as candidate for the Austrian parliament. Although he had a majority of the votes, his election was thwarted by corruption of the electoral process by the local Polish faction. He was chief convener of the Conference for the Yiddish Language held in Czernowitz, August 30 –September 3, 1908. It was the first Yiddish-language conference ever to take place. At the conference, he took the place of his colleague and fellow Yiddish activist Sholem Aleichem who was critically ill. From about 1912 onwards, Birnbaum became increasingly interested in Orthodox Judaism, and he became a fully observant Orthodox Jew in about 1916. He continued to act particularly as an advocate for the Jews of eastern Europe and the Yiddish language. From 1919 to 1922, he was General Secretary of the Agudas Yisroel, a widely-spread and influential Orthodox Jewish organization. He founded the society of the "Olim" (Hebrew for the "Ascenders"), a society with a specific program of action dedicated to the spiritual ascent of the Jewish people. Later life Birnbaum, decrying political Zionism, 1919: And is it at all possible that we, who regard Judaism as our one and only treasure, should ever be able to compete with such expert demagogues and loud self-advertisers as they [the Zionists]? It is surely not necessary that we should. We are, after all, still the mountains and they the grain, and all we need to do is to gather all our forces in a world organization of religious Jews, and it will follow of itself, and without the application of any great political cunning on our part, that we shall have it in our power to prevent what must needs be prevented and to carry out what we have to carry out. But there is no need first to create this world organization of religious Jews. It is already in existence. The world knows its name, it is Agudas Yisroel [The Union of Israel]. He continued to write and lecture. His most well-known publication of this period of his life was "Gottes Volk", 1918 (German), "God's Folk", 1921 (Yiddish), translated into Hebrew as "Am Hashem" (1948), and translated into English under the title "Confession" (1946), slightly abridged. In 1933, at the time of the Nazi rise to power, Birnbaum and his wife, together with their son Menachem (an artist) and family, who at that time were all living in Berlin, fled to Scheveningen, Netherlands, with