Joseph Berger-Barzilai

Joseph Berger-Barzilai (; 29 November 1904 – 31 March 1978), born Itskhak Mordukhovich Zheliaznik , was a founding member and the secretary of the Communist Party of Palestine and an official of the Communist International. A victim of the Great Purge, Berger-Barzilai was imprisoned in various Gulag prisons for a total of 16 years.

Early life Itskhak Mordukhovich Zheliaznik (also spelled Zilsnik or Zeliaznik) was born on 29 November 1904 in Kraków, Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria (present-day Poland). In 1914, his family fled the Russian army, which threatened to invade their city, for Vienna, and in 1916 they moved to Bielitz, Austrian Silesia.

Brought up as an Orthodox Jew and a Zionist, the young Berger was active in the Zionist youth group Wanderbund Blau-Weiß [de], and later moved toward the left by joining Hashomer Hatzair. In 1919, at age 15, he emigrated to Palestine. He initially worked in road construction and subsequently as a translator for an engineering firm. Following the expulsion of both factions from the Histadrut in February 1923, the groups were forced to cooperate and eventually reunited in June 1923 under Berger's radical platform, adopting the Yiddish name Palestinishe Komunistishe Partei (PKP).

The reunited party adopted a program written by Berger that broke with all forms of Zionism.

In 1924, acting as Deputy Secretary, he was sent to Moscow to negotiate the party's entry into the Comintern. He was sent to the USSR at the end of 1924 to assist the Plenum of the Communist International, and returned to Moscow as a party delegate in August 1926 and again in July–September 1928 for the 6th Congress of the Communist International. Berger considered this new Lebanese party to be a branch of the PCP, as the Palestinian party constituted the most developed organizational kernel of the communist movement in the Middle East and aspired to coordinate activities across the surrounding countries.

Within the PCP, Berger-Barzilai grappled with a order from the Comintern to "Arabize" the party's upper ranks. This transition was marked by internal tension, as the party's demographics were heavily skewed: Jewish members and supporters comprised about 10,000 people, while Arab affiliates numbered fewer than 1,000. To engage in active anti-imperialist struggle, he stated it must enter into a living connection with the decisive mass of the working population, the Arab workers and peasants, transforming into a party of Arab workers and "territorialized Jewish comrades" who were acquainted with Arab customs and language.

In the spring of 1929, he was called to Moscow, where he had a five-hour meeting with Joseph Stalin on 5 March.'

Berger-Barzilai died on 31 March 1978 and was buried in the Kiryat Shaul Cemetery in Tel Aviv. He was preceded in death by his wife, Esther, who died six years earlier. He left behind his son, Dr. Yaakov Berger.

Works Joseph Berger: Shipwreck of a generation: Memoirs (British title), Nothing But the Truth: Joseph Stalin's Prison Camps-A Survivor's Account of the Victim's he Knew'' (American title), (1971).