Israel Gutman

Israel Gutman was born in 1923 in Warsaw

Gutman was born in Warsaw in 1923. As a youth he joined the Hashomer Hatzair movement and was a protégé of Mordechai Anielewicz. His parents and siblings died in the ghetto.

He joined the Jewish Combat Organization and fought in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, where he was wounded. He was then sent to Majdanek and Auschwitz, and in January 1945 he survived the death march to Mauthausen, where U.S. forces liberated him. After the war he joined the Jewish Brigade in Italy.

In 1946 he moved to Mandate Palestine and joined Kibbutz Lehavot HaBashan, where he lived until 1971. He testified at the Eichmann trial in 1961. He married Irit Edelstein and had a son and two daughters, and his son Nimrod was killed during military service in 1971.

He helped found Moreshet and later directed it. In 1975 he earned a doctorate from the Hebrew University, where he became a professor and headed the Institute of Contemporary Jewry from 1985 to 1988. He was editor-in-chief of the Encyclopedia of the Holocaust, published in 1989.

From 1991 he advised the Polish government on Jewish affairs and Holocaust commemoration. At Yad Vashem he headed the International Institute for Holocaust Research from 1993 to 1996, was Chief Historian from 1996 to 2000, and then served as Academic Advisor. He died in Jerusalem in 2013 and was buried at Har HaMenuchot.