Zalman Abramov

Zalman Abramov was born in 1908 in Minsk

Abramov was born in Minsk in the Russian Empire in 1908. He moved to Palestine in 1920 and attended the Herzliya Hebrew High School in Tel Aviv.

He studied history and law at Western Reserve University in Cleveland and earned a doctorate. In the United States he was vice president of a Zionist student group from 1931 to 1933 and wrote for Haaretz. He returned in 1935, trained as a lawyer in the office of Dov Yosef in Jerusalem, and later opened a private practice in Tel Aviv.

From 1950 to 1964 he chaired the Israel-United States Friendship League. He was elected to the Knesset for the General Zionists in 1959 and stayed until 1977 as the party merged into the Liberal Party, Gahal and Likud. He represented the Knesset at the Council of Europe from 1963 to 1972, served as Deputy Speaker from 1974 to 1977, and proposed the law replacing the lira with the shekel.

He was seen as a theorist of Israeli liberalism and held moderate views. In 1938 he married Hilda Snowman, who died in 1975, and in 1976 he married Ayala Zacks-Abramov. He published his book in 1995 and died in Jerusalem in 1997.