Biography
Ethel Bernstein was born 1898 in Russia. Worked as a garment worker. Immigrated to the United States in 1911.
Became an anarchist around 1917 and joined the Jewish anarchist Frayhayt Group along with her partner, Samuel Lipman. Arrested in New York in 1919 for distributing The Anarchist Soviet Bulletin. She admitted to being an anarchist but denied belonging to the Union of Russian Workers and refused to answer additional questions. In November 1919 she led a hunger strike on Ellis Island to protest conditions. Deported on December 21, 1919 on the Buford.
In Russia, she began working for the People’s Commissariat for Foreign Affairs in 1920. Reunited in 1921 with Samuel Lipman (who was deported with Jacob Abrams and others). Lipman was killed in Stalin’s purges in the 1930s; their son was killed in the Second World War. Bernstein herself was sentenced to ten years of hard labor in a Soviet prison camp. Reportedly still alive in Moscow in 1983, “alone and impoverished.”
Adapted from Kenyon Zimmer, Red Scare Deportees (kenyonzimmer.com), compiled from INS deportation case files.
