Joseph Trumpeldor

Born in Pyatigorsk, Russian Empire, Joseph Trumpeldor received a traditional education in Rostov-on-Don before entering a Russian gymnasium. He served in the Russian imperial military during the Russo-Japanese War and was detained for a time as a prisoner of war in Japan. After returning to Russia in 1906, Trumpeldor studied law at the University of St. Petersburg before immigrating to Palestine in 1912. Having earlier been drawn to Zionist efforts to establish agricultural colonies in the Land of Israel, he joined the Migdal farm on the shore of the Sea of Galilee and then worked for a time at Degania, the first kevutsah, a labor collective working a farmstead cooperatively on national land. During World War I, Ottoman authorities deported Trumpeldor to Alexandria, Egypt, where he worked alongside Vladimir Jabotinsky to coordinate a group among the Jewish deportees to volunteer in the British war effort as the Zion Mule Corps. Trumpeldor returned to Palestine in 1919, again involving himself with Jewish settlements in the Galilee. In 1920, he was killed in fighting at the newly established Jewish settlement of Tel Hai in northern Palestine. Thereafter, he was celebrated as a hero in Zionist popular culture: he inspired the founding of the left-wing Zionist Gdud ha-avodah and was honored with mythic status in right-wing Zionist circles; thus, the Revisionist Zionist movement named its youth group Betar, combining reference to a site of Jewish resistance to Roman conquest in the ancient world with the acronymic Brit Trumpeldor (the Bond of Trumpeldor).