Minkoff, Isaiah M.

Isaiah Minkoff (1901-1983) was born in Warsaw in 1901 and was raised and educated in Moscow. As a teenager he became involved in World War I relief work and also became active in a number of Jewish and socialist organizations. After the Revolution of 1917 he continued his political activity as a member of the Russian Social Democratic movement and served a one-year term in Soviet prisons. He attended the University of Moscow, 1918-1920. He fled the Soviet Union, and in 1922 arrived in California, where he completed his B.A., in Slavonic languages, at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1926.

In June 1926 he married Dussia Samson, daughter of Russian Jews who had emigrated to the United States after a long residence in Harbin, China, and settled in San Francisco. The Minkoffs soon resettled in New York, where he soon became active in Jewish communal affairs. In New York be became reacquainted with a large circle of Russian Social-Democratic (Menshevik) exiles who had fled from the Soviet Union after the consolidation of Bolshevik power.

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