Avshalom Feinberg

Origins and early life

Avshalom Feinberg was born on 23 October 1889 in Gedera, into the aristocracy of the first Zionist pioneers: his family belonged to the Bilu colony, and his mother, Fanny Belkind, was of the family of Israel Belkind, the movement's founder.

Work and career

A poet in Hebrew and French, raised between the orange groves of Palestine and the schools of Paris, he joined the agronomist Aaron Aaronsohn at the Athlit research station — and when the World War came, with Ottoman rule pressing on the Yishuv and the Armenian massacres before their eyes, the two men, with Sarah Aaronsohn, built NILI, the Jewish network that spied for Britain. It was Feinberg who made the first contact with British intelligence in Cairo in 1915, the link on which the whole network stood.

In January 1917, trying to cross the Ottoman lines toward Egypt, he was killed near Rafah; his companion Yosef Lishansky, wounded, survived to tell it. For fifty years his grave was unknown — until after the Six-Day War of 1967 his remains were found in the Sinai sands, beneath a date palm sprung, the Bedouin said, from the dates in the dead man's pocket, and were buried with military honors on Mount Herzl in Jerusalem.