Samuel Merlin

Samuel Merlin was born in 1910 in Chișinău

Merlin was born in 1910 in Kishinev, then part of the Russian Empire. His father Avraham was an industrialist and public figure. He attended the Hebrew high school Magen David in Kishinev and joined the Betar youth movement.

From 1933 to 1938 he was chief secretary of the executive of the World Union of Revisionist Zionists. In 1938 he joined the Irgun and, with Nathan Yellin-Mor, founded its Yiddish daily Di Tat in Warsaw, which he edited until it closed in 1939. He later studied history and social sciences at the University of Paris.

After World War II began he went to France and then to the United States, where he worked to build support for the Irgun. He helped found the Hebrew Committee for the Liberation of the Nation and edited its weekly Answer in 1947 and 1948. From late 1946 he headed the committee's Paris branch and raised funds and bought arms for the ship Altalena.

He came to Israel on the Altalena in 1948 and was wounded in the leg when the ship was fired on. He was a founder of Herut, edited its newspaper and was elected to the first Knesset, where he sat on the Internal Affairs Committee. He later lectured on the Middle East at a university in the United States and died in 1994.