Leon Liebgold

Leon Liebgold was born on July 31, 1910, in Kraków, then part of Austrian Galicia, and died on September 3, 1993, in New Hope, Pennsylvania. He was an actor whose career spanned Yiddish theatre and Yiddish-language film in both Poland and the United States, culminating in a Broadway appearance in 1970 in Light, Lively and Yiddish.

Liebgold came from a theatrical family. His father, Zalman, a Kraków native, managed the Kraków Yiddish Theatre, and his mother, Basha, née Sauber, was born in Przemyśl. Both parents were Yiddish theatre actors, and Leon — whose Yiddish name was Leib — appeared in his father's productions as a boy. He had a younger sister, Toni, and a younger brother, Jan. Beginning his career as a vaudeville performer and stage actor in Poland, he joined the Vilna Troupe in 1928 and remained with the company until 1933.

His film work brought him wide recognition. He appeared in the 1936 Polish production Yidl Mit'n Fidl alongside Molly Picon, and starred in The Dybbuk, filmed in Poland in 1937. In 1939, a U.S. production, Tevya, further established his screen presence. Following the completion of The Dybbuk, Liebgold and his frequent co-star and wife, Lili Liliana, departed Poland with their troupe, Di Yidishe Bande, on a world tour that took them through Lithuania, Latvia, Belgium, and France. When World War II began in 1939, the couple was in the United States, which spared them from the Holocaust.

Liebgold married Lili Liliana, born in 1913, in 1935. During the war, he served in the United States Army, attaining the rank of sergeant. His parents and sister were imprisoned in the Tarnów Ghetto and subsequently deported to the Treblinka death camp, where they were murdered. His brother Jan survived multiple Nazi concentration camps — among them Pustków, Auschwitz, and Gleiwitz III — as well as a death march to Theresienstadt, where he was liberated by the Red Army. In 1946, Leon sponsored Jan's emigration to the United States.

In America, Liebgold continued performing in Yiddish theatre for decades, including at the Folksbiene Theater. He and Liliana also toured South America together in the 1950s. His Broadway credit, Light, Lively and Yiddish, came in 1970. In the late 1970s, he served as president of the Hebrew Actors' Union in Manhattan. Liebgold possessed a resonant, melodic, cantorial-type voice that distinguished his work both in speech and song on stage.

Lili Liliana died in 1989, after nearly sixty years of marriage. Liebgold died in 1993 at the age of 83. The two are buried together at Mount Hebron Cemetery in Queens, New York.