Abba Hushi

Abba Hushi (Also: Aba Khoushy; Hebrew: אבא חושי; born Abba Schneller; 1898 – 24 March 1969) was an Israeli politician who served as mayor of Haifa for eighteen years between 1951 and 1969. Hushi was one of the founders and activists of Hashomer Hatzair movement in Poland. In July 1920, he settled to Mandatory Palestine with a group of 130 Jewish pioneers. There he took the Hebrew surname "Hushi" ["speedy"], a translation of his original name, Schneller. He built roads and drained swamps, and helped to found kibbutz Beit Alfa. He was one of the founding members of the Histadrut labor federation. In 1927, he settled in Haifa and joined the Ahdut HaAvoda party, which later merged with Mapai. He was secretary of the Haifa Workers Council from 1931 to 1951. Hushi was elected to Israel's first Knesset in 1949 as a member of Mapai. Before the 1951 elections, he left the government to become mayor of Haifa. As mayor, he helped to found the University of Haifa, the Haifa Theatre, the Tikotin Museum of Japanese Art, the Mane-Katz Museum and the Carmelit (Haifa's funicular railway).

Abba Hushi was the father-in-law of Knesset member Amnon Linn.

Abba Hushi was born in 1898 in Turka, Galicia, then part of Austria-Hungary (today in Ukraine). His mother, Liba, ran a small farm, where she grew fruits and vegetables. After divorcing her first husband, Liba moved to Turka and married Zisha, a haberdasher. To avoid the draft, Zisha changed his name to Alexander, took Liba's surname, "Schneller," and hid in the attic of Liba's farmhouse.

The Schnellers had seven children: Ettia, Abba, Hinda, Ya'akov, Rosa, Malka and Harry from Liba's first marriage.

After attending a heder, Hushi studied at the local gymnasium. He spoke Yiddish, German, Hebrew, Ukrainian and Polish, and knew some Greek and Latin. He planned to study medicine and even wrote "Property of Medical Student Abba Schneller" on his notebooks, but his plans were disrupted by the outbreak of World War I in 1914. The Schneller family fled to Bohemia.

After the family's return to Turka in 1918, the city fell under Polish rule. Antisemitism was on the rise, so a group of members of Hashomer Hatzair organized into an independent Jewish protection force. They were successful in Turka and stopped pogroms and other attacks, although in other cities throughout Poland these attacks continued.

On 4 and 5 August 1918, a Hashomer Hatzair conference was held in Turka. Hushi was one of the chairs of the conference, and there he called for immigration to the land of Israel. In the spring of 1920, at another Hashomer Hatzair conference in Lviv, Abba read publicly for the first time the words to his poem "In the Galil, at Tel Hai" inspired by the courage of Joseph Trumpeldor at Tel Hai. Indeed, the decisions made at the conference mirrored the spirit at Tel Hai: it was decided that the graduating group of Hashomer Hatzair would make Aliyah, and the workers of the movement would assist in the realization of this decision.

The work office of the Hapoel Hatzair movement took responsibility for finding employment for its members of who had recently arrived in Palestine. Hushi's group found work in paving roads, a project initiated by the first High Commissioner of Palestine, Herbert Samuel. Hushi worked on roads around Rosh Pinna, and in 1920 and 1921, Hushi was the head of the "Shomria Unit," the group that paved the Haifa-J'da (a.k.a. Ramat Yishai) road.