Yitzchak Gruenbaum

Yitzhak Gruenbaum (Polish: Izaak Grünbaum, Hebrew and Yiddish: יצחק גרינבוים, born 1879, died 1970) was a noted leader of the Zionist movement among Polish Jewry between the two world wars and of the Yishuv in Mandatory Palestine, and the first Interior Minister of Israel and candidate for President.

Yitzchak Gruenbaum (1948)

Quotes

• I think it is necessary to state here – Zionism is above everything.
• I will not demand that the Jewish Agency allocate a sum of 300,000 or 100,000 pounds sterling to help European Jewry. And I think that whoever demands such things is performing an anti-Zionist act.
  • During an early 1943 discussion suggesting allocation of some “Zionist money” for rescue during the Holocaust:
  • Tom Segev, The Seventh Million ISBN 978-0805066609.

Quotes about Gruenbaum

• Indeed, there were Jews, like Yitzhak Gruenbaum, the Polish Zionist leader, who sincerely hoped for a united front of German and Jewish minorities [in Central and Eastern Europe]. Yet far from uniting in their common adversity, insecure Germans turned against even more insecure Jews.
  • Niall Ferguson, The War of the World: Twentieth-Century Conflict and the Descent of the West (2006), p. 173