Biography
Abba Shaul Geisinovich (later Abba Ahimeir) was born in Dolgi, a village near Babruysk in the Russian Empire (today in Belarus). From 1912-1914, he attended the Herzliya Gymnasium high school in Tel Aviv. While with his family in Babruysk for summer vacation in 1914, World War I broke out and he was forced to complete his studies in Russia. In 1917, he participated in the Russian Zionist Conference in Petrograd and underwent agricultural training as part of Joseph Trumpeldor’s HeHalutz movement in Batum, Caucasia to prepare him for a life as a pioneer in the Land of Israel. In 1920, he left Russia and changed his name from Gaisinovich to Ahimeir (in Hebrew: Meir’s brother) in memory of his brother Meir who had fallen in battle that year fighting against Poles during a pogrom.
Ahimeir studied philosophy at the Liège University in Belgium and at the University of Vienna, completing his PhD thesis on Oswald Spengler's The Decline of the West in 1924 just before immigrating to the British Mandate of Palestine. Upon his arrival in the country, Ahimeir became active in the Labor Zionist movements Ahdut HaAvoda and Hapoel Hatzair. For four years, he served as librarian for the cultural committee of the General Workers Organization in Zikhron Ya'akov and as a teacher in Nahalal and Kibutz Geva. During these years he regularly published articles in Haaretz and Davar, where he began to criticize the political situation in Palestine and of Zionism, as well as of the workers’ movement to which he belonged.
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