Politicsאברהם בן-ארויה

Avraam Benaroya

Avraam Benaroya was a Jewish socialist who led the Socialist Workers' Federation in Ottoman Thessaloniki and helped found the Socialist Workers' Party of Greece in 1918.

1887 to 1979Leading the Socialist Workers' FederationFounding the Communist Party of GreeceSocialism in Ottoman Thessaloniki

Died: 16 May 1979, Holon
Occupation: politician, journalist, school teacher, typographer
Party: Communist Party of Greece, Bulgarian Social Democratic Workers' Party (Narrow Socialists), Socialist Workers Party of Greece
Education: University of Belgrade Faculty of Law
Founded: Socialist Workers' Federation (1909)

Avraam Benaroya was born in 1887 in Lom

Benaroya was born in 1887 to a Sephardi Jewish family and grew up in Vidin, Bulgaria, among small merchants. He spoke six languages.

He studied law in Belgrade but did not finish his degree. He then taught school in Plovdiv, joined the Bulgarian Social Democratic Workers' Party (Narrow Socialists) and in 1908 published a work on the Jewish question and social democracy.

After the Young Turk revolution of 1908 he moved to Thessaloniki as a socialist organizer. In 1909 he helped create the Socialist Workers' Federation, a mostly Jewish group built as a federation of the city's ethnic groups, and from 1910 to 1911 he edited its Ladino newspaper. The Ottoman authorities jailed him 3 times between 1910 and 1912.

After Thessaloniki became part of Greece, he opposed the First World War and was exiled to the island of Naxos. Near the end of the war he initiated the Socialist Workers' Party of Greece, which later became the Communist Party of Greece. He opposed Zionism and died in Holon, Israel, on 16 May 1979.