David Bartov

David Bartov was born in 1924 in Motal

Bartov was born David Gutensky in the town of Motal, in present-day Belarus. He attended the Tarbut Hebrew school in Pinsk and finished in 1939. In 1941 he was deported to a Soviet labor camp in Siberia, and in 1946 he left for Poland, where he was active in a Zionist youth movement in Poland and Germany.

He immigrated to Israel in 1949, changed his surname to Bartov and became secretary of the bureau of President Chaim Weizmann. In 1952 he became head of bureau for President Yitzhak Ben-Zvi. He finished law studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1959, earned a Master of Laws in 1960, and after qualifying as a lawyer in 1961 became Ben-Zvi's legal adviser.

In 1964 he went to Moscow as First Secretary at the Israeli embassy and worked as a Nativ team member. After the Soviet Union cut relations with Israel in 1967, he returned and served as a Jerusalem Magistrate Court judge and as registrar of the Supreme Court. In 1979 he became deputy president of the Jerusalem District Court, and he served as secretary of the Agranat Commission and the Kahan Commission.

He headed Nativ from 1986 to 1992 and its mission in the former Soviet Union from 1992 to 1994. After retiring he did volunteer work for Jews of the former Soviet Union, and from 1997 to 2003 he chaired the executive committee of Yad Ben-Zvi. He was married to Esther Bartov, had 3 sons, and died in Jerusalem in 2018.