Yitzhak Ben-Zvi

Yitzhak Ben-Zvi (b. Shimshelevich) was the second president of the State of Israel and a longtime Labor Party leader. Born in Poltava, Ukraine, Ben-Zvi moved to Palestine in 1907, first living in Jaffa. After several years in Palestine, he studied law at Istanbul Univer­sity, along with David Ben-Gurion. During World War I, Ottoman authorities expelled him from Palestine. Ben-Zvi lived in the United States for a few years as a Po‘ale Tsiyon activist while doing research on the history of Jews in the Land of Israel, which resulted in the Hebrew and Yiddish publication, in collaboration with Ben Gurion, Eretz Israel—Past and Present (1918). Back in Palestine, Ben-Zvi served on the Jerusalem city council and as the president of the Jewish National Council (the executive government of the pre-1948 Jewish Yishuv) starting in 1931. In 1952, he became the president of the new State of Israel, a position he held until the end of his life. As a historian of Mediterranean Jewry and the history of Ottoman Palestine, Ben-Zvi also founded Jerusalem’s Institute for the Study of Ori­ental Jewish Communities in the Middle East, which was renamed the Ben-Zvi Institute in his honor.