Abraham Rakanti

Abraham Rakanti was born in 1888 in Thessaloniki

Avraham Shmuel Rakanti was born in 1888 in Salonica, then part of the Ottoman Empire. He studied at the Great Talmud Torah and at the Alliance high school in the city. His younger brother was Leon Recanati, founder of Bank Discount.

He began writing for the Jewish press in Ladino as a teenager. In 1917 he founded the French weekly Pro-Yisrael with Yitzhak Raphael Molho and served as its editor. He also reported for Die Welt and the Jewish Chronicle.

In 1911 he became head of the Maccabi association, and later founded the Mizrachi movement in Greece and its youth group. He set up the Greek branch of the Revisionist Zionist movement and joined its world leadership in 1925. He also served as deputy mayor of Thessaloniki and worked for the civil rights of Jews.

After immigrating with his family to Mandatory Palestine, he helped absorb immigrants from Salonica in Tel Aviv and led community groups of Sephardic Jews. In 1949 he was elected to the first Knesset on the Herut list and chaired the Public Services Committee. He lost his seat in the 1951 elections.

In 1952 he led the committee that published the book Zikhron Saloniki. In 1976 he was named a Yakir of Tel Aviv. He died on 3 March 1980, and a street in Ramot, Jerusalem, bears his name.