Avraham was born in August 1920 in Riga, Latvia. His father Yehezkel owned a shoe
store and his mother Helena raised the three boys. Avraham was the middle child. He studied
at a Yiddish school and in 1930 joined Beitar. In 1936 he was sent on naval training aboard
the passenger ship Theodore Herzl, which had been purchased by Latvian Jews for Beitar. In

1939 he rose to be Seaman 1 st Class and was sent by the Beitar emissary to Constanza,
Romania to join Etzel members organizing the illegal Af-AL-Pi Aliya to Eretz Israel.
He boarded the transport ship Parita carrying 860 immigrants. The ship set sail on July 12,
1939. According to the plan the immigrants were supposed to board a different ship along the
way to carry them to their final destination but it never arrived. After a difficult journey at
sea and after the foreign ship’s captain refused to take them directly to Tel Aviv, the
immigrants arrested him and his crew and Abrasha took over command of the ship. On
August 22, 1939 he managed to break through the British Navy blockade and sailed the ship
safely to the coast of Tel Aviv, opposite the Katy Dan Hotel. He swam to the shore and went
to Metsudat Ze’ev in Tel Aviv.
Upon his arrival he joined Beitar and was sent to Tel Litvinsky. In late 1940 he joined the
British Forces, served in the Navy, and was sent to Libya and to Greece. In April 1941 he
was captured by the Germans in Greece. After three-and-a-half years in a German prison he
escaped and, enduring many hardships, crossed the Russian Front and arrived in Eretz Israel
in April 1945. He joined Lehi in late 1945 while still serving in the British Forces, where he
had been put in charge of a weapons storage building in the Rehovot Base. He was planning
to hand the weapons over to Lehi but a day before the plan’s execution Etzel units entered
the storage building and the two movements had to share the pickings. He was arrested
immediately after the weapons were confiscated and transferred to Gaza Prison and then to
Latrun, where he served in maintaining contact with the Camp Commander. In October 1945
he was released under house arrest but was later rearrested and sent in 1947 to Kenya. He
returned in July 1948 with the last of the exiles.
During the War of Independence he served in the IDF Navy. After his discharge he was
appointed a Tel Aviv Port department manager, an administrator in the Asuta Hospital and a
sales manager in a general engineering company.
In 1946 Abrasha married Naomi Felatser, a Lehi comrade. They have two sons, Eike and
Arik, and five grandchildren. He retired in 1996.