In forming Betar out of a handful of Riga high school students in 1923,   Ze'ev Jabotinsky imbued the everyday lives of hundreds of thousands of    Jewish children from the ghettoes in Eastern Europe and all over the world   with the spirit of malchut Yisrael (Jewish nobility) and a sense of being a part not only of the future -- the coming Jewish state -- but of the past -- the majesty of the Kingdom of David, the Maccabees, the Prophets, and Bar Kochba, from whom they were descended.

The name "Betar" is an acronym for "Brit Trumpeldor" -- Association of Joseph Trumpeldor, the hero of the Zion Mule Corps and of Tel Hai -- and it is the name of the fortress that was the last bastian of Jewish sovereignty to fall to the Roman invaders two thousand years ago. In 1926, Betar became the official youth organization of the World Union of Revisionist Zionists, and demonstrated to the world that a new Jewish generation had at last come into being.

A great many Betarim received military training in the Diaspora countries before going to settle in Eretz Yisrael. For this purpose, Betar established a naval school in Italy in the city of Civitavecchia. With the creation of the State of Israel, many of the graduates of that school joined the Israeli Navy and became high officers in the Israeli Defence Forces.

In the late 1930's, it was Betar's Plugat HaKotel that came forward to provide the "defence force" needed to protect Jews praying at the Western Wall from Arab molestation. And in 1938, when Jabotinsky, in the face of the infamous Macdonald White Paper, gave the signal for the formation of "Aliyah Bet" to "illegally" transport Jews from Nazi-occupied Europe to Palestine, it was to Betar that he delegated the responsibility for organizing the transports and guiding the immigrants to their ports of embarkation.