Jacob Zerubavel

Jacob Zerubavel was born in 1886 in Poltava

Zerubavel was born Ya'akov Vitkin in Poltava, in the Russian Empire. As a boy he studied in a heder, and he later worked as a laborer.

He joined Poale Zion and took part in its 1906 Poltava conference. He was active in Vilna and on the party's central committee in Russia, and edited the Yiddish paper Der Yiddisher Arbeter. The Tsarist authorities arrested him several times.

In 1910 he moved to the Land of Israel and joined the Poale Zion leadership with David Ben-Gurion and Yitzhak Ben-Zvi. In 1911 he became editor of the party paper Ha'ahdut and party secretary. Sentenced to prison by the Ottomans, he fled to the United States in 1915.

After the October Revolution he went to Russia and then Poland. In 1920 he led the split that formed Poale Zion Left. British authorities barred him from settling in the country until 1935.

Back in the country, he served on the Histadrut executive committee and helped lead party mergers that led to Mapam in 1948. From 1948 he sat on the Jewish Agency executive, and from 1951 he directed the Histadrut labor archive. He died in 1967 and was buried in Kiryat Shaul.