Moshe Novomeysky

Moshe Novomeysky was born in 1873 in Barguzin

Novomeysky was born in 1873 in Barguzin, a village in eastern Siberia near Lake Baikal. His Jewish family were political exiles who worked in gold mining. His grandfather had been exiled from Poland to Siberia in 1831.

He studied in Irkutsk and then mining engineering at Königsberg University, finishing in 1897. Back in Siberia, he studied ways to extract minerals from bodies of water. In 1900 he built a chemical factory that supplied refined salts to local glassworks.

He moved from revolutionary politics to Zionism and attended the 1903 Zionist Congress in Basel. In 1905 he was jailed for revolutionary activity. He chaired the council of Siberian Jews and led the Siberian Zionist Center from 1914 to 1920.

Otto Warburg showed him a report on the Dead Sea, and in 1911 he first visited it to test its waters. He immigrated to Palestine in 1920, settled his family in Gedera and bought mining and sailing rights in 1922. He founded the Palestine Mining Syndicate in 1924, won a concession approved in 1927 and founded the Palestine Potash Company in 1929.

In 1944 he founded the Jordan Exploration Company and became its general manager. He ran the potash company until it was nationalized in 1952. He died in 1961.