Belarus-born agricultural settlement leader Ettinger encouraged Jewish families to live on the land outside capitalist society. He served as director general of the Jewish Colonization Association in South America and in a leadership role for…
Born in Prussia, Kalischer was an early proponent of the resettlement of the Land of Israel to strengthen the Jewish people. He contributed to Hebrew journals and wrote on the need for Diaspora Jews to…
A Holocaust survivor from Hungary, Kishon was a columnist, playwright and film director. His satirical work portrayed social and political issues, often focusing on the day-to-day struggles of regular people or on the state bureaucracy….
The youngest survivor of the Buchenwald concentration camp, Lau arrived in the Land of Israel with a brother in 1945. He was the chief rabbi of Netanya from 1978 to 1988 and of Tel Aviv…
A Belarus native, Levin was a Jewish Enlightenment poet who wrote in Hebrew on socialist themes. Concerned with Jewish lives in Russia, Levin wrote one of his most famous poems, “Daniyel be-gov ha-arayot” (“Daniel in…
A scholar and author born in Lithuania, Lilienblum embraced the Hibbat Zion (Lovers of Zion) movement in Russia after the pogroms of 1881 and served as secretary of an Odesa committee on Palestine settlement. His…
Born in Lithuania and ordained at the Volozhin yeshiva, Mohilever was a founder of the Hovevei Zion (Lovers of Zion) movement in Russia and served as its president in the 1880s. He helped launch Religious…
A Lithuanian Orthodox rabbi born in Belarus, Reines was one of the earliest leaders of Religious Zionism, supported an unsuccessful effort to establish a settlement mixing Torah and labor in the early 1890s, and founded…
One of the most famous Jewish refuseniks in the Soviet Union, Natan Sharansky survived Siberian imprisonment to make it to Israel, where he became a politician, author and Jewish Agency chairman.
A lawyer and TV journalist, Tamano-Shata in 2013 became the first Ethiopian-born woman in the Knesset. She also is the first Ethiopian-born Cabinet member, serving as immigrant absorption minister since May 2020 under three prime…
Yitzhak, who moved to Israel at age 19, was the first Ethiopian immigrant to earn an Israeli medical degree, having started his studies in Ethiopia, and to serve as an IDF combat surgeon. He was…
