Israel Belkind

Origins and early life

Israel Belkind was born on 11 January 1861 in Lahoysk, near Minsk, in the Russian Empire, the son of Meir Belkind, a Jewish teacher of the Haskalah, and grew up in a family that would give the Jewish settlement of Palestine several of its founders — a Jew by birth and by the whole direction of his life, which this fiche has no need to argue.

Work and career

A student at the University of Kharkov when the pogroms of 1881 swept southern Russia, he gathered in his room, in January 1882, the group of students who called themselves Bilu, from the initials of the verse 'House of Jacob, come, let us go', and who resolved that the answer to the pogroms was not emigration to America but return to the land of Israel: the first organized movement of Zionist pioneers, twenty years before Herzl's Congress and fifteen before the word Zionism existed.

He led the first fourteen of them to Jaffa in July 1882, worked as a laborer at Mikveh Israel and Rishon LeZion, and quarreled with the Rothschild administration that came to run the colonies; in 1885, for the third anniversary of Rishon LeZion, he and Fanny Abramovitch designed the blue-and-white banner with the star of David that became the flag of the Zionist movement and, in 1948, of the State of Israel. His second vocation was the school: he taught Hebrew in Jaffa, founded in 1889 the Kiryat Sefer school, the first in the country to teach all subjects in Hebrew, and in 1904 brought the orphans of the Kishinev pogrom to Palestine and founded for them an agricultural school at Shefeya.

Later years

He wrote on the geography and the Arabs of the land, whom he believed to be descendants of the ancient Jews, and died in Berlin in 1929, where he had gone for treatment; he is buried at Rishon LeZion.