Marc Jarblum, Socialist Zionist Leader, Dies at 85

Funeral services will be held here tomorrow for Marc Jarblum, a veteran Socialist Zionist leader who died yesterday in Bnei Braq at the age of 85. Born in Warsaw, Mr. Jarblum was one of the founders of Poland’s Peale Zion Party. He graduated from the Paris Law School before World War I and went to Russia during the October revolution where he interviewed Lenin on the Jewish question.

He was later arrested and sent to Siberia but escaped and returned to Paris where he became a close friend of Leon Blum, the French Jew who was Premier of France during the early 1930’s, Mr. Jarblum was credited with influencing Blum toward Zionism. When the Nazis occupied France in 1940, Mr. Jarblum became active in the French Jewish resistance movement. He escaped to Switzerland in 1943 and worked with the Joint Distribution Committee and the World Jewish Congress. After the war he played an important role in getting French intellectuals to accept the United Nations plan to partition Palestine into Arab and Jewish states.

Mr. Jarblum served successively as president and honorary president of the Zionist Federation of France and of the Federation of Jewish Associations of France. In 1948, he was named a Knight in the French Legion of Honor. He settled in Israel in 1953 and served on the executive committee of Histadrut until 1964. A prolific writer, he was the author of numerous books and pamphlets on the Palestine problem, the problem of Jews in the Soviet Union, and the struggle against Nazism. For many years he was the correspondent in France for “Davar” and for Yiddish journals in the US, South America and Poland.