Sloan-Kettering

Abba Kovner was born in 1918 in Sebastopol. Coi mitted to Zionism from boyhood, Kovner became an advocate of armed-resistance during the Second World War, famously urging his comrades in the Vilna ghetto not to go "like sheep to the slaughter, but to stand and fight. Kovner thus became a key leader in the United Partisan Organization, which earned out sabotage operations against the Germar army, first from the ghetto and later from the Balti< forest. After liberation, Kovner helped to take Jews from eastern and central Europe into Palestine and became a key voice in the resettlement of European Kovner and his wife Vitka, also a resistance leader, eventually settled on Kibbutz Ein ha-Horesh. After taking part in the Israeli War of Independence in 1948, Kovner became a writer of both poetry and prose, winning the Israeli Prize for Literature in 1970. A founder of the Moreshet Holocaust Institute and the Diaspora Museum in Tel Aviv, he died in 1987.