Aaron Aaronsohn

Aaron Aaronsohn was born in Bacău, Romania, in 1876 and came as a child with his family to Zikhron Ya'akov in 1882. After studying agronomy in France with the support of Baron Edmond de Rothschild, he explored the flora of the land, and in 1906, on the slopes near Rosh Pinna, he found wild emmer wheat (Triticum dicoccoides), the wild ancestor of cultivated wheat, a discovery that made him famous among botanists. In 1910, with American backing, he founded the Jewish Agricultural Experiment Station at Atlit.

During the First World War, convinced that the Ottoman Empire would destroy the Yishuv, he founded with his sister Sarah, Avshalom Feinberg and Yosef Lishansky the Nili spy network, which gave the British valuable intelligence for the conquest of the land. He reached Egypt and London in 1916–17 and worked with British intelligence and the Zionist leadership. After the war he advised the Zionist delegation at the Paris Peace Conference, and he died on 15 May 1919 when his plane disappeared over the English Channel.