Mordechai Gebirtig

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Mordechai Gebirtig, born Mordekhai Bertig (Yiddish: מרדכי געבירטיג) (b. 1877, Kraków - d. 1942, Kraków) was a Yiddish poet and songwriter, regarded as one of the most influential and popular writers of Yiddish songs and poems.

Today, Gebirtig is perhaps best known internationally for his song, "S'brent" (It is burning), written in 1938 in response to the 1936 pogrom of Jews in the shtetl (small town) of Przytyk. It sounded an alarm for the approaching calamity that would become known as the Holocaust. "S'brent" was sung in the ghettos of Nazi-occupied Europe. Since then the song, in the original Yiddish and in its Hebrew translation titled "Ha-Ayyarah Bo'eret" (העיירה בוערת, "Our Little Town is Burning!" - hence the occasional reference to a Yiddish title, "Undzer Shtetl Brent!"), continues to be widely performed in the context of Holocaust commemoration.

Gebirtig supported himself by working as a carpenter, even while he wrote melodies and lyrics that in his lifetime, and afterwards, became popular throughout the Yiddish-speaking community of Eastern Europe.

Mordechai Gebirtig was shot to death by the Germans in the Kraków Ghetto on July 4, 1942. No one from his family survived the war.