[1] The party leadership in Minsk had approached Zelik Akselrod [fr], a non-party Jewish writer, regarding publishing a Yiddish newspaper in Bialystok.
Akselrod managed to locate Hersh Smolar [fr], a Jewish communist cadre who had recently been released from Polish prison in Brest, asking him to join the effort for the launch of the newspaper.
[2] Following the Soviet capture of Bialystok, a period in which the city received large number of Jewish refugees from Poland, the newspaper played a key role as a significant population could not read and write in any other language than Yiddish.
[4] The former Undzer Lebn editorial board members that joined Der Bialistoker Shtern included Aaron Berezinsky, the poet Mendel Goldman and the journalist Asher Zinowitz, among others.
[4] Contributors to the newspaper included poets Peretz Markish (from Moscow), Shmerke Kaczerginski, Shalom Zirman, Pesach Binetsky, journalists Leib Strilovsky and Abraham Berakhot, writers I. Yonasewitz, Y. Akrutny and Moishe Knapheys [ru].
[1] The editors of the newspaper found themselves under pressure to accommodate translations of Soviet press material, leaving little space in the pages of Der Bialistoker Shtern for the some 50 unemployed Jewish displaced writers that had arrived in the city.
[6] Between November 1939 and February 1940 the newspaper ran a campaign, calling on refugees in Western Belorussia to move to the Soviet interior to seek employment there.
[6] The campaign reached its peak in February 1940 with Der Bialistoker Shtern publishing a series of letters from resettled refugees who had taken industrial posts in other parts of the Soviet Union, highlighting satisfaction with living and working conditions in their new abodes.
[1] The newspaper carried articles condemning the General Jewish Labour Bund, and occasionally against the Left Poalei Zion and other Zionist organizations.
[4] In its 191st issue (April 20, 1941) the word Shtern in the banner of the newspaper written with the regular nun letter for the first time, rather than its final form version.