December 6, 1867
Zionist leader Leo Motzkin is born in present-day Brovary, Ukraine, into a traditional Jewish household. He becomes interested in the Zionist cause after witnessing the 1881 pogrom in Kyiv.
He joins the Russian-Jewish Academic Society at his university in Berlin, which consists of Jewish students dedicated to Hibbat Zion (Love of Zion). This group becomes a key forerunner of political Zionism. Its members actively debate other Jewish students about Zionist ideologies and the means for settlement in Palestine. After completing his studies, Motzkin chooses Zionism as his life’s work rather than pursue a career in the sciences.
At the First Zionist Congress, he establishes himself as an outspoken advocate for the Basel Program for establishing a Jewish state. He advocates for diplomatic relations with the government ruling the Land of Israel, the Ottoman Empire. After the Congress in 1897, Theodor Herzl sends Motzkin to Palestine on a fact-finding mission. He returns with a critical opinion of the Hibbat Zion movement because he adamantly opposes the mass settlement and land-purchasing program set into motion by the French philanthropist Baron Edmond James de Rothschild.
Motzkin advocates for the rights of Russian Jews and the promotion of their self-defense, and he demands that his fellow Zionists concern themselves with the rights and treatment of Jews in the Diaspora and not just worry about the Jewish national home in Palestine. At the request of the World Zionist Organization, he writes a book about the wave of pogroms and Jewish suffering in Russia; the book is published in 1909 and 1910.
Motzkin serves as the chairman of the Zionist Executive from 1925 to until his death in 1933. Much of his focus near the end of his life turns to the protection of German Jews amid the rise of Nazism.
