Born in Kippenheim, Germany in 1926, Stef Wertheimer immigrates to Mandatory Palestine in 1937. A philanthropist and ardent peace activist, Wertheimer has dedicated more than $100 million of his own money to build industrial parks in the Galilee.
July 11, 1927 A major earthquake strikes Jericho just after 3 p.m., killing between 300 and 500 people and injuring at least 700 others. Measured at a magnitude of 6.3, the quake lasts about five…
January 2, 1927 Ahad Ha’am, the leader of the movement for cultural Zionism, dies in Mandatory Palestine. He was born Asher Zvi Hirsch Ginsberg on Aug. 18, 1856, in a village near Kyiv, Ukraine, and…
December 25, 1925 Politician and activist Geulah Cohen, the founder of the Tehiya party, is born in Tel Aviv. Cohen becomes involved with political movements in Mandatory Palestine when she is young, and she joins…
The Hebrew University officially opens in Jerusalem on Mount Scopus with Zionist and British leaders joined by representatives from universities across the world.
November 9, 1924 Avraham Tamir, a military strategic mastermind who rises to the rank of major general, is born. He is one of the first Israeli officials to meet with PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat and…
Unable to immigrate to the US, many European Jews immigrate to the land of Israel. Between 1924 and 1929, the period known as the Fourth Aliyah, 82,000 Jews arrive in Palestine.
November 8, 1923 Rabbi Yisrael Meir Friedman Ben-Shalom, a sixth-generation descendant of Rebbe Yisrael of Rizin, is born in Bohush, Romania, to a Hasidic and Zionist family. Friedman Ben-Shalom joins Hashomer Hatzair, the secular Zionist…
In border designations for states drafted primarily by Britain and France after WWI, the new state of Syria gains control of the Golan Heights.
Convened in Carlsbad, Czechoslovakia, the Thirteenth Zionist Congress discusses details of the Palestine Mandate and particularly the prerogatives of the Palestine Zionist Executive (PZE) that guide Jewish immigration and settlement in Palestine.
The only politician in Israeli history to hold the positions of both President and Prime Minister, Shimon Peres is born in Belorussia to Yitzchak and Sara Perski.
July 28, 1923 Mordechai Golinkin’s production of Giuseppe Verdi’s “La Traviata” marks the beginning of opera in Mandatory Palestine. Because Palestine has no opera house, the performance is in a movie theater. Golinkin, who wrote…
Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, considered the “father of modern Hebrew,” dies from tuberculosis at the age of 64 in Jerusalem. Thirty thousand mourners attend his funeral on the Mount of Olives.
January 23, 1922 Tuviah Samuel Friedman, a Nazi-hunter known as “the Merciless One,” is born in Radom, Poland. Friedman survives several concentration camps during the Holocaust, which kills his parents and two siblings. As a…
Nahalal, the first moshav ha’ovdim (workers settlement), is founded in the northwest Jezreel Valley, about halfway between Haifa and Afula.
Yosef Haim Brenner, a pioneer of Modern Hebrew Literature, is murdered by an Arab gang during the 1921 Jaffa Riots.
Yitzhak Navon, Israel’s fifth president, is born in Jerusalem.
March 17, 1921 Meir Amit, a career soldier who builds the Mossad into an internationally renowned intelligence agency, is born Meir Slutzky on the shores of the Sea of Galilee in Tiberias. He attends agricultural…
In Salonica, the Conference of Greek Zionists adopts a resolution declaring that Jewish education in the Alliance Israelite Universelle Schools does not meet with Jewish national views and aspirations. They call for a new syllabus.
December 24, 1920 The World Zionist Congress in London launches Keren Hayesod (Hebrew for the Foundation Fund, now known in English as the United Israel Appeal) to raise money for the Zionist movement and fulfill…
The first Hebrew language medical journal in Palestine, “HaRufuah,” is published quarterly by the Jewish Medical Association of Palestine. The journal is still published monthly by the Israel Medical Association and distributed to all its members free of charge.
Following the San Remo conference in April 1920, a treaty is signed between the Allies and the Ottoman Empire in the town of Sevres, France, officially breaking up the Ottoman Empire.
Rabbi Mordechai M. Kaplan, publishes “A Program for the Reconstruction of Judaism” in the Menorah Journal. His ideology eventually leads to the creation of a fourth American Jewish denomination, the Reconstructionist movement.
Bella Abzug is born in the Bronx, New York to an Orthodox Jewish immigrant family from Russia. Elected in 1970, she serves three terms in Congress and is the first Jewish woman to be elected to the House of Representatives.
