Leaving home at age 14, he served in the Austrian army in World War I and lived in Lemberg and Vienna.

[3] From the early 1920s he was an active contributor of poems and essays to major Yiddish periodicals, under the name Melech Ravitch.

Moving to Warsaw in 1921, he belonged to Di Chaliastre ("The Gang"), a modernist literary group which included Uri Zvi Greenberg and Peretz Markish.

[6] Ravitch visited Australia in 1933 to raise funds for the Tsentrale Yidishe Shul Organizatsye (TSYSHO), an organisation of Yiddish schools in Poland,[7] and to investigate the feasibility of resettling European Jewish refugees in the Northern Territory.

[8][9][10] In 1935 he moved to Melbourne, where he edited the First Australian Jewish Almanac[citation needed] and helped establish the city's first Yiddish school, of which he served as headmaster.