Teddy Kollek:In Jerusalem, people used to joke that even if the Messiah took centuries to come and bring peace to the holy city, mayor Teddy Kollek would still be there to greet Him. But in 1993 the man who ruled the Israeli capital for 28 years lost an election to someone almost half his age; now he has died, aged 95.
Kollek presided over Jerusalem's unification in 1967, at the time of the Six Day War. He relished the task of balancing the demands of a city divided between Israeli and Arab; Jew, Muslim and Christian; and, within the Jewish community, between religious and secular.
A genial and accessible workaholic, he was also a political anomaly - a liberal and secular ruler of a largely right-wing and pious city, a European by birth whose Jewish constituents came from 104 different backgrounds and were 70 per cent north African or Middle Eastern in origin.
On November 25th, 1993, however, he was beaten by Ehud Olmert, the current prime minister, who had wooed the city's increasingly ultra-Orthodox electorate. Only 7 per cent of Arab East Jerusalemites (or 6,000 voters) chose to vote, thus depriving Kollek of vital support.
Paradoxically, Kollek's philosophy of pragmatic liberalism had survived a national tide of support for the Likud since 1977. It failed him a year after Labour returned to power in 1992 and months after Israel and the PLO signed the Oslo peace deal that raised Arab hopes that the city might be "shared" as the joint capital of two states.
To Arab Jerusalemites, Israel's 1967 victory was a calamity, despite Kollek's attempts at equitable dealings. He came under severe pressure during the intifada which spread to Jerusalem in 1988 and effectively created no-go areas for Jews. While he strove to curb levels of enmity, he seemed detached from Palestinian aspirations, and their 1993 boycott probably sealed his fate.
Theodore Fleischer (later Hebraised to Kollek) was born in Nagyvaszony near Budapest to prosperous, well-educated Jewish parents. After the first World War, the family settled in Vienna. Work at the family timberware factory bored him and soon he devoted himself to assisting the local Zionist Youth movement.
He arrived in British-mandated Palestine aged 24 and founded Kibbutz Ein Gev on the shores of the Sea of Galilee. Within a year he had met and married Tamar Schwartz. As mukhtar (or head) of the area, he struck up good relations with the local Arab community. With the second World War looming, the Jewish Agency had Kollek negotiate with Adolf Eichmann for the rescue of European Jews and by 1940 he was head of the agency's political department.
After the second World War, Kollek bought arms illicitly in the United States to aid the nascent Jewish state: indeed, without his charm and guile, Israel may never have survived the 1947-49 war of independence. In 1951 he led the first Israeli military mission to the US and from 1952 to 1964 he served as director general of the office of Israel's first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion.
Kollek followed his mentor Ben-Gurion into political exile in the short-lived Rafi party, but just when his political career seemed over, he was persuaded to run for mayor of west Jerusalem.
Modest he was not - but a charming, intelligent rascal, definitely. In the end he declined an offer from the then prime minister Yitzhak Rabin to become minister for Jerusalem. He is survived by Tamar, his filmmaker son Amos and artist daughter Osnat.
Theodore "Teddy" Kollek, born May 27th, 1911; died January 2nd, 2007