Mordechai Oren

Mordechai Oren (; 1905–1985) was a leader of Mapam and the Kibbutz Artzi Hashomer Hatzair. He was implicated in a scandal which created an uproar in the state of Israel during the early fifties when he was tried in a show trial in Eastern Europe and was dubbed the "prisoner of Prague".

Biography Mordechai Oren was born in 1905 in the Galician town Podhajce of Austro-Hungary (now in Ukraine) and was one of the founders of the Hashomer Hatzair youth movement. By the end of the year he was sent on a mission to London and Paris by Kibbutz Artzi Hashomer Hatzair. In 1940 he went to Geneva on a mission for the Halutz (pioneer) movement to establish the world headquarters there instead of the Warsaw headquarters which ceased to operate due to the Nazi occupation of Poland. In September 1944 he was elected to the Jewish National Council by Hazit Hasmol (the Left Front). In 1948 he was one of the founders of Mapam and represented the party in the Histadrut.

Oren was a radical supporter of the Soviet Union and praised its "freedom of vote" and its "democracy". During the Cold War in the fifties, Oren supported the pro-Soviet tendency of Mapam. In November 1951 he represented Mapam as an observer at the World Federation of Trade Unions in East Berlin and was also involved in negotiations regarding compensation for East German victims of the Holocaust. In that conference he said that the workers of Israel would never go to war against the Soviet Union. On his way from Berlin to Zurich, Oren passed through Prague where he stayed a few days on a mission for the Al Hamishmar paper which he was co-editor of. During this period, Oren and his relative Shimon Ornstein were arrested and accused of supporting Imperialism and of being a Zionist agent. Authorities in Czechoslovakia did not report Oren's detention and his relatives in Israel did not know where he had disappeared. Only at the end of March 1952 Czechoslovak authorities announced that Oren had been arrested on charges of crimes against state security.

Oren and Ornstein were forced to testify against the Czechoslovak leaders in a show trial held for them, as part of the Prague Trials. During the trial, Oren said the following which was recorded by the BBC:

Prison time and aftermath Oren was sentenced to 15 years in prison, This caused deep shock in the Israeli left and the party Mapam and the movement of the Kibbutz Artzi and resulted in a three-way split. A leftist group of followers of Moshe Sneh, who refused to condemn the Prague trial and the indictment, were forced to leave the kibbutz movement and Mapam and ultimately joined the Israeli Communist Party, while another group left Mapam for not being critical enough of the Soviet Union and formed Ahdut HaAvoda, which ultimately merged with Mapai to form the Israeli Labor Party.

Mordechai Oren married Rega (Rivka) Varshaviak and had two children — Pua Gonen and author Moshe Oren. Mordechai Oren died in 1985, aged 80.