Mordechai Oren

He was implicated in a scandal which created an uproar in the state of Israel during the early fifties when he was tried in a show trial in Eastern Europe and was dubbed the "prisoner of Prague".

Mordechai Oren was born in 1905 in the Galician town Podhajce of Austro-Hungary (now in Ukraine) and was one of the founders of the Hashomer Hatzair youth movement.

[1] He emigrated to Mandatory Palestine in 1929 and joined Hashomer Hatzair settlers in Ness Ziona, where he was involved in a dispute with Mapai activists.

Since 1945 my special missions were to conduct espionage operations against the people's democracies, especially Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, Romania and the East Germany.

[6] This caused deep shock at the Israeli left and the party Mapam and the movement of the Kibbutz Artzi and resulted in a three-way split.

A leftist group of followers of Moshe Sneh, who refused to condemn the Prague trial and the indictment, were forced to leave the kibbutz movement and Mapam and ultimately joined the Israeli Communist Party, while another group left Mapam for not being critical enough of the Soviet Union and formed Ahdut HaAvoda, which ultimately merged with Mapai to form the Israeli Labor Party.