David Dubinsky - Early Years

Early Years

David Isaac Dobnievski, known to history as David Dubinsky, was born February 22, 1892 in Brest-Litovsk (currently Brest, Belarus), the youngest of five boys and three girls. Dubinsky and his family moved to Łódź, Poland, shortly before he turned three. David's father Bezalel Dobnievski, a religious Jew, owned a bakery, but limited himself to administrative tasks related to the enterprise. David's mother Shaina Wyshengrad died when he was eight, with his father remarrying a year and a half later. David worked from early childhood delivering bread from his father's bakery to local shops, while attending a Hebrew school, where he studied Polish, Russian, and Yiddish. He was later forced to leave a semi-private school he attended to take work in his father's bakery to replace a brother who had left abruptly.

During the Russian Revolution of 1905, David attended a mass meeting which led to his kinship, if not actual membership, with the Bund, a Jewish socialist organization close to the Russian Social Democratic Workers Party. He joined the bakers' union, which was controlled by the Bund, and owing to his superior education and fluency in several languages, was elected assistant secretary within the union by 1906. By age 15, David was a committed socialist.

In 1907, David was arrested for helping to plan a bakers' strike and was held for three days. In January 1908, David was arrested again, this time for attending a union election meeting held without a police permit. Not quite 16, the boy was held for 18 months in jails in Łódź, Warsaw, and Moscow, before being sentenced to exile in Chelyabinsk, Siberia. While en route to his place of exile, he walked out of the camp where the authorities were holding him and, after several months hiding in Chelyabinsk and Białystok, managed to make his way to the United States in 1911 with a ticket sent to him by one of his brothers, who was living in New York City.