Zvi Yavetz

Zvi Yavetz was born in 1925 in Chernivtsi

Yavetz was born Zvi Zucker in Czernowitz in 1925 and grew up in a Zionist, secular home where German was spoken. His grandfather taught him Hebrew. After the German occupation in 1941 he was held in a ghetto, and his mother died there.

He jumped from a train taking him to Transnistria and later fled Romania by sea with other refugees. From Turkey he was sent to Cyprus and then reached Mandatory Palestine. He later took the name Yavetz, his mother's family name, after learning her relatives had been murdered in the Holocaust.

In 1945 he began studying history, sociology and classics at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, while working at a school for deaf children. His studies were interrupted by the War of Independence. He completed his PhD in 1956 with research on the living conditions of the plebs in Rome.

In 1956 he helped found Tel Aviv University and headed its general history department until he retired in 1990. He served as dean of humanities and helped set up a humanities faculty in Addis Ababa. He also founded the journal Zmanim in 1979.

In 2008 he published his autobiography, My Czernowitz. He died in 2013 and was buried at Kibbutz Tel Yitzhak.