V. was born in 1881 in Vitebsk, White Russia. At the age of fifteen he was connected with the Yiddish theatre. He began his musical career as a chorus director in the opera and at the same time in a school, afterwards in Riga in the chorus-school on Petergasse.

When there was founded in Riga the State Yiddish Theatre, he, together with Getzl Tal, were given to the committee as a director.

On 4 January 1936 in the hall of the Riga State Yiddish Theatre he was celebrated by a committee of actors, writers and social activists, their thirty-year jubilee.

His wife, Berta Sverdlin (born 1891 in Riga), had studied music in Germany, had a magnificent mezzo-soprano voice and used to perform in general and Yiddish concerts in Riga and across the Latvian province.

According to Yona Radinov V. was a fine musician and had a beautiful tenor voice. In the cruel ghetto environment, he was one of the initiators of a Sholem Aleichem evening in the ghetto, and also of other classical activities. The Nazis had him appointed as a heytser in a [bathhouse=bod], and they had him murdered in 1943 in a cruel death. His wife was also killed by the Nazis near Riga, in a mass grave of some three thousand Jewish Nazi destructions.

Sh. E. from Yona Radinov and M. E. from Max Perlman.