Abraham Leib "A. L." Zissu | |
|---|---|
 Zissu, photographed ca. 1935 | |
| President of the Jewish Party | |
| In office September 18, 1944 – July 21, 1946 | |
| Preceded by | none (Tivadar Fischer to 1938) |
| Succeeded by | Collective leadership |
| Chairman of the Romanian Zionist Executive | |
| In office January 1944 – ca. September 1945 | |
| Preceded by | none (Mișu Benvenisti to 1943) |
| Succeeded by | Bernard Rohrlich |
| Personal details | |
| Born | January 25, 1888 Piatra Neamț, Kingdom of Romania |
| Died | September 6, 1956 (aged 68) Tel Aviv, Israel |
| Other political affiliations | Zionist Union (1915) |
| Spouse | Rachel Zimmer |
| Children | Theodor (Theodore) Zissu (1916–1942) |
| Profession | Writer, journalist, industrialist, publisher, restaurateur, inventor |
| Signature |  |
Abraham Leib Zissu (first name also Avram, middle name also Leiba or Leibu; Hebrew: אברהם לייב זיסו; January 25, 1888 – September 6, 1956) was a Romanian writer, political essayist, industrialist, and spokesman of the Jewish Romanian community. Of modest social origin and a recipient of Hasidic education, he became a cultural activist, polemicist, and newspaper founder, remembered primarily for his Mântuirea daily. During the 1910s, he involved himself in the effort to unify and reactivate the local Zionist movement. By the end of World War I, Zissu also 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 (UER) for the Jewish vote. Zissu and UER leader Wilhelm Filderman had a lifelong disputation over religious and practical politics, which gave way to a mutual dislike punctuated by episodes of fraternization.
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, 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. Such efforts required that he contact and build a working relationship with high-ranking officials of the regime, including Mihai Antonescu, Radu Lecca, and Pamfil Șeicaru. Though backed by the Rescue Committee of the Jewish Agency and the World Jewish Congress, his contribution is at the center of an enduring controversy, focusing on his alleged favoritism of Zionist Jews and his cantankerousness. He had a reluctant collaboration with the more junior Zionist Mișu Benvenisti, who emerged as one of his key rivals.
In 1942, while held at Târgu Jiu internment camp, Zissu was co-opted by the Romanian resistance cells, and formed a political bond with Antonescu rival Nicolae Rădescu. Assisting M. H. Maxy of the Romanian Communist Party, he established links with the more mainstream National Peasants' Party. He and Maxy also formed a Jewish Democratic Front, holding seats on its Central Committee alongside Leon Ghelerter. From 1944, they helped finance the underground movement against Antonescu. As part of such organizational efforts, Zissu personally handled the accommodation of Jewish parachutists, including Shaike Dan Trachtenberg. He also persuaded the increasingly defeatist Romanian regime not to tolerate pogroms on its territory. Shortly after the Coup of August 1944, which restored democracy, Zissu's Zionism merged with explicit anti-communism, clashing directly with the Communist Party's anti-cosmopolitan agenda; he also found himself opposed to the mainstream groups in Romania and Palestine, criticizing Labor Zionism and celebrating Zionist political violence when used against British authorities.
The creation of a monopolistic Jewish Democratic Committee, led by Maxy and favored by Benvenisti, resulted in Zissu's near-complete marginalization in political life; friends quarreled with him when he publicized his anticlericalism, which specifically targeted Chief Rabbi Alexandru Șafran. In that context, Zissu veered toward a non-communist "Biblical socialism", which he envisaged as the doctrine of a new political group in Israel. After 1948, his renewed effort to ensure the mass emigration of Romanian Jews, and his contacts with Israeli government officials, made him a target for the communist regime. In 1951, he was arrested and tortured into confessing that he had spied for Israel; in 1954, he was sentenced to life imprisonment for the crime of high treason. Zissu was amnestied after two years, having spent most of them in the notoriously harsh Pitești prison. Finally allowed to emigrate in July 1956, he died less than two months after in a Tel Aviv hospital. He left a corpus of works in various languages, including Hebrew, many of which survive as manuscripts.