A. D. Gordon

Aaron David Gordon was born in 1856 in Podolia, in the Russian Empire, and spent over twenty years as an official on an estate managed by the Günzburg family. In 1904, aged 48, he moved to Ottoman Eretz Israel and insisted on working as a farm laborer, first in the vineyards and orange groves of Petah Tikva and Rishon LeZion, later in the Galilee. He spent his last years at Degania, where he died in 1922 and is buried.

His essays taught a "religion of labor": exile had cut Jews off from nature and physical work, and only by working the land with their own hands could they heal themselves as individuals and as a people. He was the spiritual guide of the Hapoel Hatzair party and of the young pioneers of the Second Aliyah. The Gordonia youth movement was named after him, and his ideals helped shape the kibbutz.