Ben-Zion Dinur
Ben-Zion Dinur () (January 1884 – 8 July 1973) was a Zionist activist, educator, historian and Israeli politician. Biography. Ben-Zion Dinaburg (later Dinur) was born in Khorol in the Russian Empire (now Poltava Oblast, Ukraine). He received his education in Lithuanian yeshivot. He studied under Shimon Shkop in the Telz Yeshiva, and became interested in the Haskalah through Rosh Yeshiva Eliezer Gordon's polemics. In 1898 he moved to the Slabodka yeshiva and in 1900 he traveled to Vilnius and was certified a Rabbi. He then went to Lyubavichi to witness the Chabad-Lubavitch branch of Hasidic  Judaism. Between 1902 and 1911 he was engaged in Zionist activism and teaching, which at some point resulted in a brief arrest. In 1910 he married Bilhah Feingold, a teacher who had worked with him in a girls' trade school in Poltava. In 1911, he left his wife and son for two years to attend Berlin University, where he studied under Michael Rostovtzeff and Eugen Täubler. He then spent two more years at the University of Bern, where he began his dissertation under Rostovzev, on the Jews in the Land of Israel under the Roman Empire. The break of World  War I forced him to move to the University of Petrograd. However, due to the October Revolution, he did not receive his PhD. He was a lecturer at the University of Odessa from 1920 to 1921. Pedagogic and academic career. In 1921, he immigrated to Palestine and from 1923 to 1948 served as a teacher and later as head of the Jewish Teachers' Training College, Jerusalem. In 1936, he was appointed lecturer in modern Jewish history at the Hebrew University and became professor in 1948 and professor emeritus in 1952. As a historian he described Zionism in the diaspora as  a huge river into which flowed all the smaller streams and tributaries of the Jewish struggle down the ages, and tracing its origins to 1700, when history records a first wave of Polish Jews emigrating to Jerusalem. He believed "messianic ferment" played a crucial role in Jewish history, and introduced the idea of "mered hagalut" ("Revolt of the Diaspora"). Political career and public office. He was elected to the first Knesset on the Mapai list and served as Minister of Education and Culture in the third to sixth governments (1951 to 1955), when he was responsible for the 1953 State  Education Law, which put an end to the prevailing party "trend" education system. From 1953 to 1959 he was president of Yad Vashem.