JERUSALEM (AP) — Haike Grossman, a leader of the Jewish resistance against the Nazis in occupied Poland who became an Israeli parliament member, died Sunday after being in a coma for three years. She was 76.
Grossman was not yet 20 when the Germans invaded Poland in 1939. Although she had an immigrant’s permit from British authorities in Palestine, she chose to stay in Poland.
A leader of the left-wing Zionist movement Hashomer Hatzair, she participated in the Jewish uprisings in the Vilna and Bialystock ghettos. Along with a few other survivors of the uprisings, Grossman escaped into the forests and joined Jewish partisans.
Her father was shot by the Germans and her mother perished in the Majdanek death camp. Two sisters survived, and her brother was conscripted into the Red Army but never returned.
In 1948, Grossman immigrated to newly independent Israel and settled in Kibbutz Evron, where she married her childhood friend Meir Orkin. She retained her maiden name — in those days, a rare act of feminist independence.
In 1968 she was elected to parliament as a representative of the left-wing Mapam Party, which has long supported establishing a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza. In 20 years as a legislator she headed various parliamentary committees and served as deputy speaker.
In 1993, the diminutive Grossman tripped and fell down a steep flight of steps. She was in a coma for the past three years.