Hillel Seidman (1915–1995)

Hillel Seidman was born in Buczacz, Galicia (present-day Poland) and in his youth studied with Rabbi David Menahem Manish Babad, rabbi of Tarnopol. He earned a doctorate in philosophy and letters from the University of Warsaw in 1930.
In Warsaw, he served as a member of the municipal council. He wrote for the daily Yiddish newspaper Moment, and also wrote journalism in Polish.

In 1937, he was appointed the official archivist of the Warsaw Jewish community, and continued to occupy this position in the Warsaw Ghetto in World War II. Shortly before the start of the 1943 Ghetto Uprising, for which he had been preparing, Dr. Seidman was arrested by the Gestapo and imprisoned. Later he was transferred to camps in France along with other Jews who, like him, had obtained foreign citizenship papers. He was held there until the liberation of France in 1944.
In 1946, he came to the USA, where he married Sara Abraham, the daughter of a prominent Romanian rabbinical family. They lived for about two years in Jerusalem, where he served as director general of the Israeli Ministry of Welfare. The Warsaw Ghetto Diaries of Hillel Seidman was published in both Hebrew and Yiddish after the war, and in English translation in 1997.

He contributed to the religious Jewish press in the USA and Israel, as well as to other Jewish papers in Hebrew, Yiddish and English. For some years, he also published a Yiddish weekly of his own in New York City, Di Yiddish Voch. He published books in Hebrew, Yiddish and English, including Festival of Joy (1965), The Glory of the Jewish Holidays (1969), United Nations: Perfidy and Perversion (1982), about Kurt Waldheim, and Menachem Begin: His Life and Legacy (1990).