Zalman Shazar — president with roots in the Russian Empire
Zalman Shazar was born Shneur Zalman Rubashov in 1889 in Mir, in the Minsk Governorate of the Russian Empire, now in Belarus; his birth date is given as 6 October by Britannica and 24 November by Wikipedia. His family were Chabad Hasidim. After a fire destroyed much of Mir in 1892, they moved to the nearby town of Stolbtsy, where he received a traditional religious education while also absorbing his parents' Zionism. His Hebrew name, Shazar, was formed from the initials of his original name.
In 1905 he joined Po'alei Zion, the Labour Zionist party, and he was briefly imprisoned by the tsarist authorities for his activities. In 1907 he moved to Vilna and began a career in journalism, writing for Yiddish newspapers in Russia and the United States. He first visited Palestine in 1911, and from 1912 studied history and philosophy at the universities of Freiburg, Strasbourg and Berlin, where he was among the founders of the HeHalutz pioneer movement in Germany.
In 1924 he settled in Tel Aviv, joined the secretariat of the Histadrut labour federation and in 1925 became a member of the editorial board of its new daily, Davar, of which he was editor-in-chief from 1944 to 1949 (Britannica dates his editorship to 1938–48). In 1920 he had married the writer Rachel Katznelson.
Elected to the first Knesset in 1949 for Mapai, he became Israel's first Minister of Education and Culture in David Ben-Gurion's government and was responsible for the Compulsory Education Law of that year. He left the government in 1950 or 1951, joined the executive of the Jewish Agency and from 1956 to 1960 was acting chairman of its Jerusalem executive. On 21 May 1963 the Knesset elected him the third President of Israel, succeeding Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, who had died in office; he was re-elected in 1968 and served until 24 May 1973. He was the first president to live at the President's Residence in Jerusalem.
Throughout his life Shazar wrote poetry, autobiographical prose, scholarly studies and journalism in Hebrew and Yiddish, and in 1966 he received the Bialik Prize for literature. He died in Jerusalem on 5 October 1974 and was buried on Mount Herzl.
"Studied in Germany from 1912 and first visited Palestine in 1911; settled in Tel Aviv in 1924."
Migration storyTracing the roots — Mir, Minsk Governorate (now Grodno Region, Belarus)
Born Shneur Zalman Rubashov in Mir, in the Minsk Governorate, in 1889 into a Chabad Hasidic family, he grew up in Stolbtsy, joined Po'alei Zion in 1905 and worked as a journalist in Vilna before studying in Germany.
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Mir, Minsk Governorate (now Grodno Region, Belarus). At the time, this region lay within the Russian Empire, which spanned from Poland to the Pacific.