Eri Jabotinsky

Eri Jabotinsky was born in 1910 in Odesa

Eri Jabotinsky was born in Odesa in 1910, the only son of Ze'ev Jabotinsky and Yoana Galperin. As a child he traveled with his parents and was taught privately, learning Hebrew, English, French and Russian.

He studied in Paris and qualified in electrical engineering in 1933. He worked as an engineer in an aircraft factory and then at the Naharayim power station.

A Betar activist, he headed Betar in the Land of Israel and helped organize illegal Jewish immigration. The British jailed him in Acre from November 1937 to February 1938, and again in 1940 after he led the immigrant ship Sakarya. In the United States he worked with Hillel Kook's group and helped found the Emergency Committee to Save European Jewry.

He returned to Israel in 1948 and was elected to the first Knesset for Herut in 1949. On 20 February 1951 he and Hillel Kook left Herut after disagreements over its direction under Menachem Begin.

He lectured on electricity theory at the Technion from 1955 and earned a PhD in mathematics from the Hebrew University in 1957. He published work on iteration theory and is linked to Jabotinsky matrices. He died in 1969.