Ya'ackov Ben-Dov

Ya'ackov Ben-Dov was born in 1882 in Polonne

Ben-Dov was born on 21 June 1882 in Polonne, near Kiev, to Dov and Raizel Lasutra. As a child he studied in a heder and took general subjects with private tutors. As a teenager he organized Zionist activity in the Zhytomyr region.

He studied at the Academy of the Arts in Kiev and became a photographer. In 1906 he asked Menachem Ussishkin for help to move to the Land of Israel, and he arrived at the end of 1907 with the Second Aliyah. He joined the Young Worker movement, worked as a guard in Rehovot, and then settled in Jerusalem to study at Bezalel.

After his studies he founded the photography department at Bezalel and taught there. He married Roza Rabinowitz, a pharmacist from Zhytomyr. In 1912 he and Boris Schatz announced the creation of a Jewish film industry in the Land of Israel.

In World War I he served as a photographer in an Austrian military hospital in Jerusalem. In 1920 he produced Shivat Zion, a film about life in the country, and he made a feature-length documentary each year for 16 years. He also produced postcards, albums and portraits of community leaders, and in 1922 built one of the first homes in Talpiot.

He was named a Worthy Citizen of Jerusalem in 1967 and died on 7 March 1968. His daughter Hana gave about 3,000 negatives to the Israel Museum and the Zionist Archives. A street in Talpiot bears his name.