Nathan Schwalb

Nathan Schwalb (* 1. April 1908 in Stanislau , Galicia , Austria-Hungary ; † 24. March 2004 in Tel Aviv ) was a Jewish trade unionists, Delegate of Hechaluz and the Histadrut , the driving force of the Zionist rescue resistance since 1939 by Geneva from saved at least 200,000 Jews from death in the Holocaust .

Life

He was the son of a language and religion professor at the local Jewish high school and a private teacher, attended school up to high school graduation and became a member of forbidden Jewish associations, including Makkabi Hazair , Gordonia (of which he was also a co-founder) and Hechaluz .

He studied for three semesters the rights in Lvov and emigrated in 1929 to Palestine from.

There he took part in the reconstruction of Kibbutz Chulda, which had been destroyed by the Arabs, and began working in the Jewish trade union movement Histadrut, for which he was a delegate in Prague and Vienna from 1938 to 1939 , from where he tried to enable as many Jews as possible to emigrate to Palestine .

In 1939 he took part in the 21st Zionist Congress in Geneva, the last before the outbreak of the Second World War , and was the main driving force behind the construction of the new world headquarters of the Hechaluz in Geneva. Until 1945 he organized, in cooperation with Saly Mayer from JOINT, the leading figure of Swiss Jewry , and the Swiss Red Cross, support and rescue operations for Jews threatened with death in Europe.

In 1941 his father and his siblings were shot by the Gestapo in Stanislaw. In 1945 he returned to the Kibbutz Chulda and became a leading member there, from 1946 he was again a Histadrut delegate and liaison to various unions in Europe.

Nathan Schwalb, who, once endowed with a phenomenal memory, suffered from Alzheimer's in the last months of his life, died in Tel Aviv in 2004.

Appreciation

His life's work is almost unknown and has never been sufficiently appreciated, which is also due to the fact that for decades after the war he did not provide any information and kept the information in his archives secret in order to achieve the goal of Zionism, the creation of a Jewish state of Israel in Palestine, not to be endangered by self-tearing guilt discussions.

In 1954, Nathan Schwalb fell into political disgrace as he remained loyal to his old friend and protégé, Pinchas Lawon , when he was overthrown as defense minister by David Ben-Gurion in the Lawon affair . Ben-Gurion blamed Lawon for a failed Mossad campaign in Cairo . This also made Nathan Schwalb a persona non grata. His rescue work was forgotten.

literature

• Arno Lustiger , To the fight to the life and death! The book on the resistance of the Jews in Europe 1933–1945 , Cologne 1994

Web links

• Nathan Schwalb and the Hechaluz World Association from 1939