Donia, Tuvia

Son of Chaya and Dov. He was born on April 11, 1877 in Siauliai, Lithuania. At first he studied in a room and yeshiva and then at a real school and at the high technical school in Riga. In 1906 he received an engineer’s degree and two years later immigrated to Eretz Israel and settled in Haifa. He was the first to settle in Hadar Hacarmel and built the first house on Herzl Street. He was a member of the Neighborhood Committee and a member of the management of the “Atid Industries Company” and the founder and chairman of the first Magistrate’s Court in Haifa. In 1910 he opened an independent technical office, but he also worked as a construction contractor and co-founder of the contracting company “Albina, Dunya, Katinka”. The company built the central post office, the King David Hotel and the YMCA. In Jerusalem, police stations throughout the country and camps for the British army. Tuvia had a deep technical understanding, strong and clear, with long-term initiative. Was a pioneer in the introduction of new technology and methods of work. In addition to his many occupations, he was also a member of the Haganah. In the midst of the bloody events that broke out in 1936, on 7 July 1938, he drove in his car on Malchim Street in Haifa when a bomb exploded a few meters in front of the car and stopped his car to pick up an injured Arab policeman and take him to the hospital. He was laid to rest in the Haganah section of the Haifa cemetery and a wife (Gita Dunya, the sister of Prof. Chaim Weizmann) and two girls were placed in the Haaretz newspaper on July 8, 1938, A pioneer in the supreme sense of the term. “In the newspaper Davar of that day, he was mentioned as one of the best builders of the urban settlement in Israel and one of the founders of the Hebrew industry.