Konrad Adenauer, 1876-1967
Adenauer, West Germany’s chancellor from 1949 to 1963, initiated talks in March 1952 that resulted in West Germany agreeing to pay Israel 3 billion marks over 12 years as Holocaust reparations. The funds were crucial…
Chaim Arlosoroff, 1899-1933
Arlosoroff, an ardent socialist and Zionist, was born in Ukraine and immigrated to Palestine in 1921. He was a founder of the Histadrut labor federation. Working with the Jewish Agency, he helped negotiate the Haavara…
Arthur Balfour, 1848-1930
Balfour, an English politician and diplomat who served as the British prime minister from 1902 to 1905, was the foreign secretary in November 1917 when he sent a letter to Lord Rothschild that became known…
Selig Brodetsky, 1888-1954
Ukrainian-born Brodetsky engaged the Zionist movement as an undergraduate at Cambridge. He attended the Twelfth to Twenty-Third Zionist Congresses and served with the World Zionist Executive from 1928 to 1951. He was the president of…
Winston Churchill, 1874-1965
Churchill visited Palestine in March 1921 as the British secretary of state for the colonies and declared that a Jewish national home would be a “blessing to the whole world.” In July 1922, after the…
Richard Crossman, 1907-1974
A leader of the Labor Party Zionists in the British Parliament, Crossman served on the 1944-1946 Anglo-American Palestine Commission, which aimed to set the number of Jews permitted into Palestine after World War II. He…
Blanche “Baffy” Dugdale, 1880-1948
A close adviser to Chaim Weizmann on his relations with British officials, Dugdale was a strong, non-Jewish advocate for Zionism. A niece of Arthur Balfour’s, she wrote a biography of him and a book on…
Eliahu Elath, 1903-1990
A Ukraine-born journalist, politician and diplomat, Elath arrived in the Land of Israel in 1924, joined the Jewish Agency in 1934, and became Israel’s first ambassador to the United States and, when the diplomatic post…
David Lloyd George, 1863-1945
Lloyd George was the British prime minister from 1916 to 1922. His government issued the Balfour Declaration and took control of Palestine during World War I, negotiated for the inclusion of the declaration’s language at…
Frederick “Frank” Kisch, 1888-1943
A British brigadier general, Kisch chaired the predecessor to the Jewish Agency, the Palestine Zionist Executive, from 1918 to 1921. Kisch was prolific in Jewish life in Mandate Palestine. He helped found the Palestine Philharmonic…
Pope Paul VI, 1897-1978
Pope Paul VI’s visit to the Holy Land in 1964 served as de facto recognition of the State of Israel. It was the first time any pope left Italy in over a century. In 1965,…
Raoul Wallenberg, 1912-1947
Wallenberg was a Swedish diplomat who in 1944 saved thousands of Hungarian Jews, including future Congressman Tom Lantos, by providing protective passports and safe houses. He went missing in January 1945 and is believed to…
Chaim Weizmann, 1874-1952
Weizmann, a native of Russian-controlled Poland, was the first president of Israel. In England during World War I, he used his chemistry skills to develop a synthetic process for making acetone and thus made relationships…
Harold Wilson, 1916-1995
Labor Party leader Wilson was the British prime minister from 1964 to 1970 and 1974 to 1976 and was one of Parliament’s strongest supporters of Israel, where he made social democratic friends. He spoke up…
