Ya'akov Zerubavel

Biography

Zerubavel was born in Poltava in the Russian Empire (now in modern-day Ukraine) in 1886. Like many Jewish boys, he studied in a heder during his youth. As a young man, he joined the Poale Zion movement, and was elected to its executive board in 1906. Zerubavel was a central member of the party in Vilna, and a member of the central committee of the party in Russia. After helping fellow Zionist Ber Borochov publish an underground newspaper, Zerubavel moved to Vilna. He spent 18 months in prison in Vilna before moving to Lvov, where he worked on the editorial board of the Yiddish newspaper Der Yiddisher Arbeter.

In 1910, Zerubavel immigrated to Palestine, where he became one of the leaders of the Poale Zion movement in Israel along with David Ben-Gurion and Yitzhak Ben-Zvi. Zerubavel was a strong proponent of Yiddish, sharing the view of many left-wing Zionists that Hebrew was the language of intellectuals, and therefore not suitable to the party's goal of reaching the primarily Yiddish-speaking masses abroad.

Zerubavel was sentenced to prison by Ottoman authorities during World War I, but he managed to escape and fled to the United States in 1915. Zerubavel returned to Russia following the October Revolution in 1917, becoming a member of the National Jewish Council of the Ukraine. He returned to Poland in 1918, where he served as a leader of the Poale Zion and edited a Yiddish newspaper.

In 1935, Zerubavel was allowed by British Mandatory authorities to return to Palestine. There he published Yiddish books and journals, and served on the executive committee of the Histadrut, whose labor archive he directed beginning in 1951. In 1949, he became a member of the Palestine Zionist Executive, and helped found the Mapam party.