The Heritage of 5703

Zalman Shazar (Shneur Zalman Rubashov), the third president of the State of Israel, was born in Mir, Belorussia, to a prominent Hasidic rabbinical family. He became active in the Po‘ale Tsiyon movement and immigrated to Palestine in 1924. Shazar was a member of the executive committee of the Histadrut and was active in the World Zionist Organization. In 1944, he was appointed editor of the newspaper Davar. Elected to the first Knesset in 1949, Shazar served as minister of education. He was elected president of Israel in 1963 and 1968. Throughout his life, Shazar wrote poetry, autobiographical fiction, scholarly treatises on philology and on biblical criticism, and articles in Yiddish and Hebrew. In 1966, he received the Bialik Prize for literature.