Avraham Stern
Avraham Stern ( Hebrew אברהם שטרן, Avraham Shtern ), alias Yair (* December 23, 1907 in Suwałki , Russian Empire ; † February 12, 1942 in Tel Aviv , British Palestine) , was the founder and leader of a Zionist independence movement known as Lechi from 1940 was called Stern Gang by the British Mandate .
Life
childhood
Abraham Stern was born in the Russian Empire (today, Poland ) to a Zionist family. During the Bolshevik Revolution he was forced to live with his mother and brother far away from his father and his homeland.
Youth in Palestine and Florence
1925 Star moved to Palestine where Britain after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire , the League of Nations Mandate for Palestine perceived. He finished high school in Jerusalem and then studied at the Hebrew University . He used it to finance his studies by giving private lessons. Stern was considered a gifted humanities student and won a scholarship to study Classical Philology at the University of Florence . In 1929 he returned to Palestine, entered the Hagana and a little later left his studies to devote himself entirely to the struggle for Jewish independence. The Arab uprising in 1929 led Stern to believe that the Jews would have to start fighting the British.
Time in the Zionist Underground
In 1931 a group of Haganah fighters rejected what seemed to them to be moderation and restraint in the struggle for independence, separated from the Haganah and formed their own armed resistance movement known as the Irgun . Stern, whose views had become increasingly militant after the Arab uprising of 1929, became an active member of the Irgun.
It carried the underground name "Yair" in honor of the commander of the Zealots of Masada , Eleazar ben Ja'ir . For Stern, the main enemies of the Jews and the obstacle to independence were not the Arabs but the British , and he called for an armed struggle against the British. With David Raziel he wrote a military instruction manual on the use of the revolver , the first in the Hebrew language . In 1933 he wrote the poem " Hayalim Almonim " (in German , "Anonymous soldiers"), which was first the hymn of the Irgun and later of the Lechi. In 1936 he married Roni Bronstein.
After the Arab riots, the Irgun split in 1937 and many of its members returned to the Haganah. Before World War II , he was active in recruiting volunteer fighters and immigrants from among the ranks of Polish Jews . Stern and others who opposed the Haganah leadership remained in the Irgun under the command of Vladimir Zeev Jabotinsky and continued their militant activities. Stern went to Poland to set up training courses for the Irgun and to receive weapons. When he returned to Palestine, he was arrested by the British and was in prison from August 1939 to June 1940 . Stern insisted that the fight against the British should remain independent of any political involvement, even with Jabotinsky's revisionists . He vehemently opposed moderation, and when the Irgun decided in August 1940 to postpone their attacks on the British until after World War II , Stern founded a radical faction, the "Lechi", an acronym for "Lochamei Cherut Israel." "-" Fighters for Israel's Freedom ". Stern believed that even in the face of the Nazi threat , it was mostly the British who threatened the Jews. He doubted an Allied victory and even spoke out in favor of an alliance with the German Reich and Fascist Italy , convinced that such a connection would be beneficial to national efforts in Palestine. Stern's extremism and numerous robberies carried out by his group brought Lechi the opposition of many Jews and of course the British. In early 1942, the British offered a reward for Stern's capture. Stern set the outlines for the ideological and political principles of resistance in his essay "18 Principles of Rebirth".
Stern as a poet
Stern was also a poet. In 1934 he put together his first book of verses for publication, his poetic work consists of 53 short poems and was described by Moshe Hazani as an expression of the eroticism of death and aneroticism in women. One of Stern's role models was Juliusz Słowacki , who wrote about the suffering of Poles during the long struggle for Polish national independence . A collection of Stern's underground poetry was published after his death.
Tried cooperation with the National Socialists
Stern had doubts that the Allies would win World War II, so he contacted fascist Italy and Nazi Germany . In January 1941, Stern tried to reach an agreement with the German Reich through the German envoy in Beirut . In Lebanon, there were first attempts to establish Syria and independence from the French League of Nations mandate in 1937 , which was exercised by the Vichy regime in 1941 . Stern offered to play an active role on the side of the German Reich, if in return Jewish refugees would be supported in their migration to Palestine . At the end of 1941, Stern tried again to come into contact with the German Reich. Answers from the German Reich are not documented.
