Robert Bitker

Short Biography

Robert (Boris) Bitker (1907-1977) was a military commander of the Zionist paramilitary group Irgun. He was born in Warsaw, Poland in 1895 and attended a Catholic high school. At 19, he was drafted into the Polish Army, but soon fled to Russia where he fought in the White Army under Kolchak during the Russian Revolution of 1917. In the early 1920s, he emigrated to the U.S., and lived briefly in Los Angeles where he worked in the film industry. From the U.S. he went to Shanghai, China, where he joined the Revisionist Zionist movement and was one of the originators of the Jewish battalion in the volunteer corps in Shanghai which was commanded by the British. In 1933, he was appointed head of the Betar command in southern China. In 1937, he went to Palestine, where he was appointed Commander-in-Chief of the Irgun. He held this position for a short time, and later returned to the United States, where he lived for the rest of his life.