Land of Israel in Yehezkel Yaakobi's collection

From Upper Galilee to Dead Sea; from colonies of Ekron, Petah Tikva and Rishon Lezion to houses, streets and wide boulevard in Tel Aviv. Take a peek into a private, fascinating postcard collection taking us way back

Nadav Man

Published: 02.06.10, 07:46 / Israel Travel

Yehezkel Yaakobi was born in Poland in 1897. At the age of 14 he immigrated on his own to the Land of Israel to study at the Herzilya Hebrew High School in Tel Aviv. Yaakobi is one of those lone youth who arrived from abroad to study in the Land of Israel in the Hebrew High School's first classes when it was still located at the end of Herzl Street.

The Hebrew High School rented a boarding house (pension) for some of the teens, while others stayed with families from Tel Aviv who adopted them. The youth's parents sent their sons in Israel money for living and tuition fee. When World War I broke out, the youth were "stranded" in Israel and could not receive the money sent by their parents from abroad.

When he turned 17, Yaakobi joined the Turkish army and became an officer. At the end of the war he arrived in Belgium, began studying chemistry and graduated with a Ph.D.

Regina (Friedenberg) Yaakobi was born in Russia in 1903, and moved with her family to Belgium when World War I ended. She studied music and became a piano teacher. In Belgium she met Yehezkel and married him.

The Yaakobi couple's son, Daniel, was born in 1934. When World War II broke out, the family escaped to a rural area in France and managed to hide. In 1945 the family members immigrated to the Land of Israel. Yehezkel worked as a chemist in a fertilizer and anorganic materials factory, and Regina worked as a piano teacher at Dunie Weizman Conservatory of Music in Haifa.

Daniel studied physics at the Technion and was considered a prodigy. Daniel died in 2009, and I reviewed the albums in the house of his daughter, Anat (Yaakobi) Katz. I found interesting photos in them and we'll present them here in the future. This time we present postcards from the Land of Israel collected by Yehezkel in one of the albums.