Public Employee Press

DC 37 historian Bernard Bellush dies

Bernard Bellush, a scholar and social activist who authored a history of DC 37 from its beginnings in the 1940s through the 1980s, died Dec. 30. He was 94.

Bellush worked in the DC 37 Education Dept. in the 1970s and had returned to college teaching when he and his wife of 64 years, historian Jewel Bellush, wrote the 465-page "Union Power & New York: Victor Gotbaum and District Council 37," which was published in 1984.

Bellush was born in 1917 and attended city schools in the Bronx. Raised as a pacifist, he served in the U.S. Army from 1942 to 1945 and fought in the bloody D-day landing on Omaha Beach.

After the war, he earned his master's degree in history from Columbia University, and a Ph.D. from City College. He taught at City College for more than four decades, wrote several books on American history, chaired the Faculty Senate and edited the English supplement of the socialist Jewish Forward newspaper.

Bellush was a co-founder of the progressive and racially integrated American Veterans Committee, a leader of Americans for Democratic Action and president of the New York Labor History Association.