Gelman Yakov (1880-1950)

Gelman (Hellmann) Yakov (Jakov) (1880, Talsi – 1950, Argentina) – journalist, public figure, and one of the leaders of the Labour Zionist movement in Latvia.

Yakov Gelman studied at a yeshiva in Lithuania. In 1897, he moved to Germany, where he studied at the universities of Marburg (a student of Hermann Cohen) and Bern until 1910, earning a doctorate in philosophy.

Between 1904 and 1906, he was a member of the Socialist Revolutionary Party (SRs). In the Zionist movement, he initially supported territorialism, including the project for Jewish settlement in Uganda. During the First World War, he lived in Moscow. In 1919, he returned to Latvia and joined the Tseirei Zion party. With the formation of the United Party of Socialist Zionists of Latvia (UPSZL), he became a member of its Central Committee.

He served on the Executive Committee of the World Zionist Organisation and the Central Committee of the Keren Hayesod Zionist Fund in Latvia. He took part in international Zionist events, including sessions of the WZO Executive and global conferences.

Yakov Gelman was elected to the Constituent Assembly on the Tseirei Zion list, working on legislative and social committees. In June 1920, he proposed a section on minority rights for inclusion in the draft Constitution (Satversme), advocating for national minorities’ right to elect their own legal institutions (“parliament”, “administration”) to manage education, culture, and other areas of community life—though this proposal was not adopted. He advocated for the use of Yiddish in Latvian courts, defended the right to Sabbath observance for Jews, and argued that foreign nationals should be eligible to serve in religious community leadership.

As a member of the Constituent Assembly's commission investigating antisemitic incidents in Latgale, he exposed police and bureaucratic abuses and harassment of Jews.

Gelman was one of the most active lecturers for Tseirei Zion, specialising in topics such as Jewish settlement in Palestine, Zionist ideology, national autonomy, and education. He frequently criticised the Jewish department of the Ministry of Education for failing to defend cultural autonomy.

A proponent of a democratic and secular Jewish community, he participated in events held by Riga’s national student association and was involved in organisations such as Hechaver (“Comrade”) and Ganicauts (“Spark”). He also collaborated with organisations outside Tseirei Zion’s ideological circle, such as lecturing on “The National Movements of the Middle East” at the Histadrut HaTzionit people’s university.

Yakov Gelman was a prominent journalist. In May 1920, he became editor of the newspaper Dos Folk (“The People”) and contributed to and edited other publications, becoming, from 1927, one of the publishers of Frimorgn.

Following the 15 May 1934 coup in Latvia, Gelman, a vocal critic of Kārlis Ulmanis’s regime, left for Warsaw, where he worked with the left-wing Zionist press. Until 1936, he was the editor-in-chief of Dos Naye Wort, the official publication of Poalei Zion in Warsaw.

In 1939, Yakov Gelman participated in the 21st Zionist Congress and later that year emigrated to Argentina as a representative of the World Jewish Congress. There, he held leadership positions in Jewish organisations and contributed to the Jewish Newspaper (Idiše Cajtung).