Jakob Edelstein was born into a devout Ashkenazi Jewish family in Horodenka, a city then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, nowadays in the Ivano-Frankivsk Oblast, Ukraine.

[1] From 1926 Edelstein was involved in the Hechalutz (the pioneer), a Zionist youth organisation and in World War II a resistance movement, later he worked at their head office.

[2] Edelstein and his substitute Otto Zucker visited England and the British Mandate for Palestine in 1938 to help facilitate the evacuation of Jewish refugees, his wife was ordered to stay in Czechoslovakia, thus forcing him to return home.

[6] On 18 October 1939 Edelstein, Friedmann and another thousand Jewish men were, due to the so-called Nisko-und-Lublin-Plan, deported from Ostrava to Nisko in the Lublin reservation, a concentration camp in the General Government.

On 4 December 1941, by order of the head of the "Central Office for Jewish Emigration in Prague" SS-Sturmbannführer (major) Hans Günther, Edelstein and his family were deported to Theresienstadt.

Jakob Edelstein had to watch the murder of first his mother in law then his wife Miriam and his twelve-year-old son Ariel before he was shot to death in the crematorium of the gas chamber.

[2][9] In June 1947, on the three-year yahrzeit of Yacov Edelstein's death in Auschwitz, Max Brod wrote: "And so a Jewish hero left this world, a man who up to the end did everything he possibly could and never gave up.