Meir Dizengoff

Meir Dizengoff was born on Shushan Purim, 25 February 1861 in the village of Ekimovtsy near Orhei, Bessarabia. His father was a follower of the Hasidic master of Sadigura, and his mother was the descendant of a rabbinic dynasty. In 1878, his family moved to Kishinev, where he graduated from high school and studied at the polytechnic school.

In 1882, he volunteered in the Imperial Russian Army, serving in Zhytomyr (now in Ukraine) until 1884. There he first met Zina Brenner, whom he married in Alexandria on his way back to Ottoman Palestine in the early 1890s.

After his military service, Dizengoff remained in Odessa, where he became involved in the Narodnaya Volya underground. In 1885, he was arrested for insurgency and spent 8 months in jail. In Odessa, he met Leon Pinsker, Ahad Ha’am and others, and joined the Hovevei Zion movement.

Upon his release from prison in 1886, Dizengoff returned to Kishinev and founded the Bessarabian branch of Hovevei Zion, which he represented at the 1887 conference.

He left Kishinev in 1888 to study chemical engineering at the Sorbonne in Paris. At the Sorbonne he met Elie Scheid, a representative of Baron Edmond de Rothschild's projects in Ottoman Palestine.

While studying chemical engineering at the University of Paris, Dizengoff met Edmond James de Rothschild, who sent him to Ottoman-ruled Palestine to establish a glass factory which would supply bottles for Rothschild's wineries. Dizengoff opened the factory in Tantura in 1892, but it proved unsuccessful due to impurities in the sand. At this time Dizengoff's wife contracted malaria. Since she was pregnant, her doctors advised that she go to Paris. There she gave birth to a girl, but the baby soon died. The couple never had any additional children. After this tragedy and the failure of the bottle factory, Dizengoff soon returned to Kishinev.

In 1904, Dizengoff helped establish the Geulah company, which bought up land in Palestine from Arabs, and became involved in the import business, especially machinery and automobiles to replace the horse-drawn carriages that had served as the primary transportation from Jaffa port to Jerusalem and other towns. In 1905, Dizengoff returned to Palestine and settled in Jaffa. Dizengoff also co-founded a boat company that bore his name, and served as the Belgian consul. When Dizengoff learned that residents were organizing to build a new neighborhood, Tel Aviv, he formed a partnership with the Ahuzat Bayit company and bought land on the outskirts of Jaffa, which was parceled out to the early settlers by lot.