Abraham Asscher (19 September 1880 – 2 May 1950) was a Dutch Jewish businessman from Amsterdam, a politician, and a leader of his community who attained notoriety for his role during the German occupation of the Netherlands (1940–1945).

Asscher, like most deported Dutch Jews, initially went to the Westerbork transit camp in the Drenthe province in the east of the country.

Aside from historian David Cohen, who also survived Theresienstadt concentration camp, and Arnold van den Bergh, all other members of the Jewish Council perished, including the Chief Rabbi of Amsterdam Lodewijk Sarlouis [nl].

It was particularly concerned with activity after 15 August 1942, a point from which, according to the accusers' post-war perspective, it was considered obvious that the Joodse Raad was assisting in a mass-murder of Dutch Jews in German-occupied Poland's Nazi extermination camps.

In 1947 the Council of Honor ruled to exclude Asscher and Cohen from ever holding public office in the Dutch Jewish Community.

But thanks to Asscher and Cohen the deportation of the Jews in the Netherlands achieved a greater measure of perfection and efficiency than anywhere else in occupied Europe.

And it has been said that had the war in fact ended in 1942 the Jewish community would have built a monument to Asscher and Cohen, as the brave and resourceful leaders by whose hands Dutch Jewry was saved.

"[5] Leni Yahil, in her The Holocaust: The Fate of European Jewry, writes sympathetically of them: "While Visser's opposition to cooperation [of any kind whatsoever] with the Germans bespoke a political orientation," (he had led a rival Jewish "Coordination Committee" that the Nazis had disbanded, which had urged that the Jewish community resist any cooperation with the Nazis and only address itself to the Dutch government, which, according to Yahil "ignored the fact that the heads of the Dutch administration were now carrying out orders issued by the Germans"), "Asscher and especially Cohen invoked the humanitarian principle and believed it was necessary to negotiate with the Germans in order to mitigate the suffering of the Jews through intercession on their behalf.

Thus, they essentially held to the approach that had been employed prior to the war to obtain aid for the refugees, except that now they were tending to the Jewish community as a whole.