Anniversaries in Conflict: On the Centenary of the Jewish Socialist Labor Bund

ne hundred years ago, in the attic of a small house belonging to a poor workingman's family in Vilna, Lithuania, 13 men and women representing smallJewish socialist groups in Lithuania, Belorussia, and Poland met clandestinely for three days. Everyone in the group was in their twenties, but they all had years of conspiratorial experience behind them. At the end of the meeting, they issued a manifesto that proclaimed the formation of Der Yidisher Arbeter Bund in Rusland un Poyln (the Jewish Labor Union of Russia and Poland), known as the Bund.