Recanati, Leon

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RECANATI, LEON

RECANATI, LEON (Yehuda ) (1890–1945), banker. Born in Salonika, Recanati was one of the earliest Zionist activists in Salonika. After the outbreak of the Young Turk revolution in 1908, he was one of the first Zionist leaders who acted in the open. In the same year he began to function as a correspondent of the local Zionist movement to the Central Zionist Bureau in Cologne. After the death of his older brother Zacharia, Leon took over the family business of commercial representation for foreign firms in Salonika.

When the Young Turks began to ban official Zionist activities, Leon channeled his public endeavors through his involvement with B'nai B'rith, of which he was one of the founding members in Salonika (1911). One of the first results of his B'nai B'rith work was his initiative in founding a women's organization, B'not Israel.

Recanati's principal business was as owner of the tobacco factory Fumero. He provided work for some 600 Jewish breadwinners in times of economic stress.

In 1929 he was the Greek Jewish representative at the gathering which founded an extended Jewish Agency and subsequently was Greek Jewry's representative to the World Jewish Congress in Geneva. In 1933 the Zionist slate won the local Jewish community elections, and Leon Recanati was elected president of the Jewish community of Salonika.

In 1934 he moved to Palestine and in 1935 founded the Israel Discount Bank. He continued his concern with the welfare of his fellow Salonikan Jews. During the period of Nazi occupation in Greece, Recanati tried to take measures to help save his fellow Jews. He persuaded the Jewish agency to rent a small boat that sailed secretly at night between Zakalos, on the eastern coast of the Euboean peninsula in Greece, and Gesme, Turkey. Hundreds of Greek Jews fleeing Nazi terror were saved in this manner and later arrived in Palestine. Hundreds of Greek officers escaped from Greece in these same boats in order to join the Greek army stationed in the Middle East.

In Palestine, Recanati cared for the few refugees who succeeded in escaping and granted them loans for initial rehabilitation. He also participated in the building of a residential area for Greek Jewish immigrants in Yad Eliyahu in the Tel Aviv region.

He was also actively involved in public life in Palestine. He was chairman of the Greek-Jewish Kadima club, leader of the Organization of Greek Immigrants which ran a kitchen for the needy as well as a welfare fund for Greek immigrant women, and was president of the settlement company Banimli-Gevulam, which founded and strengthened the settlements of Kefar Hittim, Bet Hanan, Zur Moshe, and Bet Halevi, all inhabited mostly by Sephardi Jews. He also set up a scholarship fund to enable Sephardi youth to obtain high school, technical, agricultural, and particularly university training.