Yosef Sprinzak

Yosef Sprinzak

Josef Sprinzak ( Hebrew יוֹסֵף שְׁפְּרִינְצַק Jōssef Schprīnzaq , Yiddish שפּרינצאַק Shprintsak , Cyrillic Йосе́ф Шпри́нцак ; December 8, 1885 in Moscow , Russian Empire - January 28, 1959 in Jerusalem ) was a leading Zionist in the first half of the 20th century, an Israeli politician, and the first spokesman for the Knesset , a position he held from 1949 until his Death in 1959.

Life

After the Jews were expelled from Moscow in 1891, his family moved to Chișinău , where he founded Zeʿirej Zion (Young [People] of Zion). He began studying medicine at the American University of Beirut in 1908 and settled in Palestine in 1910 during the Second Aliyah (1904–1914) .

Together with Elieser Kaplan , he led HaPoel HaZair ("The Young Worker"), a Zionist-socialist party founded in 1905, which in 1930 became part of the Mapai party. Its members were pro-British and supporters of Chaim Weizmann . He was one of the founders of the Histadrut in 1920 and headed this organization as General Secretary from 1945 to 1949.

Sprinzak was elected Speaker of the Provisional Parliament on July 15, 1948, in this role he laid the foundations of Israeli parliamentarism . After the parliamentary elections in 1949 , he entered the first Knesset as a member of the Mapai and was elected as speaker of the new parliament . He moved in again in the next two elections and was confirmed as spokesman on both occasions.

As part of his role as spokesman, he was acting president during Chaim Weizmann's illness. After Weizmann's death on November 9, 1952, he was acting president until Inauguration Yitzhak Ben Zvi on 10 December 1952nd

His son Jaïr Sprinzak (1911-1999) from his marriage to Channah Wanetik (1885-1987) was also a member of the Knesset.

Web links

Commons : Yosef Sprinzak  - collection of images, videos and audio files

• Yosef Sprinzak on the Knesset website (in English)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ John F. Oppenheimer (Red.) And a .: Lexicon of Judaism. 2nd Edition. Bertelsmann Lexikon Verlag, Gütersloh u. a. 1971, ISBN 3-570-05964-2 , Sp. 773.