Goldelman, Solomon

Goldelman, Solomon [Ґольдельман, Соломон], b 5 December 1885 in Soroka, Bessarabia, d 3 January 1974 in Jerusalem. Jewish and Ukrainian scholar and political figure; an economist by profession. He studied at the Kyiv Commercial Institute (1907–13) and then worked there (1913–15) and for the Union of Zemstvos (1915–17). From June 1917 to April 1918 he represented the socialist Zionist party Poale Zion in the Central Rada and the Little Rada. Under the Hetman government he lived in Odesa, where he edited Unser Leben, a Poale Zion daily. In December 1918 he was appointed acting minister of labor and acting secretary for national minorities in the government of the Directory of the Ukrainian National Republic. Until February 1919 he also served as deputy to Serhii Ostapenko, the minister of trade and industry; from August to April 1920 he was deputy minister of labor in Isaak Mazepa’s cabinet.

In mid-1920 Goldelman immigrated to Vienna. In 1922 he helped organize the Ukrainian Husbandry Academy in Poděbrady; he taught there and at the Ukrainian Technical and Husbandry Institute until 1939, when he immigrated to Palestine. He maintained close ties with Ukrainian émigré institutions and promoted Ukrainian-Jewish co-operation to the end of his life. Goldelman wrote in Ukrainian an exhaustive study on the theory of stock companies (1925) and textbooks on economics and industrial policy (1923), international economic policy (1924), and the economics of industry (1934). He also wrote many articles, in Ukrainian, Yiddish, Hebrew, Russian, and German, on economics and politics, as well as the books Lysty zhydivs'koho sotsiial-demokrata pro Ukraïnu ... (Letters of a Jewish Social Democrat about Ukraine ..., 1921, repr 1964), Löst der Kommunismus die Jüdenfrage? ... (1937), Zhydivs'ka natsional'na avtonomiia na Ukraïni, 1917–1920 (Jewish National Autonomy in Ukraine, 1917–1920, 1963, 2nd edn 1967, English trans 1968), and Jüden-Bauern in der Ukraine ... (1973).

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bykovs'kyi, L. Solomon Izrailevych Goldelman, 1885–1974: Bio-bibliohrafichni materiialy (Denver-Jerusalem 1976)
Bykovsky, L. Solomon I. Goldelman: A Portrait of a Politician and Educator (1885–1974) (New York–Toronto–Munich 1980)

Arkadii Zhukovsky

[This article originally appeared in the Encyclopedia of Ukraine, vol. 2 (1988).]