Zvi Zimmerman

Zvi Zimmerman was born in 1913 in Skala-Podilska

Zimmerman was born in 1913 in Skala-Podilska. During World War I his parents fled with their children and died of cholera. He finished a Hebrew high school in Tarnopol and studied law at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków, where he led the Zionist student union Kedima.

He spent most of World War II in the Kraków Ghetto and was active in the Zionist underground there. After the ghetto was liquidated in 1943 he was sent to a forced labor camp, escaped, and reached Budapest. There he worked with Henryk Sławik and József Antall Sr., supplying false papers to Jews and supporting an orphanage in Vác that hid Jewish children.

He reached the Land of Israel in 1944 and lectured on the Holocaust in Hebrew. In 1948 he joined the Haganah, then opened a law office. He served on the Haifa City Council and as deputy mayor of Haifa, and testified at the Eichmann trial in 1961.

In 1959 he was elected to the Knesset for the General Zionists and was later re-elected for Gahal. He served as Deputy Speaker in the Seventh Knesset. From 1983 to 1986 he was Israel's ambassador to New Zealand.

In later years he worked to gain recognition for his rescue partners, and Sławik was named Righteous Among the Nations in 1992. Zimmerman died in 2006.