Avraham Sharon

Abraham Schwadron (later Avraham Sharon) was born in the village of Bieniów (now Zolochivka),[1] near Zolochiv in Galicia (then a part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire).

During that time he also spread the "Heroic Zionism" idea among his friends, including David Horowitz, who described him as one of the founders of the Jewish pioneering school of thought.

In a Jewish music concert held on November 14, 1935, in the Edison Theater in Jerusalem, three of Sharon's compositions were performed, together with works of Felix Mendelssohn, Ernest Bloch, Joel Engel and others.

He translated Hayim Nahman Bialik's The City of Slaughter into German, regularly published pamphlets on current events which he gave to his acquaintances, and letters to the editor.

[4] He was a staunch believer in Hebrew labor (he mockingly called Arab work Avodah Zara, a pun on idolatry in Judaism), and the fulfillment of the Zionist vision.

He sympathized with Beitar and Lehi, and joined the Jewish Work Guards — an organization whose members stood outside orchards barring entry to Arab workers.

For several decades, Sharon collected thousands of manuscripts and portraits of people from a variety of fields: rabbis and scholars, leaders of the Haskalah ("enlightenment") movement, Zionist leaders, businesspeople and economists, naturalists, scientists and technologists, doctors, historians, writers, poets and more – all Jewish, with a small amount of apostates, including Eighteen Nobel Prize laureates.

As a result of his research, Sharon found out that the printed portraits of the Baal Shem Tov, Dov Ber of Mezeritch, and Jacob Joseph of Polonne were forged.

Sharon's vision for the collection was for it to be used as a basis for a Jewish biographical research institute and museum, adjacent to the National Library of Israel, where the portrait gallery could be exhibited.