Background
Gruenbaum was born in Warsaw on November 24, 1879 and grew up in Plonsk.
Gruenbaum was born in Warsaw on November 24, 1879 and grew up in Plonsk.
He began to study medicine but turned to law in 1904. From an early age, he contributed articles to the Jewish press and before long was editing newspapers in Hebrew, Yiddish, and Polish.
From 1905 onward, he was a delegate to Zionist congresses, and at the Helsingfors conference of Russian Zionists in 1906 was a leading advocate of struggling to achieve Jewish political rights in the Diaspora (Gegenwartsarbeit). In 1908 he was appointed general secretary of the Central Committee of Russian Zionists in Vilna. In 1914 Gruenbaum was editing a Warsaw Yiddish weekly but with the outbreak of war, moved to Saint Petersburg (Petrograd). Returning to Warsaw in 1918, he resumed his editorship of the Yiddish weekly and for a time edited the Hebrew daily Ha-Tzejira.
In 1932 Gruenbaum moved to Paris. The following year he was elected to the Zionist executive and settled in Palestine. From 1933 to 1935 he headed the immigration department of the Jewish Agency and from 1935 to 1948, its labor department. During World War II he worked hard to assist Polish Jewry, heading the Jewish Agency’s rescue committee. However, he was criticized for long refusing to believe the reports of mass extermination and later, for despairing of rescue possibilities and recommending concentrating on the rehabilitation of survivors. He engaged in widespread fund-raising and correspondence to get as many Jews as possible out of Europe into safe havens wherever possible. During this difficult period, Gruenbaum had to face criticism on the rescue committee’s lack of achievement and tension with the religious Zionist parties. He was under additional strain in the knowledge that his son was being held in a concentration camp. (After the war his son was charged with having been a kapo — a Nazi-appointed head of a camp work gang — but was acquitted of the charge. Later, he was killed fighting in Israel’s 1948 War of Independence.)
In 1948, Gruenbaum was a signatory of Israel’s Declaration of Independence (although he could not take part in the official ceremony in Tel Avivas he was stranded in besieged Jerusalem). He was appointed minister of interior in Israel’s provisional government (1948-1949) and was responsible for organizing the country’s first elections. In these elections, in 1949, he submitted his own party list but received no seats. He continued for a time to serve on the Jewish Agency Executive and remained active in Zionist affairs. Later, he retired to spend most of his time in literary, journalistic, and scholarly pursuits, including a history of Zionism and the editorship of the Encyclopedia of the Diaspora. He was a member of Kibbutz Gan Shemucl and his views grew increasingly leftist as he moved away from rightist General Zionism and joined the Marxist Mapam party.
In Zionism, he was prominent in the General Zionist Movement and advocated the secularization of Jewish life.
From 1919 to 1930 Gruenbaum was a member of the Polish parliament (the Sejm), where he fought for the rights of national minorities in general and the Jews in particular. He was a member of the committee that drafted the Polish constitution and initiated and organized a “national minorities’ bloc” which scored a significant electoral success in 1922.
Throughout the 1920s he was one of the outstanding leaders of Polish Jewry and a dominant figure in the parliamentary representation of Polish minorities. Fora number of years he was also president of the Polish Zionist organization. One of his great interests was the promotion of Hebrew language and culture in Poland, and toward this aim he became one of the organizers of the Tarbut movement. He strongly opposed Chaim Weizmann, who he believed put too much emphasis on Palestine. Gruenbaum felt that the primary objective of the world Zionist movement should be the welfare of the Jews in the Diaspora. When he challenged Weizmann in 1925, Weizmann retorted “I am a Jewish statesman and you are an assimilatory Jew.”