Zilberman (Silbermann) David (1934, Preiļi) — engineer, public figure.
After evacuation during the war, David Zilberman’s family returned to Preiļi. In 1957, he graduated from Tallinn Polytechnic Institute. He worked at the Mangali Shipyard in Riga. In 1971, he emigrated to Israel, where he worked at the shipyard in Haifa. In 1977, he moved to the United States, settling in New York, where he worked as an independent licensed consulting engineer.
Zilberman was one of the long-term refuseniks who, from the 1960s onwards, fought for the right of Soviet Jews to emigrate to Israel. He was subjected to persecution by the Soviet authorities, including surveillance, searches, and interrogations by the KGB. He was among the organisers of the protest action by Riga Jews in Moscow at the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR and the USSR Ministry of Internal Affairs on 10–11 March 1971, when 56 Riga Jews and about 100 Jews from other Soviet cities declared a hunger strike, demanding permission to emigrate to Israel. The protest attracted wide attention in the West, and under international pressure the Soviet authorities were forced to concede and issue exit permits to several thousand Jews, including Zilberman.
From the early 1960s onwards, David Zilberman collected and published numerous memoirs of former ghetto and concentration camp inmates, as well as materials concerning the struggle for emigration. In 1971, the Israeli journal HaUma published his Hebrew-language essay The Story of Two Days. Diary of a Demonstrator, describing the protest action in Moscow. A year later, the essay was published in English in the American journal American Zionist. In 1973, Zilberman published, in his own literary rendering, the memoirs of former Riga ghetto inmate Frida Michelson, I Survived Rumbula (later published in Yiddish and English; a second Russian edition appeared in Riga in 2005). He authored a book about the former Riga resident, the painter Iosif Kuzkovsky (Tel Aviv, 1975), and was the compiler of the collection of memoirs of former ghetto and concentration camp inmates And You Saw It. He also wrote Like a Star in the Dark: Memories of Žanis (Zhanis) Lipke. In addition, he recorded and published the testimony of Ella Medalie, who escaped execution at Rumbula (The Right to Life), and collected materials about rescuers of Jews in Preiļi.
In August 2004, a Holocaust memorial in Preiļi was unveiled at his initiative and with his personal financial support.
Works: And You Saw It, New York, 1989; Riga, 2006. Like a Star in the Dark: Memories of Janis (Zhanis) Lipke, Riga, 2005 (in Latvian); 2007 (in English). The Right to Life, Riga, 2006.