Leopold Kessler (Zionist)

Leopold Kessler
Leopold Kessler in Africa, May 1892
Born	February 4, 1864 Gliwice, Prussia (now Poland)
Died	January 3, 1944
Alma mater	Freiberg University of Mining and Technology
Occupation	Engineer, publisher
Children	David F. Kessler
Parent(s)	Jacob Kessler Johanna Feig

Leopold Kessler (1864–1944) was an engineer, newspaper publisher and Zionist. He was instrumental in building many of the institutions that supported the establishment of Israel as a Jewish state.

Leopold Kessler was born on February 4, 1864, into a family that had been settled for some 250 years in Gliwice, Upper Silesia: then part of Prussia, now part of Poland. He was the youngest of five children of Jacob Kessler and Johanna Feig. His maternal grandfather was Jacob Feig, one of the first Jews permitted to settle in nearby Tarnowitz.

Kessler studied at the Mining Academy in Freiberg and joined the German Student Corps' Teutonia chapter. However, he left because of anti-Semitism and because he did not agree with his fellow members' drinking and brawling. He spent a year at the Royal School of Mines in Berlin before returning to Freiberg to complete his studies. Afterward, he left Germany, because he no longer wanted to live in a country where Jews were treated as second-class citizens.

Kessler became a mining engineer in Rhodesia before going in 1896 to the Transvaal to become general manager of a mine.

Kessler wrote in his unfinished autobiography that when he read the booklet "The Jewish State" by Theodor Herzl, he felt he had discovered the solution to the problems that had troubled him in his student days. From then on, he declared himself to be a Zionist and became one of the earliest Zionist pioneers in South Africa. In 1899, he became president of the Transvaal Zionist Association and went to Basel, Switzerland, for the first time. He caused a stir at the Third Zionist Congress, where Jews from all over the world had rallied to Herzl’s call. Kessler was "greeted with enthusiastic applause" after presenting practical ideas for the Congress's Finance Commission, and was elected a member of the Greater Actions Committee.