April 23, 1963
Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, Israel’s second president, dies at age 78 after a brief battle with cancer. His predecessor, Chaim Weizmann, also died in office in 1952.
Ben-Zvi’s Jerusalem funeral procession is lined by 100,000 mourners. Though he dies just a week before Israel’s 15th Independence Day, flags are lowered to half-staff, and no bands are included in military parades.
He was born Ovadiah Shimshelevich in Poltava, Ukraine, in 1884. His father, Zvi, was a member of B’nei Moshe, a secret order of the Hovevei Zion (Lovers of Zion) movement. Yitzhak was active in Zionist and Jewish self-defense groups in Ukraine, deepening his involvement in both after a two-month visit to the Land of Israel in 1904 and a pogrom in Poltava in November 1905.
In 1906, his home was raided by Russian authorities, who found a cache of weapons belonging to a Jewish defense group Ben-Zvi led. He escaped, but his father was caught and imprisoned in Siberia until 1923.
Ben-Zvi made aliyah in 1907 and settled in Jaffa, where he created a Palestine branch of Poalei Zion (Workers of Zion), the Labor Zionist movement he helped create in Russia a few years earlier. In Palestine, he remained active in self-defense, helping found the Bar Giora and Hashomer defense organizations.
From 1912 to 1914, Ben-Zvi, along with David Ben-Gurion and Israel Shochat, studied law at the University of Istanbul and returned to Palestine after the outbreak of World War I. He and Ben-Gurion were expelled by Turkish authorities, so they travelled to New York and established the Halutz (pioneer) organization to recruit North American Jews to support and fight for the Jewish community in Palestine.
Returning to Palestine in 1918, Ben-Zvi assumed a leading role in developing the Histadrut labor federation in the Yishuv and became a rising star within socialist-leaning Zionist political movements.
A signer of Israel’s Declaration of Independence, Ben-Zvi served in the Knesset from 1949 to 1952, when he was elected Israel’s second president.
Ben-Zvi’s public life was not limited to politics. A scholar and writer, he worked with Yosef Haim Brenner and Ben-Gurion as co-editors of Ha-Achdut, a journal of the Israeli Socialist Workers Party. He and Ben-Gurion co-authored the internationally distributed book The Land of Israel Past and Present.
Additionally, Ben-Zvi was fascinated with Eastern Jewish culture and society. In 1947 he founded the Ben-Zvi Institute for the Study of Jewish Communities in the East for “studying documents, manuscripts and printed material relating to the history, communal life and culture of the Jewish communities under Islam and in other countries of the Middle East and Asia.”
He also was renowned for his extensive on the chronology of the Samaritans.
