The eldest living member of the Fourth International (FI) in Germany, Jakob Moneta, died yesterday in the age of 97 in Frankfurt.

Jakob was born in 1914 in Austria in a Jewish family, which escaped to Cologne in Germany 1919 after a pogrom in his hometown in 1918.

Since his schooltime he was active in the SJVD, the youth organisation of the Socialist Workers Party.

1933 he went to Palestine and worked in a Kibbuz, where he worked together with Palestinians and organized strikes for the 8-hours.day. From 1939 on he was prisoner of the British forces in Palestine for more than two years. After his release he became a journalist and in 1948 he went back to Colgne, where he joined the German section of the FI.

When the German section of the FI turned to entrism, he entered the SPD (Social Democratic Party of Germany) and worked from 1953 on at the German embassy in Paris. During the fifities at the same time he engaged clandestine for the liberation war of the Algerian people. 1962 he returned to Cologne and became chief-editor of the monthly newspaper of the German metal workers union, Metall, what he stayed until his retirement in 1978. During this time he was clandestine working for the German section and publishing under a pseudonym in our press.

From 1990 on he was member of the PDS (former Communist party of Eastern Germany) and in their National leadership until 1995.

Jakob wrote hundreds of articles, essays and some books and was until the age of 90 still publishing in the press of the FI.

With Jakob Moneta we loose a lifelong fighter against oppression and for the emancipation of menkind.

We will not forget him.

Thadeus Pato