Abba Kovner

Abba Kovner (Hebrew: אבא קובנר; 14 March 1918 – 25 September 1987) was a Polish-born Jewish partisan leader, and later Israeli poet and writer. In the Vilna Ghetto, his manifesto was the first time that a target of the Holocaust identified the German plan to murder all Jews. His attempt to organize a ghetto uprising failed, but he fled into the forest, joined Soviet partisans, and survived the war. After the war, Kovner led Nakam, a paramilitary organization of Holocaust survivors who sought to take genocidal revenge by murdering six million German people, but Kovner was arrested in the British zone of Occupied Germany before he could successfully carry out his plans. He made aliyah to the State of Israel in 1947. Considered one of the greatest authors of Modern Hebrew poetry, Kovner was awarded the Israel Prize in 1970. Abba (Abel) Kovner was born on 14 March 1918 in Oszmiana (now Ashmyany, Belarus). His parents were Rochel (Rosa) Taubman and Israel Kovner, whose other sons were Gedalia and Michel, the youngest of them. In 1927, the family moved to Popławska Street in Wilno (now Vilnius, Lithuania). Abba Kovner was educated at the Hebrew Tarbut Gymnasium in Wilno and Stefan Batory University's Faculty of Arts. His father had a shop in Wilno selling leather on Julian Klaczko Street. While pursuing his studies, Abba became an active member in the socialist Zionist youth movement HaShomer HaTzair. Abba Kovner was a cousin of the Israeli Communist Party leader Meir Vilner.