Ben Zyskowicz - Biography

Ben Berl Zyskowicz (born 24 May 1954 in Helsinki) is a Finnish politician and member of parliament. Zyskowicz was chairman of the Finnish National Coalition Party's (Finnish: Kansallinen Kokoomus) parliamentary group from 1993 to 2006 and has been a member of parliament for the National Coalition Party since 1979. He was the first of Jewish ancestry to be elected to the Finnish parliament. Following the parliamentary elections in April 2011, Zyskowicz was elected as the acting speaker of the parliament, a position he gave up after the new cabinet had been formed..

Zyskowicz was born in Helsinki to Jewish parents. His father, Abram, was a Polish Jew who had been in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp and moved as a refugee to Sweden, where he met Ben's mother, Ester, a Finnish Jew. Ben Zyskowicz has been married to Rahime Husnetdin-Zyskowicz, a member of the Finnish Muslim Tatar community, since 1982 and has two daughters, Daniela (1983) and Dinah (1985).

Zyskowicz abstains from alcohol. He is known to be a regular at Café Strindberg – a popular celebrity-spotting location on Pohjoisesplanadi in the Helsinki city centre.

Zyskowicz is renowned for being the Finnish politician with the most difficult to spell name. In 2002, Ilta-Sanomat reported that only 16,6 % of Finns knew how to correctly spell his name. In 2011 he was elected as the acting speaker for the Finnish parliament. Despite spelling instructions for his name being sent by text message to elected members of parliament, two voting ballots were disqualified for misspelling his name.

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