Menachem Z. Rosensaft
Menachem Z. Rosensaft (born 1948 in Bergen-Belsen, Germany) an attorney in New York and the Founding Chairman of the International Network of Children of Jewish Survivors, is a leader of the Second Generation movement of children of survivors, and has been described on the front page of the "New York Times" as one of the most prominent of the survivors' sons and daughters. He also served as National President of the Labor Zionist Alliance, and was active in the early stages of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. As psychologist Eva Fogelman has written: "Menachem Rosensaft's moral voice has gone beyond the responsibility he felt as a child of survivors to remember and educate. He felt the need to promote peace and a tolerant State of Israel as well. He wanted to bring to justice Nazi war criminals, to fight racism and bigotry, and to work toward the continuity of the Jewish people".
L. L. Zamenhof
Zamenhof was born on 15 December (3 December OS) 1859, the son of Markus Zamenhof (27 January 1837 - 29 November 1907) and Rozalia Zamenhof (1839 - 1 September 1892), in the multi-ethnic city of Białystok, now in Poland, at that time in Grodno Governorate in the Russian Empire as a result of the 1807 Treaties of Tilsit. His parents were of Litvak Jewish descent that inhabited the former Grand Duchy of Lithuania. He appears to have been natively bilingual in Yiddish and Russian. From his father, a teacher of German and French, he learned those languages and Hebrew as well. Despite this he spoke Polish, one of the major languages of Białystok alongside Yiddish, Belarusian, and German, and it was Polish that was to become the native language of his children after settling in Warsaw. In school he studied the classical languages: Latin, Greek, Hebrew, and Aramaic. He later learned some English, though in his own words not very well, had an interest in Lithuanian and Italian, and learned Volapük when it came out in 1880, though by that point his international language project was already well developed.