Boris Efimov, One of World’s Oldest Jews, Passes Away at 108

Chabad.org ^ | Oct. 7, 2008

[Alouette]

Caricaturist Boris Efimov, whose drawings during World War II helped stoke morale among Russian troops in the fight against Nazi Germany, died last week in Moscow. One of the world’s oldest Jews, he passed away just shy of his 109th birthday.

Born Boris Fridland in Kiev, Ukraine, in 1899, Efimov was just a toddler when his family moved to Bialystok in present-day Poland. He studied art and by the time he moved to Moscow in the 1920s, his drawings were attracting the attention of influential politicians. But it was his depictions of German troops and Nazi leader Adolf Hitler that earned him both praise at home and a death sentence abroad if captured by Nazi forces.

He continued etching political cartoons until the early 1980s, and in the process recied two Soviet State Prizes. He was named People’s Painter of the USSR in 1967.

Efimov underwent a spiritual awakening at the age of 100 when he met Chabad-Lubavitch Rabbi Berel Lazar, the chief rabbi of Russia.

“It took a 100 [years] … to learn about Judaism and even put on tefillin,” he related in Yiddish at the Beit Menachem Chabad-Lubavitch Marina Roshtza synagogue in Moscow on occasion of his 107th birthday.

At the party, which the Jewish community threw in his honor, he told of his experience touring the concentration camp in Majdanek, Poland, with the Russian troops who liberated it in the waning days of the war.

“I will never forget the moment that I arrived at the death camps,” he said. “As I was walking around the camp, I came to a women’s bunk. I don’t know what pulled me there, but I went to one of the beds and put my hand under the mat, and happened to come across a machzor for Yom Kippur.”

The holiday prayer book, said Efimov, was “what kept me connected to Judaism.”

[Alouette]

FReepMail to be added or removed from this pro-Israel/Judaic/Russian Jewry ping list.

Warning! This is a high-volume ping list.

[cripplecreek]

A Jew that old should automatically be renamed Moses.

[Alouette]

Don’t you mean Methuselah?

[cripplecreek]

Nah, he would have to hit at least 400 for that.

[Our man in washington]

So this man dodged pogroms, World War I, Stalin’s killings, the Soviet famines, the Holocaust,and World War II. Nobody defeats death in the end, but that was one good fight!

[JimKalb]

Not a completely good fight. His political caricatures made him Stalin’s favorite artist, and if you look up his work you’ll see what that means. Some of them were indeed about Nazis but there were other people Stalin didn’t like.

[Polybius]

So this man dodged pogroms, World War I, Stalin’s killings, the Soviet famines, ...

Boris Efimov was firmly in the camp of those who were in Stalin's good graces. That makes it easy to avoid the Stalin killings and the Soviet famines as he was in the camp of those who were perpetrating those atrocities.

Here are some other Boris Efimov cartoons.

This is how he depicted America:

This is how he lumped in the West and even the Pope in the same group as the Japanese and the Nazis in 1932:

This is how he depicted Stalin in 1933:

While kulaks and Ukranians were dying by the millions as a result of Stalin's actions, Stalin was keeping Boris Efimov well fed so that Efimov could glorify him.

As the years passed, and poltics changed, this is how he depicted Stalin in 2007:

Boris Efimov was a political whore. Nothing more. Nothing less.

[Our man in washington]

Okay, that may have been my stupidest post ever on FR. Thanks for correcting me. That’s what I get for scanning the article and not reading closely.