Yitzhak Arad

Yitzhak Arad was born in 1926 in Švenčionys

Arad was born Icchak Rudnicki on November 11, 1926, in Švenčionys, then part of Poland and now in Lithuania. His father was a cantor. As a youth he belonged to the Zionist youth movement Ha-No'ar ha-Tsiyyoni and studied in Warsaw.

After the German occupation in 1941 he lived in the ghetto and organized an underground group that stole weapons. In February 1943 he joined Soviet partisans in the Naroch Forest, where he fought the Germans and faced antisemitism in his unit. In April 1943 he entered the Vilna Ghetto to meet underground leader Abba Kovner.

In December 1945 he reached Mandate Palestine on the immigrant ship Hannah Szenes. He served in the Palmach and the IDF, mostly in the Armored Corps, and in 1968 became Chief Education Officer. He retired in 1972 as a brigadier general.

From 1972 to 1993 he headed the directorate of Yad Vashem. He earned a doctorate at Tel Aviv University in 1974, lectured there on Jewish history and wrote and edited many books on the Holocaust, including on the Holocaust in the Soviet Union.

Lithuanian prosecutors opened an investigation into his partisan activity, and it was dropped in 2008. He died on May 6, 2021, and was buried in Einat beside his wife Michal.