EDELSTEIN, JACOB

(d. 1944)

Czech Zionist. Born in Galicia, he became a Zionist socialist leader in Czechoslovakia and director of the Palestine office of the Jewish Agency in Prague. During the German occupation, he encouraged the idea of a Jewish labour camp at Theresienstadt. In 1941 he became Jewish elder of the Theresienstadt ghetto. In 1943 he was arrested for falsifying the lists in order to help some Jews to escape and was shot in Auschwitz.