This year, the kraize names have been nominated in recognition of notable figures in the world labour movement:
Willy Brandt
Willy Brandt, born Herbert Ernst Karl Frahm (German pronunciation: [ˈvɪli ˈbʁant]; 18 December 1913 – 8 October 1992), was a German politician, Chancellor of West Germany 1969–1974, and leader of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) 1964–1987.
Brandt’s most important legacy was Ostpolitik, a policy aimed at improving relations with East Germany, Poland, and the Soviet Union. This policy caused considerable controversy in West Germany, but won Brandt the Nobel Peace Prize in 1971.
In 1974, Brandt resigned as Chancellor after Günter Guillaume, one of his closest aides, was exposed as an agent of the Stasi, the East German secret police.
Helen Lothan Robertson
(1848–1937), tailoress and trade unionist, was born in 1848 at Glasgow, Scotland, daughter of Joseph Biggs, carpenter, and his wife Elizabeth, née Baird. The family came to Victoria in 1853. At 14 Helen ‘started with her needle at the trade’; clothing machinists were then paid 10 shillings to 12s. 6d. per week, about half the rate for unskilled male labourers. On 15 April 1870 at Fitzroy she married with Presbyterian forms Scottish-born James Stewart Robertson, carpenter. In the next eleven years they had six children, three of whom died in childhood. She probably combined home duties with outwork, the endemic, lowest paid form of employment in the garment industry.
Rivke Epshteyn
(1884-1941), Rivke Epshteyn was born in Vilna in 1884. Even as a child she sought to educate herself and sympathized with those who were treated unfairly. She was treated unfairly by nature, as she was very short and walked with a limp. The girl studied in a private secondary school in Vilna and wanted to attend a government school, but her father would not allow her to attend a school where she would have to write on Shabbes. While telling her parents that she was studying independently for a government secondary school diploma in Kovno, the young girl remained there and joined the Bund during the earliest years of the 20th century running krayzn for female students and for workers in both Kovno and in Vilna.
A. Litvak
(1874–1932), pseudonym of Khayim Yankl Helfand, socialist, Yiddish writer, translator, and editor. Helfand was born in Vilna to a strictly observant Jewish family. He went to heder until the age of 12 and subsequently studied at a yeshiva and taught himself Russian. At the age of 19, he joined an illegal study group in Vilna organized by the Jewish Social Democratic Group in Russia, the organization that later established the Bund in 1897.
Clement Attlee
Clement Richard Attlee, 1st Earl Attlee, KG, OM, CH, PC, FRS (3 January 1883 – 8 October 1967) was a British Labour politician who served as the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1945 to 1951, and as the Leader of the Labour Party from 1935 to 1955. He was also the first person to hold the office of Deputy Prime Minister, under Winston Churchill in the wartime coalition government, before leading the Labour Party to a landslide election victory over Churchill’s Conservative Party in 1945. He was the first Labour Prime Minister to serve a full Parliamentary term, and the first to command a Labour majority in Parliament.
Doc Evatt
Herbert Vere Evatt, QC KStJ (30 April 1894 – 2 November 1965), was an Australian jurist, politician and writer. He was President of the United Nations General Assembly in 1948-49 and helped draft the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948). He was Leader of the Australian Labor Party (and thus Leader of the Opposition) from 1951 to 1960.
Evatt was formally referred to as Dr H. V. Evatt, but was informally known as “Bert” or “Doc” Evatt.
