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Jehoshua A. Gilboa Collection
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Held at: University of Pennsylvania: Archives at the Library of the Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies [Contact Us]420 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA 19106-3703
This is a finding aid. It is a description of archival material held at the University of Pennsylvania: Archives at the Library of the Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies. Unless otherwise noted, the materials described below are physically available in their reading room, and not digitally available through the web.
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Jehoshua A. Gilboa was born in Pinsk, Poland, as Yeshoshua A. Globerman, on May 13, 1918. During World War II he was imprisoned in Russian prisons and camps. Following the war, he married Dina Firstenberg in 1948 and moved to Israel in 1949. He completed his Masters Degree in 1967 at Boston University and his Doctorate at Tel Aviv University in 1975. His doctoral thesis was on Hebrew culture in the Soviet Union.
Much of Gilboa's professional life was spent as a journalist. He worked for several daily newspapers in Tel Aviv: as a member of the editorial board of the Dvar (1950-1953), as assistant editor and editor-in-chief at the Zmanim (1953-1955), and at the Maariv as a member of the editorial staff beginning in 1955. He worked at the Institute of East European Studies at Brandeis University as a senior research associate (1965-1967) and was a research associate at Tel Aviv University's Diaspora Research Institute (beginning in 1969). From 1973-1978 he served as editor of the scholarly journal Shvut, which sought to preserve the heritage of Russian Jewry. During the 1960s, he also contributed a number of articles to The Jerusalem Post.
In addition, he wrote or edited a number of books, including "Confess! Eight Years in Soviet Prisons" (1968), "The Black Years of Soviet Jewry 1939-1953" (1971), "The Kibbutz Sitting Pretty" (1973), and "A Language Silenced: The Suppression of Hebrew Literature and Culture in the Soviet Union" (1982). He was also an editor and contributor to several anthologies of short stories and essays in Hebrew and Yiddish. In addition to Hebrew, Yiddish and English, Gilboa had some knowledge of Polish, Russian, and German. He was awarded the Israeli Journalist Prize in 1965 and 1971 and won the Prize of Judaistic Studies in 1972.
Gilboa died in 1981 following a brief illness. He was survived by his wife and two children.
(This biography was written using an obituary from The Jerusalem Post (February 5, 1981) and an entry on Gilboa from Contemporary Authors Online (Gale, 2007).
- Publisher
- University of Pennsylvania: Archives at the Library of the Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies
- Finding Aid Author
- Louise A. Strauss