Gedaliah Alon

Gedaliah Alon was born in 1901 in Kobryn

Gedaliah Rogoznitski, later Alon, was born in 1901 in Kobryn, then in the Russian Empire and today in Belarus. His father Nachman was a scholar and craftsman. Alon studied in a heder and a local yeshiva, and in 1913 entered the Slabodka yeshiva in Lithuania.

He returned home in 1917 and became a Zionist activist after the Balfour Declaration, founding a Hebrew school in Kobryn. He finished high school in Vienna in 1922. In 1924 he studied for a year at Berlin University and at the Hildesheimer rabbinical seminary.

He moved to the Land of Israel, studied at the Hebrew University, and in 1931 was among the first to receive a master's degree there. He then taught Talmud and the history of the Mishnah and Talmud period at the university, without tenure. His research used a philological and historical method and sought to build the history of the period on the foundations of Jewish law.

Alon died of a heart attack in Jerusalem in 1950. In 1953 he was awarded the Israel Prize for Jewish studies for his history of the Jews in the Land of Israel in the Mishnah and Talmud period. A street in the German Colony of Jerusalem bears his name.