How to Pronounce A. L. Zissu
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Jan 25, 1888 Piatra Neamț, Neamț County, Romania Died on 16 Sep 1956 (aged 68)
Romanian writer, political essayist, industrialist
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A. L. Zissu, Date of Birth, Place of Birth, Family, Facts, Age, Net Worth, Biography and More in FamedBorn.com
About A. L. Zissu
- Abraham Leib Zissu (first name also Avram, middle name also Leiba or Leibu; January 25, 1888 – September 6, 1956) was a Romanian writer, political essayist, industrialist, and spokesman of the Jewish Romanian community.
- Of lowly social origin and a recipient of Hasidic education, he became a noted cultural activist, polemicist, and newspaper founder, remembered primarily for his Mântuirea daily.
- By the end of World War I, he emerged as a theorist of Religious Zionism, preferring communitarianism and self-segregation to the assimilationist option, while also promoting literary modernism in his activity as novelist, dramatist, and cultural sponsor.
- He was the inspiration behind the Jewish Party, which competed with the mainstream Union of Romanian Jews for the Jewish vote.
- Zissu and Union leader Wilhelm Filderman had a lifelong disputation over religious and practical politics. Always a confrontational critic of antisemitism, Zissu found himself marginalized by fascist regimes in the late 1930s and for most of World War II.
- During the Holocaust era, he risked his personal freedom to defend the interests of his community, and was especially vocal as a critic of the collaborationist Central Jewish Office.
- He eventually reached a compromise with the Ion Antonescu regime when the latter curbed its deportations of Jews to Transnistria, and, after 1943, helped initiate the Aliyah Bet exodus of Romanian and Hungarian Jews to Mandatory Palestine.
- His contribution is at the center of an enduring controversy, focusing on his alleged favoritism of Zionist Jews and his cantankerousness. In his final years, Zissu's Zionism merged with explicit anti-communism, clashing directly with the Romanian Communist Party's anti-cosmopolitan agenda.
- His renewed effort to ensure the mass emigration of Romanian Jews, and his contacts with Israel, made him a target for the communist regime: in 1951, he was arrested, and, in 1954, sentenced to life imprisonment for the crime of high treason.
- He was amnestied after some two years in prison, where he had been tortured and brutalized.
- Himself an emigrant, he died shortly after resettling in Israel.
