Poverman Ilya Moiseevich (1899)

Poverman (Powermann) Ilya Moiseevich (December 29, 1899, Mogilev-Podolsk, Vinnytsia region) — engineer.

Until 1915 Ilya Poverman lived and studied in his native city. Due to the proximity of Mogilev-Podolsk to areas of military operations against the Austrian army in 1915, he was transferred to a school in Ryazan. In 1917 he completed his secondary education and was awarded a gold medal.

In 1924, he received higher education, graduating with distinction from the Kyiv Polytechnic Institute with a degree in electrical engineering. From 1924 to 1927 he worked as an engineer at municipal electrical enterprises in Kyiv. From 1927 to 1931 he worked at Soviet trade missions abroad — in Germany (1927, engineer of the Export Administration) and in the United States (1928–1931, engineer of the electrical department and subsequently of the Energy Center).

In 1928, in the United States, he met his cousin Gertruda Shapiro (1900–1978), who had emigrated to the United States from Poland with her parents in the 1920s. Their marriage was registered in 1929, and in 1931, one month after the birth of their son Evgenii, he was recalled to the USSR. His wife later accepted Soviet citizenship and moved to the Soviet Union in 1935.

During the war, he was sent by the Teploproekt Institute to Novosibirsk as head of a design team. Subsequently he supervised the restoration of power plants destroyed during the war: the Voronezh State District Power Station (GRES) in 1943, the Mariupol Thermal Power Plant (TPP) in 1944, and Minsk TPP-2 in 1945. In the summer of 1945 he was assigned to the Soviet occupation zone of Germany and, for carrying out a special assignment, was commended by Order of the Commander-in-Chief No. 159 of May 23, 1946. In 1945–1946 he worked in the Soviet zone of Germany.

From 1931 to 1951 he served as senior engineer, sector head, and department head at the Leningrad branch of the Teploproekt Institute. From 1952 to 1976 he worked at the Riga branch of the Teploproekt Institute as acting chief engineer, head of the technical department, and chief specialist. From 1976 he was retired due to old age.

He was awarded two certificates of honour from the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the Latvian SSR and the medals “For Labour Distinction,” “For Valiant Labour in Commemoration of the 100th Anniversary of the Birth of V. I. Lenin,” “30 Years of Victory over Germany in the Great Patriotic War 1941–1945,” “For Valiant Labour in the Great Patriotic War 1941–1945,” and “Veteran of Labour.”

His son, Evgeny Poverman (born 1931), after Poverman’s transfer to Riga, remained to live and work in Leningrad.

In 1978 Ilya Poverman planned to move to Israel to join his maternal cousin, Sofia Joffe (née Olomutskaya) (born 1916), a native of Warsaw who had been imprisoned in the Warsaw Ghetto, from which she escaped to Palestine, where she subsequently lived and worked in Israel.

Family:

Gertruda Poverman (née Shapiro) (1900–1978) — wife
Evgeny Poverman (1931) — son
Moisei Poverman (1875–1945) — father
Tsetsiliya Poverman (1882–1937) — mother
Naum Poverman (1901–1943) — brother
Raisa Zhadanovskaya (née Potashinskaya) (1903) — sister
Lidiya Katz (née Poverman) (1909) — sister
Sofia Joffe (née Olomutskaya) (1916) — cousin