Michelsohn Dina (26 April 1907, Riga — 1941 (?), Tartu) — teacher, philologist.

Dina Michelsohn was born into the family of a Riga dentist and entrepreneur, Abraham Michelson. She graduated from a German secondary school in Riga and enrolled in the Riga Jewish Pedagogical Institute, where she studied until 1927. She then continued her education at the Faculty of Philosophy of the University of Hamburg, studying Semitic languages; she attended lectures in philosophy by Ernst Cassirer, in psychology by William Stern, and in Russian literature by Vladimir Propp.

After Hitler came to power, she was forced to leave Germany. In 1935 she enrolled at the University of Tartu, specializing in Jewish Studies under the supervision of Prof. L. Gulkowitsch. In the spring of 1940 she defended her master’s thesis, “Die Šelah im Alten Testament, sprachgeschichtlich untersucht.”

In the autumn of 1940, following the incorporation of Estonia into the USSR, all foreign-language institutes and the Department of Judaic Studies at the University of Tartu were closed. In 1940–1941 she taught Russian at the University of Tartu. After the German army entered Tartu, she, together with all the Jews of the city, was confined to the ghetto, where she perished.

Literature:

Eesti juutide katastroof 1941. Tallinn, 1994, p. 191;

Shor, T. “Jewish Women at the University of Tartu (1918–1940),” in Proceedings of the 8th Annual Interdisciplinary Conference on Jewish Studies, Part 1, Vol. 8. Moscow, 2001, pp. 96–107.