Meir Vilner

Meir Vilner was born in 1918 in Vilnius

He was born Ber Kovner in Vilnius in 1918, and his father was a shoe merchant. He studied at a heder and then at the Tarbut Hebrew gymnasium. He led the Hashomer Hatzair youth group in the city with his cousin Abba Kovner and Esther Vilenska, who later became his wife.

He came to doubt Zionism and left the movement. In 1938 he moved to Mandatory Palestine and studied history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Most of his family who stayed behind were murdered in the Holocaust.

He joined the Palestine Communist Party in 1940 and took the name Meir Vilner. In 1948 he signed the Declaration of Independence for the party. He was elected to the Knesset for Maki in 1949, resigned in 1959, and was elected again in 1961 before resigning once more.

In 1965 he and Tawfik Toubi founded the pro-Soviet party Rakah after a split in the communist movement. He opposed the Six-Day War, and on 15 October 1967 he was stabbed in Tel Aviv. After Hadash was formed in 1977 he became its first chairman, and he stayed in the Knesset until 1990.

The Soviet Union awarded him the Order of Friendship of Peoples in 1978. He had 2 sons with Esther Vilenska, and they later divorced. He died on 5 June 2003, and a street in Shafaram is named after him.