Mordechai Palzur

Mordechai David Palzur (; born 1929, Tarnów, Poland) is an Israeli former military officer, diplomat and chairman of World Jewish Congress.

Biography Mordechai Plutzer (later Palzur) was born in Tarnow in southeastern Poland. His parents were graduates of Kraków's Jagiellonian University and his father was a professor there. He studied in a non-Jewish school, where he remembers being taunted as a "jew boy." When the Nazis invaded Poland, Palzur and his family were sent to the ghetto. From there, they were deported to Krakow and then transported to Siberia by the Russians. In 1942, they were evacuated to a British army base in Persia. The following year, Tzippora Sharett, later wife of Israel's second prime minister, Moshe Sharett , who was working for the Jewish Agency, arranged for their immigration to Palestine.

Palzur joined the Haganah and fought in the War of Independence. After his release from the army, he joined Israel's diplomatic corps, serving in various positions.

He studied law at the Tel-Aviv School of Law and Economics and later, law, international relations and political science at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Trinidad and Tobago and Barbados. When he was appointed to Warsaw in 1986, he was “the first Israeli diplomat to serve behind the Iron Curtain since the severance of diplomatic relations by Communist countries as a result of the Six-Day War” serving as Ambassador until 1990.