WECHSLER, MAX

WECHSLER, MAX (pseudonyms: Germanicus ; I.H. Vaˇleanu ; Ieşau ; 1870–1917), Marxist theoretician and leading member of the general and Jewish socialist movement in Romania. In the 1890s he was among the founders of the first independent Jewish socialist society, which was formed in *Jassy under the name of *Lumina. Wechsler fought against the refusal of the Romanian Social-Democratic Party to conduct a special campaign for the emancipation of the Jews. He was among the signatories to the memorandum of the society to the Fourth Congress of the Second International in London (1896). Wechsler was one of the editors of the society's organs in Romanian (Lumina) and Yiddish (Der Veker). He rejected the demand for assimilation and conversion as a condition for the civic emancipation of the Jews. After the establishment of the new Social-Democratic Party, a few years before World War i, Wechsler joined its ranks. In May 1917 he was accused by revolutionary soldiers of complicity in the liberation of the party's leader, his friend Christian Rakovski (the future president of Soviet Ukraine). He was imprisoned by the Romanian military authorities and put to death.

bibliography:

J. Kisman, Shtudyes tsu der Geshikhte fun Rumenishe Yidn in 19-tn un Onheyb 20-tn Yorhundert (1944), index; I. Popescu-Puţuri et al. (eds.), Presa muncitoreascaˇ si socialistaˇ din Rominia, 2 vols. (1964–66); indexes; S. Bernstein, Die Judenpolitik der rumaenischen Regierung (1918), 185–7.

[Moshe Mishkinsky]