Baruch Podolsky

Baruch (Boris Semyonovich) Podolsky (; 18 February 1940 – 21 February 2011) was an Israeli linguist, lexicographer, television and radio presenter, teacher, and leading expert in the field of Hebrew and Semitic languages. He was the author of a number of popular Hebrew dictionaries and science books.

Biography

Podolsky was born in Moscow on 18 February 1940. His mother, Dora Borisovna Kustanovich, graduated from the Jewish Pedagogical College and Moscow Pedagogical Institute. After the faculty was closed, she worked as a teacher of Russian language and literature. His father, Semyon Moiseevich Podolsky, graduated from the history department of MSU and taught high school history.

Between 1941 and 1944, the family lived in Southern Urals in the city of Orske, in 1944 he returned to Moscow.

His father and mother were great lovers of Jewish culture, visited GOSET, subscribed to the newspaper " Einikait", and had a library of books in Yiddish.

Baruch learned to read Yiddish from his mother. His father, using his grandmother's prayer book, taught him to read Hebrew as well.

After graduating from school, Baruch decided to study Semitic languages. In those years in the Soviet Union, Semitology could be studied only in two places: at Tbilisi University, where teaching was conducted in Georgian language, and at Eastern Faculty of Leningrad University. In Leningrad, admission to this department was once every two years, and that year there was no admission. Podolsky entered the Institute of Oriental Languages at MSU, intending to study Arabic. However, the Arabic branch was not opened that year and he was accepted into the Hindi department.

In 1958, together with his parents, he was arrested on charges of "anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda using national prejudices" ( Article 58-10, part two) and "participation in an anti-Soviet organization" (Article 58–11) for having contacts with employees of the Israel embassy and studying Hebrew. He served 5 years of imprisonment in the Mordovian camps ( Dubravlag). In 1967, he was again sentenced to two years for Zionist activities.

In 1971 he repatriated with his wife Lydia to Israel.

In Israel

In Israel, Podolsky entered the Department of Semitic Linguistics in Tel Aviv University, where he completed first and second degrees. This was followed by Doctorate on Historical Phonetics of Amharic, published in English in 1991 ("Historical Phonetics of Amharic").

Together with Professor Veniamin Fain they created the voluntary partnership "Tarbut" ( - culture) with the goal of "promoting Jewish education in Russia." As part of Tarbut, a Hebrew self-teaching book "Living Hebrew" was published, which is still very popular. He wrote "Practical Grammar of the Hebrew Language" (edited by Aron Dolgopolsky), which was reprinted many times.

As senior lecturer in the Department of Semitic Linguistics at Tel Aviv University, Podolsky taught Semitic languages, mainly Amharic and Old Ethiopian. He gave courses of lectures on a variety of areas of linguistics, such as the map of the world's languages, the origin of language, an introduction to linguistics, the origin of writing, as well as a course in the Hindi language, phonetics and phonology, phonetics and morphology of modern Hebrew and many others. Podolsky's lectures were extremely popular, they were listened to by students from other departments and faculties, and external audiences. He wrote articles and spoke at conferences.

He first compiled a small and then a fairly large Hebrew-Amharic dictionary. In the last years of his life, he managed to complete the compilation of an Amharic-Hebrew dictionary with transcription and reverse translation index. The dictionary was published posthumously in Tel Aviv in 2012 by his wife Lydia Podolskaya (Stone). While still in a prison camp in the USSR, he managed to collect and then export to Israel materials on the Urum (Greek-Tatar) language, which he processed and published in 1985 (Greek Tatar - English Glossary. Wiesbaden, Otto Harrassowitz, 1985).

Since 1992, he has been the editor-in-chief of the "Hebrew-Russian Dictionary" and "Russian-Hebrew Dictionary". The result was a two-volume dictionary containing 26 thousand words in each volume. Although the dictionary was a great success, Podolsky set about creating a new Hebrew-Russian dictionary. The new dictionary contains approximately 50 thousand words and expressions. In the electronic version (on CD and online), made by enthusiasts from the OLAN company, a Russian-Hebrew dictionary index was added, as well as all word forms: verb conjugation, feminine forms and plurals of adjectives and nouns, combinations of prepositions with pronominals suffixes. In 2007 the "Newest Hebrew-Russian Dictionary" with 50 thousand words appeared. In 2010, IRIS was released, a large Russian-Hebrew online dictionary with a volume of approximately 65 thousand words, prepared by Podolsky. The dictionary is available online and as a mobile application.

In recent years, Podolsky worked to expand the Yiddish-Russian dictionary up to 50 thousand lexical units.

Almost until his death he taught at the Department of Hebrew and Semitic Languages Tel Aviv University. Academic courses of lectures by Podolsky "Map of the World's Languages", "Introduction to Linguistics", "The Origin of Language" and "The Origin of Writing" were very popular, attracting students from many faculties and external audiences.

For many years, Podolsky hosted the program "Hebrew Language Lessons" in Russian on the Israeli state radio station REKA, which was extremely popular among repatriates from the former USSR. As a popularizer of science and the Hebrew language, Baruch actively gave lectures, hosted an educational program on Channel 9 television, wrote and published, including co-authorship, a number of popular science books and textbooks. Some of the popular science lectures and books, as well as some recordings of the broadcasts, are published on the Memorial Page of Baruch Podolsky.

In 2004, he was elected "Person of the Year" in the category "Contribution to science, medicine and education in Israel" 9th Channel of Israeli Television. He was Honorary citizen of the city of Holon, where he lived for many years.

Podolsky died on 21 February 2011, in Holon.

Podolsky's lectures were recorded on a tape recorder by the famous refusenik and physician Moshe (Mieczyslaw) Vardi and partially published by Baruch's widow, Lydia Podolskaya, in Hebrew and translated into Russian.

Sources

* Baruch Podolsky
The life and adventures of Baruch Podolsky.
* Baruch Podolsky
Conversations about Hebrew and much more


Memorial page of Baruch Podolsky on the website of Tel Aviv University (English)


Baruch Podolsky on the website of the "Jewish Heroes" project

Notes

External links

Baruch Podolsky - about life, Hebrew and much more

Baruch Podolsky - collection of video materials

Large Hebrew-Russian-Hebrew Dictionary by Dr. Baruch Podolsky

{{DEFAULTSORT:Podolsky, Baruch
Israeli lexicographers
1940 births
2011 deaths