Funeral services will be held tomorrow for Dr. Emanuel Scherer, secretary of the General Jewish Labor Bund. He died yesterday at the age of 75. A native of Cracow, Poland, Scherer joined the Jewish Labor Bund at the age of 17. He took part in the Jewish Socialist movement at Jagiellonian University in Cracow from which he earned a doctor of law degree.
In 1930, Scherer moved to Warsaw and became the youngest member of the Bund’s central committee. He was elected to the Warsaw City Council in 1938. After the German attack on Poland, Scherer, his wife Bronka and several other members of the Bund central committee moved their headquarters to the then as yet unoccupied part of the country. But after the Red Army moved into Poland and most Bundists were arrested, Scherer succeeded in making his way to Lithuania, then Sweden and finally coming to the United States in 1941.
Scherer became a leading member of the American representation of the Jewish Labor Bund in Poland. In 1943 after Szmul Zygielbojm, the Bund representative on the Polish National Council in London, committed suicide in order to shock the Western world into action against the massacre of Jews by Nazis, Scherer succeeded him on the Council and remained in London until the end of World War II.
Scherer returned to the U.S. in 1946 and became secretary of the coordinating committee for the Bund. He was also editor of the Bund monthly, “Unser Tsait,” and its representative in the Socialist International. He was also vice-president of the Jewish Labor Committee.
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