Abba Kovner (Hebrew: אבא קובנר‎; 1918–1987) was a Lithuanian Jewish Hebrew poet, writer, and partisan leader. He became one of the great poets of modern Israel. He was a cousin of the Israeli Communist Party leader Meir Vilner.

Abba Kovner was born in the Crimean Black Sea port city of Sevastopol but soon moved with his family to Vilnius, Lithuania) where he grew up and was educated at the secondary Hebrew academy and the school of the arts. While pursuing his studies, he joined and became an active member in the socialist Zionist youth movement HaShomer HaTzair.

In June 1941, Nazi Germany attacked Vilna, which was by that time in Lithuanian SSR, and after occupation established the Vilna Ghetto. Kovner managed to escape with several friends to a Dominican convent headed by Anna Borkowska in the city's suburbs, but he soon returned to the ghetto. He concluded that in order for any revolt to be successful, a Jewish resistance fighting force needed to be assembled.

At the start of 1942, Kovner released a manifesto in the Vilna ghetto, twice repeating the phrase "Let us not go like lambs to the slaughter!" that later became famous. The manifesto declared that Hitler had decided to kill all the Jews of Europe and that it was best to die fighting. It was the first time such a notion had been declared in Europe—nobody at that time knew for certain of more than local killings—and many received it with skepticism. Kovner and others formed the United Partisan Organization, one of the first armed underground organizations in the Jewish ghettos under Nazi occupation. Kovner became its leader in July 1943, after Yitzhak Wittenberg was named by a tortured comrade and turned himself in to prevent an attack on the ghetto. The UPO planned to fight the Germans when the end of the ghetto came, but circumstances and the opposition of the ghetto leaders made this impossible and they escaped to the forests.