Izeaslav Levit
Iziaslav Elikovich Levit was a Soviet Moldovan and American historian, and professor. He authored numerous works on the history of Bessarabia during Romanian administration and the Eastern Front, as well as on Romanian occupation policies in Transnistria and Bessarabia. He was a recipient of the State Prize of the Moldavian SSR.
Biography
In 1940, Levit graduated from the Romanian Bogdan Petriceicu Hașdeu Lyceum in Chișinău and entered the Chișinău Pedagogical Institute. On 6 July 1941, he was mobilized in the Red Army to build field fortifications east of the Dniester, where his battalion was encircled but managed to escape. In October 1941, Bessarabians were withdrawn from the front and sent to the rear; Levit worked at a factory in Astrakhan. After the evacuation of the enterprise, he continued his studies at the History Faculty of the Chișinău State Pedagogical Institute. After graduating in October 1945, he became a junior researcher at the Institute of History, Economics, Language and Literature of the Moldavian branch of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR.During the anti-cosmopolitan campaign of 1948 and 1951, he was accused of attempting to whitewash the Romanian occupation authorities in Moldova during World War II.
In 1958, Levit defended his dissertation for the degree of Candidate of Historical Sciences. From 1957 to 1962, he served as academic secretary of the Institute of History of the Academy of Sciences of the Moldavian SSR. He became a doctor of history in 1983.
Between 1962 and 1987, he headed the Department of the History of Southeastern European Countries. From 1980 to 1987, he taught modern history at the Chișinău Pedagogical Institute. Beginning in 1991, he became chief researcher and head of the Department of Jewish History and Culture at the Institute for National Minorities of the Academy of Sciences of Moldova.
From the mid-1990s, he lived in the United States, where he collaborated with the New York–based Yiddish newspaper Forverts.
He was the author of numerous scholarly and popular works on the modern history of Romania, Moldova, and Bessarabia, international relations, and World War II. From the early 1990s, he also focused on the history of the Holocaust in Romanian-occupied territories of Bessarabia, Bukovina, and Transnistria. He received the State Prize of the Moldavian SSR for co-authoring the two-volume History of the Moldavian SSR.
Levit’s most significant scholarly contributions were his late works on Bessarabia’s short-lived independence and the establishment of the Moldavian Democratic Republic in 1917–1918, including The Movement for the Autonomy of Bessarabia in 1917. The Formation of Sfatul Țării. Proclamation of the Moldavian Democratic Republic and the 500-page The Fateful Year. The Moldavian Republic: From the Proclamation of the Moldavian Republic to the Abolition of Bessarabian Autonomy. He also authored The Bessarabian Question in the Context of International Relations: The Paris Peace Conference and the two-volume The "Jewish Question" in the Politics of the Antonescu Dictatorship.
He contributed to the encyclopedia project The Holocaust in the Territory of the USSR.
Levit was married to Inna Petrovskaya and had a son, Alexander. He died on 11 February, 2021, in Fort Lee, New Jersey.