Avraham Katznelson

Avraham Katznelson was born in 1888 in Babruysk

Katznelson was born in 1888 in Bobruisk in the Russian Empire to Nissan HaCohen and Zelda Helena. His siblings included Yosef, Reuven, Shmuel and Rachel, who married Zalman Shazar. He was later also known as Avraham Nissan.

He studied in a heder and a gymnasium, then at the Jewish Studies Academy and the universities of Saint Petersburg and Moscow, and at an academy of social hygiene in Berlin. He earned a doctorate in natural sciences in 1912 and qualified as a physician in 1914. In World War I he was a military doctor in the Russian army.

From 1912 he sat on the Zionist Executive, and in 1919 and 1920 he ran the Palestine Office in Constantinople, helping immigrants. He helped lead Hapoel Hatzair from Berlin and Vienna, then moved to Palestine in 1924. He headed the health department of the Jewish Agency and later that of the National Council until 1948.

In December 1947 he co-founded the Medical Service. He sat on the Provisional State Council, signed the Declaration of Independence, and was Director-General of the Ministry of Health until March 1949. He then joined the UN delegation and the Foreign Ministry, serving as minister plenipotentiary to Scandinavia in Stockholm from November 1950.

He married physician Sima Kaplan in 1919. He returned from Stockholm ill in early 1956 and died on 18 May 1956. A street in Jerusalem's Kiryat Yovel bears the name Avraham Nissan.