Uri Zvi Grinberg

Uri Zvi Grinberg was born in 1896 in Bilyi Kamin

Grinberg was born in 1896 in Bilyi Kamin, Galicia, to a Hasidic family. His father was a Hasidic rabbi, and the family moved to Lemberg when he was a small child. He received a traditional Jewish religious education.

He published his first poems in Hebrew and Yiddish in 1912. From 1915 to 1918 he served in the Austro-Hungarian army on the Serbian front. In 1918 he and his family survived a pogrom in Lemberg, an event that shaped his writing.

In Warsaw he helped found a group of young Yiddish writers and edited the journal Albatros, which the Polish censors banned. He moved to Berlin and then settled in the Land of Israel in 1923. There he wrote for the labor movement press, including Davar.

After the 1929 Hebron massacre he broke with the labor movement and joined the Revisionists in 1930. With Abba Ahimeir and Yehoshua Yeivin he founded Brit HaBirionim. He edited Yiddish newspapers in Poland in the 1930s and returned in 1939, while his parents and sisters were murdered in the Holocaust.

He was elected to the first Knesset for Herut in 1949 and served until 1951. In 1950 he married the poet Aliza Gurevich, and they had 5 children. After the Six-Day War he joined the Movement for Greater Israel, and he died in 1981.