Call to Arms

Born in Sevastopol and raised in Vilna, Abba Kovner was a partisan, poet, novelist, and major figure in Israeli cultural life. A leader of the Zionist youth group Ha-Shomer ha-Tsa‘ir, in late 1941 Kovner issued the first Jewish call to arms and took over the leadership of the United Partisans Organization after the death of Itzik Vittenberg. Among the liberators of Vilna in 1944, Kovner organized illegal immigration of Jews to Palestine (the so-called Beriḥah movement) but was caught by the British when trying to procure arms for a group called Nakam that sought to avenge the Holocaust. During Israel’s War of Independence he served as the political commissar for the Givati Brigade. All these experiences he later recast into prose and verse. From 1946 to his death, Kovner was a resident of Kibbutz ‘Ein ha-Ḥoresh.