Joseph Berger-Barzilai

Joseph Berger-Barzilai was born in 1904 in Kraków

He was born Itskhak Zheliaznik in Kraków in 1904 and grew up in a traditional Zionist family. In 1914 the family fled the Russian army to Vienna. As a youth he joined Zionist groups and later Hashomer Hatzair.

In 1919 he emigrated to Palestine and worked in road building and as a translator. He soon turned to communism and took the name Berger. In 1922 he helped found the Palestinian Communist Party and became its secretary.

In 1924 he went to Moscow to negotiate the party's entry into the Comintern, and later that year he was sent to Beirut to build a communist party in Lebanon. British authorities refused him reentry in 1926, and he later lived under a false identity in Beit Safafa. In 1928 he met Stalin in Moscow.

He moved to Moscow in 1932 to work for the Comintern. He was arrested in 1935, sentenced to death, pardoned and sent to the Gulag in Siberia. He was released in 1951, tried again, and finally freed in 1956.

He moved with his wife Esther Feldman and son to Poland and from there to Israel. In Israel he wrote for Maariv and published books about the Soviet Union under several pen names. He died on 31 March 1978 and was buried in Kiryat Shaul cemetery.