Arkin, Moshe

Son of Yaffa and Yosef. He was born on June 14, 1908 in the village of Ekron (Mazkeret Batya today), the third generation of the founders of the moshava. In August 1936, during a large demonstration of Arabs, a bomb was thrown into the prison yard. Moshe managed to grab the bomb and remove the burning fuse, thereby preventing its explosion. For saving the lives of many people, he received an honorable mention from the police. During his vacations, he used to go with his family to trips to Lebanon and on these trips he smuggled arms in various ways for the Haganah, for example: he used to hide guns with a large bandage on which he put his arm. Throughout his service in the police, he maintained close relations with neighbors and with Arab friends. When he served in the traffic department in Jaffa, he was a single Jew at the station and then served as an interpreter between Jews and Arabs, and used to reconcile between them in cases of need and restore order. The Arabs respected him and also liked him and many of his friends were true. On November 15, 1938, he was shot in the back on one of the streets of Jaffa and killed by Arabs in retaliation for discovering the murderers of a flour mill owner on the Tel Aviv-Jaffa border a few days earlier. He was laid to rest in the cemetery in Nahalat Yitzhak. He left a wife and four children.