Mark Dvorzhetski

Mark Dvorzhetski was born in 1908 in Vilnius

Mark Dvorzhetski was born in Vilnius in 1908, when the city was part of the Russian Empire. He was active in the Zionist movement from his youth and was elected to the Vilnius city council for the Zionist faction.

He began medical studies at the University of Nancy and earned a medical degree in Vilnius in 1935. In 1938 he received a rabbinical diploma.

In 1939 he served as a medical officer in the Polish army, was captured by the Germans and escaped to Vilnius. He worked as a doctor in the Vilna Ghetto and took part in its resistance movement. In 1943 he was sent to forced labor camps in Estonia, later moved to camps in Germany, and escaped during a death march in 1945.

After the war he lived in Paris and edited a Jewish newspaper. He moved to Israel in 1949, worked as a doctor for Kupat Holim Clalit and led organizations of Holocaust survivors and partisans. In 1959 he founded the chair for Holocaust research at Bar-Ilan University and headed it.

In 1967 he received a doctorate in history from the Sorbonne for a study of the Jewish camps in Estonia. He opposed the reparations agreement with West Germany and testified at the Eichmann trial. He died in 1975.