BRUCK, GRIGORI

BRUCK, GRIGORI (Ẓevi Hirsch; 1869–1922), Russian Zionist. He was born in Chernigov, Ukraine, graduated in 1893 as a physician from Kiev University, and worked as a doctor in Gomel. From his youth, he was a member of the Ḥovevei Zion and the Zionist movement, and at the Third Zionist Congress he was elected regional representative for Belorussia. In 1901 he became government-appointed rabbi in Vitebsk. In 1905 he was elected to the first Duma on the Constitutional Democratic (Kadet) Party ticket. When the Duma was dissolved, he was a signatory to the protest of the radical delegates (the Viborg Manifesto) and was arrested and removed from his official rabbinical post. Opposing the helsingfors program (1906) which required the Zionists to act as a political party in the Diaspora, he retired from the Zionist leadership. During World War I he served as a doctor in the Russian Army. At the 1917 Russian Zionist Conference in Petrograd he again opposed the participation of Zionists as a party in the Russian Revolution. In 1920 he settled in Ereẓ Israel. -BIBLIOGRAPHY: K.I. Silman (ed.), Z. Bruck. Alim le-Zikhrono (1929); Sefer Vitebsk (1957), 109–28. (Yehuda Slutsky)