Ali Ben Zvi, son of President Ben Zvi - Photo album 1938-1940 - Mikve Israel.

Ali Ben Zvi, son of President Ben Zvi - Photo album 1938-1940 - Mikve Israel.

The album documents the life of Ben Zvi, aged 16-18, while attending the Mikve Israel agricultural school, and engaged in training and defense activities. Includes many photographs of teenagers with weapons, and in uniforms, photographs of life, trips and landscapes, and several photographs of buildings and places in the school.

The story of his life 

Ben Rachel-Yanait and Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, the second president of the State of Israel after its establishment, one of the pioneers of the second aliyah, Hashomer, the Haganah and the creators of socialist Zionism that fulfills its principles in its life. He was born on Thursday, February 10, 1924, in Jerusalem, and was the first child in the Rehavia neighborhood. His mother, Shoshana Lishansky, put a stick on his shoulder, like a rifle, and went out to stand in front of the door. To his grandmother's question:

He replied: "I am going out to protect you. They are the only man in the house." In this spirit of responsibility, heroism and fulfillment of duty to the end, grows. From the age of twelve onwards, he did "defense" in communications services, transferring weapons and hiding them, etc. He also worked as a farmer in his childhood, in the workers' nursery that his mother founded and ran. He was one of the best students in the elementary school and in the gymnasium, and in his essays there was a deepening of the problems of morality and supreme justice. During his school years he prepared himself - in idea and deed - for a life of fulfillment as a friend and later as a guide and took upon himself and performed the most difficult tasks, lest he be suspected of relying on "ancestral rights".

During the months of summer vacation he would go to labor camps on farms and even then he chose his future with pioneering fulfillment in agriculture, and it was necessary to convince him that graduating from high school does not contradict the pioneering duty he took on. After seven high school classes, in which he excelled in his studies, he moved to the agricultural school named after Kadouri and with his classmates there he joined the Palmach and bore all the hardships, hardships and dangers of training and travel.During World War II, when the enemy threatened to invade our country, he wanted to volunteer for the army following in the footsteps of his older brother, but in his internal struggle he won the recognition that he must remain in the Palmach, "the nucleus for an independent Hebrew army." His nucleus in Palmach for settlement and defense in Kibbutz Beit Keshet - near Sajra, the cradle of Hashomer and the idea of ​​defense, where his parents dreamed and fought in their thinking in the new type of Jew living his whole life in his homeland close to the land, in the form of an agricultural collective. He again considered volunteering for the front lines of the war against Hitler, but the sense of duty and discipline grew within him and therefore remained on his guard in the country. Ali was the mukhtar of his kibbutz Beit Keshet, and formed friendly relations with the Arabs of the villages and with the Bedouin tribe in the area. In the kibbutz he was a leader and a guide and a man of the line, both at work and in defense.

With the outbreak of the War of Independence, when there were Arab attacks on his point, he wisely and firmly managed the defense of the place and the environment. On Thursday, March 16, 1948, a few days before the date set for his wedding, he set out with seven members of Beit Keshet for a tour of the area. Managed to escape to the kibbutz and summon reinforcements, the seven remaining boys fought valiantly in the gang until the last bullet and all fell. After three days of tedious negotiations, their bodies were returned.

He is survived by his parents and a brother - Amram.

(This page is part of the state memorial project "Yizkor", organized by the Ministry of Defense) 

125 photos, many of them small - around 6X8 cm.

A very small part was photographed!