessa bar in 1871 and after the Odessa pogrom of that year was one of several Jewish lawyers who represented the victims in court proceedings against the perpetrators. From 1874 he practiced in St. Petersburg, where he founded a seminary for law students and where he acquired a reputation as an outstanding jurist and an authority on Russian and foreign law. His advice on civil-law matters was sought by public bodies and his interpretations of judicial rulings in Russian legal journals were sometimes adopted by the Supreme Court. For some years, he sat on the board of the St. Petersburg Bar Association, but resigned in 1889 when the board gave the Ministry of Justice statistics on Jews in the legal profession.
Passover was an active figure in the Jewish community and initiated research projects on the economic situation of the Jews in Russia. He bequeathed his large library, containing a huge amount of anti-Jewish literature, to the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences.
bibliography:
S. Ginsburg, Amolike Peterburg (1944), 101–10; Russian Jewry 1860–1917 (1966), index.
[David Bar-Rav-Hay]