Mordechai Palzur

Mordechai Palzur was born in 1929 in Tarnów

Mordechai Plutzer, later Palzur, was born in 1929 in Tarnów, Poland. Both his parents studied at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków, where his father was a professor. He attended a non-Jewish school.

After the Nazi invasion of Poland, the family was sent to the ghetto, then to Kraków, and later the Russians moved them to Siberia. In 1942 they were evacuated to a British army base in Persia. The next year Tzippora Sharett of the Jewish Agency arranged their immigration to Palestine.

He joined the Haganah and served as an officer in the War of Independence, where he was wounded. He studied law in Tel Aviv, and later law, international relations and political science at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

He entered the Foreign Service in 1950 and served in Mexico, Pretoria and Cyprus. He was later ambassador to Bolivia and to the Dominican Republic and several Caribbean states. In 1986 he was posted to Warsaw as the first Israeli diplomat behind the Iron Curtain since the break in relations after the Six-Day War.

He later chaired the World Jewish Congress.