Avram Leib Zissu

Abraham Leib Zissu 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.