A. L. Zissu

Abraham Leib Zissu (first name also Avram, middle name also Leiba or Leibu; אברהם לייב זיסו; January 25, 1888 – September 6, 1956) was a Romanian writer, political essayist, industrialist, and spokesman of the Jewish Romanian community. Of modest social origin and a recipient of Hasidic education, he became a cultural activist, polemicist, and newspaper founder, remembered primarily for his Mântuirea daily. During the 1910s, he involved himself in the effort to unify and reactivate the local Zionist movement. By the end of World War I, Zissu also emerged as a theorist of Religious Zionism, preferring communitarianism and self-segregation to the assimilationist option, while also promoting literary modernism in his activity as novelist, dramatist, and cultural sponsor. He was the inspiration behind the Jewish Party, which competed with the mainstream Union of Romanian Jews (UER) for the Jewish vote. Zissu and UER leader Wilhelm Filderman had a lifelong disputation over religious and practical politics, which gave way to a mutual dislike punctuated by episodes of fraternization. Always a confrontational critic of antisemitism, Zissu found himself marginalized by fascist regimes in the late 1930s and for most of World War II. During the Holocaust, he risked his personal freedom to defend the interests of his community, and was especially vocal as a critic of the collaborationist Central Jewish Office. He eventually reached a compromise with the Ion Antonescu regime when the latter curbed its deportations of Jews to Transnistria, and, after 1943, helped initiate the Aliyah Bet exodus of Romanian and Hungarian Jews to Mandatory Palestine. Such efforts required that he contact and build a working relationship with high-ranking officials of the regime, including Mihai Antonescu, Radu Lecca, and Pamfil Șeicaru. Though backed by the Rescue Committee of the Jewish Agency and the World Jewish Congress, his contribution is at the center of an enduring controversy, focusing on his alleged favoritism of Zionist Jews and his cantankerousness.