Robert Bitker

Robert (Boris) Bitker (1895–1945) was a military commander of the Zionist paramilitary group Irgun. He was born in Warsaw in 1900 and attended Catholic gymnasium. At 19 he was drafted into the Polish army but soon fled into Russia where he fought in the White Army under Kolchak during the Russian Revolution. In the early 1920s he emigrated to the U.S and lived briefly in Los Angeles where he worked in films. From the U.S. he returned to Shanghai where he joined the Revisionist movement and where he was one of the originators of the Jewish battalion in the volunteer corps in Shanghai which was commanded by the British. In 1933 he was appointed to head the Betar command in southern China. In 1937 he came to Palestine where he was appointed head of the Irgun military operations there. He eventually returned again to the United States and died in San Francisco in 1945.