Zalman Shazar Is Elected Israel’s Third President

May 21, 1963

Zalman Shazar, born Shneor Zalman Rubashov in 1889 in Mir, Belarus, to a family of Chabad rabbis, is elected the third president of Israel. He succeeds Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, who died in office April 23.

Involved in the early development of Zionism, Shazar organized Jewish self-defense groups in Belarus and Ukraine and joined the Poalei Zion (Workers of Zion) movement in 1905. In 1923, at the 13th Zionist Congress, he was elected to the Zionist Executive Committee.

Shazar, who first visited the Land of Israel in 1911, makes aliyah in 1924, four years after marrying Rachel Katzenelson. Arriving in Palestine, he was active in the Zionist Labor Movement and the Zionist Organization. He served as a member of the Executive Committee of the Histadrut labor union and functioned as a member of the editorial board of the Davar newspaper, serving as its editor in chief from 1944 to 1949.

Shazar was one of the writers of Israel’s Declaration of Independence. He made his official entry into Israeli politics in 1949, when he was elected to the first Knesset as a member of the Mapai party. Immediately after the election, Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion appointed him minister of education, a role he served for one term.

Although he did not serve as a minister in Ben-Gurion’s second government, he maintained his Knesset seat in the 1951 and 1955 elections. In 1952, Shazar became a member of the Jewish Agency Executive. He resigned from the Knesset in 1956 to become the chairman of the Jewish Agency’s Jerusalem Executive from 1956 to 1960. Between 1960 and 1963, Shazar served other senior functions in the Jewish Agency until his election as president, an office he holds for 10 years. He is the first Israeli president to live at the President’s Residence (Beit ha’Nassi) in Jerusalem, which he opens to various scholars and artists.

Likewise a noted writer, he publishes hundreds of articles and poems and is the namesake of the Zalman Shazar Center for the Study of Jewish History in Jerusalem. Shazar dies Oct. 5, 1974, in Jerusalem.