Background
Ben-Zvi was born in Poltava in the Ukraine on November 24, 1883 and had a traditional Jewish upbringing.
Ben-Zvi was born in Poltava in the Ukraine on November 24, 1883 and had a traditional Jewish upbringing.
He studied in Kiev, but his schooling was interrupted by pogroms.
He became active in Jewish self-defense and in organizing the Poale Zion socialist party with its founder Ber Borochov.
In 1906 he escaped from the Poltava police, who accused him of illegal Zionist activities: the following year he immigrated to Eretz Israel, where he forged a life-long friendship and collaboration with David Ben-Gurion. Together they established the Eretz Israel branch of Poale Zion, which stood for a fusion of democratic-socialism and Zionism, calling for the revival of Hebrew, return to the soil, Jewish labor, and self-defense.
Before World War I he was one of the founders of Ha-Shomer (the Watchman Defense association, which was the forerunner of Jewish self-defense in the country) and the print workers union and served as delegate to various Zionist and socialist gatherings.
In 1914 his law studies in Istanbul were abruptly terminated by the war. A year later he and Ben-Gurion were expelled from Palestine by the Turkish authorities. They proceeded to the United States and engaged in Zionist socialist work. In 1917 they joined the Jewish Legion, returning with it to Palestine a year later as part of the British Army.
In 1927 he was elected member of the Jerusalem municipal council. From 1931 to 1944 he served as chairman of the National Council of Palestinian Jewry (Va’ad Le’umi), which looked after the affairs of the country’s Jewish community in the spheres of health, welfare, education, religious matters, and local authorities, and became its president in 1945. During Israel’s war of independence, he was one of the leaders of the beleaguered Jewish communtiy of Jerusalem. His son Eli fell in battle.
Elected to Israel’s parliament, the Knesset, in 1949 and 1951, he was nominated to be Israel’s president following the death of Chaim Weizmann, and was elected to the office three times, an unprecedented feat, thanks to his enormous popularity. He served from 1953 to 1963 and died shortly after the beginning of his third term.
A modest man, he sought to bring the exalted office of the president closer to the people of Israel, who were then being welded into a nation as large numbers of immigrants streamed into the country. He instituted an open-house policy, inviting the public to the presidential residence on holidays. He paid special attention to Israel’s minorities and advocated the rights of the small Samaritan community, on whom he wrote a standard work.
A noted scholar and researcher, his field of study was the history of the Holy Land and the special character of various Jewish communities in the Dias¬pora. He was a prolific writer who authored books and articles in these areas, including The Exiled and the Redeemed (Philadelphia, 1957) and encouraged research and publications, founding the Ben-Zvi Institute for the Study of Middle Eastern Jewish Communities. He rose above the daily political tumult, able to find that which united and bridged over differences.