In the school year 1923/1924, he and his friend Klement Jug transferred to the University of Padua, but Jelinčič did not finish his studies.

[1] As the secretary of the Association of Educational Societies, he traveled extensively in the Goriška region and organized liberal cultural clubs.

The following year he was arrested when the illegal organization TIGR - Trst, Istra, Gorica, Rijeka was uncovered by fascist authorities; In 1931, he was as the top defendant among 30 accused, sentenced to 20 years in prison by a special court in Rome, the continuation of the 1st TIGR trial in Trieste.

After the dissolution of Italy in the autumn of 1943 he joined the partisans; there he was a member of the Provincial National Liberation Committee for Slovenian Littoral.

From 1958 on he worked in Institute for Ethnic Issues in Ljubljana and was one of the initiators for the creation of an ethnographic map of the Trieste territory based on original, ancient fallow names.