DOHANJ, JULIJE

DOHANJ, JULIJE (1884–1972), Yugoslav lawyer. Dohanj was born and studied in Budapest. He lived first in Karlovo Selo in the Banat region, moving later to Novi Sad, the capital of the Vojvodina province, where he had a successful career as an advocate. He was a Zionist and for a while even vice president of the Yugoslav Zionist Federation, but in the early 1930s he broke away and joined the Revisionist faction of Jabotinsky, which until then had had no adherents there. Under his influence the local Zionist group also broke away and became a center of Revisionism in Yugoslavia. Jabotinsky spoke at meetings in Zagreb, Belgrade, and Novi Sad, and the new movement, with its Betar youth sections, spread throughout the country. In 1935, after Jabotinsky left the Zionist organization, forming the New Zionist Organization, Dohanj presided over its Yugoslav branch. In that capacity, he helped organize "illegal" Jewish *immigration via the Danube River and, in cooperation with the British Embassy in Belgrade, attempted to warn the Yugoslav public of the Nazi danger.

Dohanj was married to a German woman. Despite this fact, or possibly because of it, he was arrested and interrogated, and was ultimately sent to the Gestapo headquarters in Berlin, where he was kept imprisoned throughout the war. Returning home after the liberation he reopened his office, but experiencing problems with the new Communist judiciary system he soon immigrated to the United States. He worked as a government employee and remarried, this time to an American. On his retirement in 1967 he moved to Israel, settling in Haifa.

[Zvi Loker (2^nd ed.)]