ERC > LEXICON OF THE YIDDISH THEATRE  >  VOLUME 5  >  ROSA LEAH SURITS


Lexicon of the Yiddish Theatre
BIOGRAPHIES OF THOSE WHO WERE ONCE INVOLVED IN THE Yiddish THEATRE;
aS FEATURED IN zALMEN zYLBERCWEIG'S  "lEKSIKON FUN YIDISHN TEATER"


VOLUME 5: THE KDOYSHIM (MARTYRS) EDITION, 1967, Mexico City

 


 

Rosa Leah Surits
(Levius)


 

S. was born in 1890 in Dvinsk, Latvia.

Her father was a traveler.

The accounts of her father about his travels and the people who he met, aroused in her a travel fantasy and a huge desire to know the world. Still very young, she associated herself with  the artistic Yiddish theatre, and she used to perform in the then amateur circle known as the "Gezelshaftlekher" Theatre together with the late preeminent painter Michal Yo and world-famous Yiddish actor Shlomo Mikhoels. That theatre had been founded in the Moscow suburbs, a tightly occupied poor Yiddish quartal of Riga, and she was accustomed to having a great success with the visitors.

After her marriage to Moshe Surits, she became a professional Yiddish actress and used to act together with the troupes in which he had participated.

On 30 November 1941, in the first "action" in the Riga Ghetto, when they were taken and killed with the tens of thousand Latvian Jews, among them the world-famous Yiddish historian Professor Simon Dubnow, S. and her five-year old daughter Berta, were killed by the Nazis in the Rumbula forest, where in six mass graves lie thirty-eight thousand Riga Jews who were murdered there during the "action."
 

Sh. E. from Jonas Rabinov.

 


 

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Adapted from the original Yiddish text found within the  "Lexicon of the Yiddish Theatre" by Zalmen Zylbercweig, Volume 5, page 4357.
 

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