Aharon Grabelsky

Aharon Grabelsky was born in 1898 in Derazhne

Grabelsky was born in 1898 in Derazhne, in the Podolia region of Ukraine, to a well-off family of Sadigura Hasidim. During the Third Aliyah he came to the Land of Israel through Egypt with Tzipora, who became his wife. He first lived in a tent camp that became the Nordia neighborhood of Tel Aviv, then moved to Jerusalem.

In Jerusalem he worked as a construction laborer and learned the trade, then partnered with industrialist Yitzhak Mandelblit. In 1923 he opened a workshop for marble and mosaic tiles in the area of the planned Rehavia neighborhood. His stonework on the Scottish St. Andrew's Church in the late 1920s made his name known in the city.

He built the home of the Mufti of Jerusalem and, in the mid 1930s, repaired marble walls in the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron for the Muslim Waqf. A contract to restore the Dome of the Rock and al-Aqsa Mosque was signed but not carried out because of the 1936 to 1939 unrest. He also worked on the National Institutions buildings, the YMCA, the Rockefeller Museum and the Tegart forts.

In the War of Independence he served as an officer in the Engineering Corps, in charge of fortifications on Mount Zion. He was badly wounded by Jordanian sniper fire and suffered from the wound until his death in 1954. He is buried on Har HaMenuchot, and his son Yechiel and grandsons continued the factory.