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"

Mordechai Oren was born in 1905 in the Galician town Podhajce of Austro-Hungary (now in the Ukraine) and was one of the founders of the Hashomer Hatzair youth movement. He emigrated to British Palestine in 1929 and joined Hashomer Hatzair settlers in Ness Ziona, where he was involved in a dispute with Mapai activists. In 1934 he settled in Kibbutz Mizra and was elected in 1938 to the kibbutz's management. 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 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 though 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 was arrested along with his relative Shimon Ornstein and accused of supporting Imperialism and of being a Zionist agent. Authorities in Czechoslovakia did not report his 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.

...
Wikipedia