born 8. August 1923, Będzin
died 6. June 1996, Holland
lived in Będzin, u Małachowskiego 16 / Israel
Israeli lawyer, historian, social and political activist
He was born as Leib Hassenberg – son of a Religious Education teacher. After finishing Rapaport’s School, he began his studies in the Fürstenberg Gymnasium of Humanities. On 1. August 1943 he was deported to Birkenau, then to Monowice. During the evacuation of the camp in January 1945 he fled into the woods, where he lived to see the arrival of Soviet troops. In the camp, he lost his parents and five siblings.
In the autumn of 1945 he went to Palestine with a group of Zionist youth (while on Cyprus he was interned), where he arrived in 1947, and he enrolled in Trade Unions school. After demobilization in 1949 (he fought in the independence war) he became parliamentary secretary. In 1958 he graduated from the law school. He was active in the Progressive Party (until 1958 he was its spokesman), and from 1961 to 1988 in the Independent Liberals Party and in the Liberal Party. In his 1994 doctoral dissertation was published as a book entitled “Facing the Holocaust in Budapest: The International Committee of the Red Cross and the Jews in Hungary, 1943-1945.” On 12. March 1996 met with President of Poland and on 15. March, as chairman of the World Union of Jewish Basin visited Bedzin for the last time. He died suddenly at the Congress of the Liberal International. He was awarded the Knight’s Cross of the Order of Merit.