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.
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Cover of Hasmonaea, the Romanian Zionist magazine, in 1924
1940 issue of Hasmonaea, congratulating King Michael I and Ion Antonescu for their seizure of power, on behalf of Romania's Jewish population
A Jewish literary gathering at the Barașeum Theater in Bucharest, 1943. Zissu (seated at the table, on the left) alongside a young man, possibly Dinu Hervian. In the background, from the left: actress Beate Fredanov; diarist Emil Dorian; poet Nina Cassian; poet Sașa Pană; two men (one of whom is journalist Horia Liman); poet Maria Banuș
Group of Jewish parachutists, photographed in Bucharest in September 1944. Shaike Dan Trachtenberg is center, seated, with Baruch Kamin to his left
March 1947 playbill for a Betar benefit in Roman, urging Jewish youths to mobilize for the colonization effort in Palestine (called Eretz and Patria Evreească de mâine, "Tomorrow's Jewish Homeland")
Cell of Jilava Prison, photographed in 2012Writers born in the 1880s 6
About this person
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.
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