Israel Katz

Israel Katz was born in 1927 in Vienna

Israel Katz was born in Vienna to Moshe Yosef and Fanny Katz. After the Anschluss in 1938, he came to Mandatory Palestine with a Youth Aliyah group. His parents reached the country in 1939 but were deported to Mauritius, and the family reunited in 1946.

He studied agriculture at the Ahava youth village until 1944 and completed his matriculation on his own. He studied sciences at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1946 and 1947 and worked with delinquent youth in Jerusalem. He served in intelligence during the War of Independence.

In 1951 he studied psychiatric social work at Columbia University, and from 1953 he supervised special education for Youth Aliyah. He ran the Kiryat Ye'arim youth village from 1954 to 1959. He earned a doctorate in social administration at Case Western Reserve University between 1959 and 1961.

From 1962 to 1968 he was the first Israeli head of the Paul Baerwald School of Social Work at the Hebrew University. He was director general of the National Insurance Institute from 1968 to 1973, when laws on unemployment and disability insurance were passed. He then founded the Brookdale Institute on aging in 1974.

He served as Minister of Labor and Social Affairs from 1977 to 1981. In 1982 he founded the Taub Center for Social Policy Studies and led it until 1992. He died in 2010.