Israel Shochat
Israel Shochat (name variant: Shochet ; * 1886 in Liskowa, Belarus ; † June 7, 1961 in Israel ) was one of the first leading Zionists . He founded and directed the organization HaSchomer (German "The Guardian"). He was the husband of Manja Shochat .
Life
Shochat was born in the province of Grodno as the son of a family of Jewish landowners (later the father speculated almost the entire fortune on the stock exchange). As a youth he joined the Poale Zion party and emigrated to Erez Israel in 1904 . He had previously toured the larger cities of Russia and founded various local groups of the Poale Zion. The pogroms in Kishinev caused a change of heart in him, and he vowed not to rest until he had trained the entire Russian-Jewish youth as ordinary workers, day laborers, and field workers and transferred them to Erez Israel. Before he emigrated in 1904, he stayed in Germany, where he received further training in agricultural engineering.
After his aliyah arrived in Erez Israel in March 1904 , when he noticed that the Jewish settlements there were mainly based on Arab labor and were guarded by Bedouin , Circassian and Maghreb guards, he decided to found an underground movement to replace Jewish workers and guards to kick. After attending the eighth Zionist Congress in 1907 , he founded a ten-member underground organization in Jaffa called Bar Giora (named after one of the leaders of the uprisings in the Jewish War against the Romans) that same year .
As the leader of this group, Shochat went to Sejera (later Ilaniya ) in Galilee , where he convinced the surrounding settlements to entrust their guarding to Jewish guards. In 1909 the members of Bar Giora founded the HaSchomer ("The Guardian") organization. In 1910 Shochat attempted to introduce Jewish workers into the settlements by means of a "Labor Legion" that was to be newly founded. However, this project met with resistance from the Jewish workers' parties. At the end of 1912 Shochat traveled with Yitzchak Ben Tzwi and David Ben Gurion to Constantinople to study law (Israel Shochat had a notable lack of at the court hearings in the Turkish capital against the establishment of Jewish colonies in Palestine that had been invaded by Bedouins legally qualified Jews who he wanted to remedy).
When the First World War broke out , Shochat was one of those who proposed the establishment of a Jewish militia in order to maintain order in the country. The Turkish authorities opposed this plan, arrested Shochat and his wife Manja and deported them to the Anatolian city of Bursa , where they languished for three and a half years.
In 1917 Shochat was allowed to attend the Poale Zion Conference in Stockholm and returned to Palestine in the spring of 1919. Together with other members of the HaSchomer, he was one of the founders of the Hagana .
However, due to controversies about the organizational structure of the Hagana, he soon withdrew from its command and tried to set up a defense system of its own by setting up an arms store in Kfar Giladi within the framework of the "workers battalion " ( Gedud ha-Avoda ) , and sent members to the military training to Europe. In 1925 he traveled to Moscow to negotiate secretly with high-ranking Soviet authorities about a possible cooperation between his group and the Soviet secret service , but these efforts proved completely fruitless. Shochat and his associates were summoned to a Histadrut committee where they were asked about their separatist political activities.
With the dissolution of Gedud ha-Avoda, Shochat had to resign from the main part of its public activities. As a lawyer he later defended Hagana prisoners, and after the establishment of the State of Israel (1948) he became legal advisor to the Minister of Police. His memoirs were published in Kovez Ha-Shomer (1937) and Sefer Ha-Shomer (1957).
literature
- Salomon Wininger : Great Jewish National Biography . 1925–1936, Vol. V.
- Encyclopedia Judaica . 1971 ff., Volume 14, pp. 1440-1441
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ Mordecai Naor: Eretz Israel. The 20th century. Könemann, Cologne, 1998, ISBN 3-89508-594-4 , p. 26.
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Shochat, Israel |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Shochet, Israel |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | Zionist |
| DATE OF BIRTH | 1886 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Liskowa, Belarus |
| DATE OF DEATH | June 7, 1961 |
| Place of death | Israel |