DOV-BORIS GOLDBERG

DOV-BORIS GOLDBERG (November 12, 1866-July 7, 1922)

            He was born in Shaki (Šakiai), near Suwalk, Lithuania, into a well-to-do family that adhered to the Jewish Enlightenment.  He graduated from a secular high school in Kovno.  He graduated from Berlin University with a degree in chemical engineering.  In 1898 he returned to Russia and settled in Vilna.  From 1902 he was one of the most active Zionists in Russia.  He was the main speaker at the Zionist conference in Helsinki, where he defended the importance of work in the Diaspora.  He participated in a number of Zionist congresses.  In 1905 he was a member of the “Committee for Jewish Rights in Russia.”  In 1907 he took part in the third conference of the Zionist press in Vilna.  During WWI, he served as an envoy of Russian Zionists to Scandinavian countries and England.  In 1917 he was selected as a member of the National Council of Russian Jewry, and in 1919 he was a representative of the National Council to the All-Jewish World Conference in Paris.  Until late 1920 he was in England.  He was a co-founder of the Jewish National Fund as well as other international Zionist institutions.  In early 1921 he moved to Israel and started construction factories, which made possible the development of Tel Aviv.  He began writing for Voskhod (Sunrise) in 1906, in which he published articles and impressions of the Fifth Zionist Congress.  He later published feature pieces on Jewish and Zionist issues in Russian, Yiddish, Hebrew, and German in Razsviet (Dawn), Die Welt (The world), Haolam (The world), Dos yidishe folk (The Jewish people) in Vilna (1908-1907), and Altnayland (Old-new land), among other serials.  He was also the author of a statistical work in Russian concerned with Jewish life in Russia (St. Petersburg, 1897) and of a pamphlet entitled Di yidishe kolonyal-bank (The Jewish colonial bank) which appeared in both Yiddish and Russian (Vilna, 1909), 32 pp.  He served on the editorial boards of Haolam, Dos yidishe folk in Vilna, and Altnayland, among others.  He wrote under the pen name “Dov.”  On May 1, 1921 during the Jaffa pogrom, he was severely wounded and he died in Tel Aviv.

Sources: Haarets (Tel Aviv) (July 8, 1922); D. Tidhar, in Entsiklopedyah leḥalutse hayishuv uvonav (Encyclopedia of the founders and builders of Israel) (Tel Aviv, 1947-1971), vol. 1, pp. 293-94.

Khayim Leyb Fuks