Yehuda Dranitzki

Yehuda Dranitzki was born in 1910 in Odesa

Dranitzki was born in Odessa in 1910. As a youth he joined Hashomer Hatzair, which was banned at the time and worked underground. In 1925 he emigrated to Mandatory Palestine.

In Palestine he was active in Poale Zion Left and helped found the Socialist League and the Marxist study groups. He later joined the Hashomer Hatzair Workers Party and then Mapam. He studied for a year at the London School of Economics.

In 1942 he joined the secretariat of the Tel Aviv Workers Council. He was elected to the Histadrut executive committee in 1949 and to its central committee in 1955. From 1966 he headed the Histadrut Department for Industrial Democracy and lectured at the School for Histadrut Activists.

In 1952 he traveled to the United States for the Histadrut, but was refused entry because he was a Mapam member and was held at Ellis Island. He returned to Israel after 18 days.

He entered the Knesset on the Alignment list and served as a deputy speaker and on the economics and labor committees. He lost his seat in the 1977 elections. He died in 2002 and was buried in Kiryat Shaul cemetery.