Latter days, persecution and death
Persecution and Anti-British Operations
The Lechi was a small group with only a few hundred members and limited financial resources. The group was persecuted by the British and the yishuv for refusing to operate against the British during World War II. There were operations that also killed Jews. The British published pictures of Stern and other members of the lechi in the Jewish newspapers with a promise to reward those who would help them catch them. Stern was therefore forced to hide in Tel Aviv and move from place to place.
Arrest and Assassination
On February 12, 1942, Stern hid in a closet in Moshe and Tova Svora's house while the British Mandate Authority was looking for him, which was subsequently able to arrest him. After his arrest and handcuffing, Stern was shot from behind in the room. Avraham Stern was buried in the Nahalat Yitzhak Cemetery ( Givʿatajim ). The building in which Stern was murdered now houses a Lechi museum.
After his death
Israeli politicians and government officials are to be present every year at events on Avraham Stern Remembrance Day. In 1978 an Israeli postage stamp with the portrait of Avraham Stern was printed. His son Yair, born on June 7, 1942, just four months after his father's murder, became a radio journalist, television commentator and head of Israeli state television. In 1981, south of Qalqiliya, a city named Kochav Yair (Yair's star) was named after Stern's nom de guerre .
literature
- Saul Zadka: Blood in Zion . London 1995.
- David Charters: The British Army and Jewish Insurgency in Palestine, 1945–1947 , London 1989.
- Star gear . In: Ian FW Beckett: Encyclopedia of Guerilla Warfare . New York 2001, p. 224.
- Joseph Heller : The Stern Gang. Ideology, Politics, and Terror, 1940-1949 . Frank Cass, 1995, ISBN 0-7146-4558-3 .
- Kati Marton : A death in Jerusalem . Pantheon, 1994 ISBN 0-679-42083-5 .
- Arie Perliger, Leonhard Weinberg: Jewish Self-Defense and Terrorist Groups Prior to the Establishment of the State of Israel: Roots and Traditions . Routledge, 2003.
- J. Bowyer Bell: Terror Out of Zion: Irgun Zvai Leumi, Lehi, and the Palestine Underground, 1929-1949 . Avon, 1977, ISBN 0-380-39396-4
- Zev Golan: Free Jerusalem: Heroes, Heroines and Rogues Who Created the State of Israel . Devora, 2003, ISBN 1-930143-54-0
Web links
- Biography in German. The Jewish Agency for Israel
- Hillel Kook. etzel.org.il - Profile at the Irgun website
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b c d e f Dr. Motti Friedman: Abraham Stern (1907-1942) - poet, underground fighter and founder of "Lechi" (archived version). In: The Jewish Agency for Israel. Internet Archive, December 11, 2000, accessed October 17, 2018 .
- ↑ a b c d e Zionist Archives; Avraham "Yair" star. In: http://www.zionistarchives.org.il . World Zionist Organization, WZO, accessed October 16, 2018 .
- ↑ a b c Ada Amichal Yevin: In purple: the life of Yair-Abraham Stern . Hadar Publishing House, Tel Aviv 1986, p. 290.
- ↑ Moshe Hazani: Red carpet, white lilies: Love of death in the poetry of the Jewish underground leader Avraham Stern . In: Psychoanalytic Review , vol. 89, 2002, pp. 1-48.
- ^ A b Colin Shindler: Triumph of Military Zionism: Nationalism and the Origins of the Israeli Right . IB Tauris & Company, London 2005, p. 189.
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Star, Avraham |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Yair |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | Polish poet, founder and head of the Zionist organization Lechi |
| DATE OF BIRTH | December 23, 1907 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Suwałki |
| DATE OF DEATH | February 12, 1942 |
| Place of death | Tel Aviv |