Chaike Grossman

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Chaike Grossman (20 November 1919-26 May 1996) was an Israeli politician and member of Knesset. In her youth, she was a Zionist leader in Europe, a partisan, and a participant in the ghetto uprisings in Poland and Lithuania.

Grossman was born in Bialystok, Poland. As a teenager she joined the HaShomer HaTzair Socialist-Zionist youth movement. As a leader of the movement in Poland, she was sent to the town of Brisk (Brest-Litovsk) to organize the movement's activities there and in the surrounding region.

When World War II erupted, she moved to Vilna (now Vilnius, Lithuania), where she was active in the emergency underground leadership of HaShomer HaTzair. Upon the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, she returned to Bialystok, where she helped organize the underground movement in the Bialystok Ghetto. She served as a courier between that ghetto and those of Vilna, Lublin, Warsaw and others. Using forged papers, she managed to pass as a Polish woman named Halina Woranowicz. Her Polish identity enabled her to assist the underground movements in numerous towns and ghettoes, as well as the emerging partisan units being formed in the nearby forests of Poland and Lithuania. At the same time, she also purchased arms and helped smuggle them into the ghettoes. In 1943, she took part in the Bialystok Ghetto Uprising, and helped to establish an underground unit of anti-Nazi Germans.

After the war, she served on the Central Committee of the Jews of Poland, and was awarded Poland's highest medal for heroism. She emigrated to Mandatory Palestine in 1948 and joined Kibbutz Evron in the Western Galilee. She also served in various capacities in the Mapam party. From 1950 to 1951 she was the head of the Ga'aton Regional Council.

From 1969 to 1988, Grossman was a member of Knesset for the Mapam Party and later for the Labor Party, which it joined. As a parliamentarian, she focused on social issues and the status of women. Among the laws she helped pass were the right to abortions, laws relating to at-risk youth, and the law against beating children.

In 1993, Grossman was invited to light one of twelve torches traditionally kindled in the national ceremony marking Yom Ha'atzma'ut (Israel's Independence Day). Later, at a party for the torch lighters, she slipped down a flight of stairs and fell into a coma, which lasted three years, until her death in 1996.