Yekef

Jacob Edelstein was born in 1903 in Horodenka, in what was then Austrian Galicia.

During the First World War, he was evacuated by the authorities from the front line, where the Russian army was committing incredible atrocities, together with his parents and sister, and was placed in a refugee camp in the interior of the empire. And so in 1915 he found himself in Pohořelice in Moravia. While the rest of the family returned after the war ended, Jacob apparently stayed in Brno for more than a decade, perhaps studying at a high school and even attempting college. For most of that time, however, he was completely destitute and lived so miserably that he did not want to return to those years later.

He became a respected speaker and organizer of the German Social Democracy in Czechoslovakia, attending its congresses in Brno until the 1930s. At the same time, he became increasingly involved in activities connected with the Jewish national idea, Zionism. With the emergence of new nation-states such as not only Czechoslovakia, but also Poland, Ukraine and Lithuania, all hostile to the Jews, the idea that Jews were also a nation in the political sense and should have their own state as part of national self-determination grew in popularity. Jacob Edelstein, called Yekef, became the secretary of Zionist socialist movement in Teplice. He married and eventually he and his wife settled in Prague, where he managed the office of the Zionist movement Hechalutz.