Feldenkrais, Jacob Fishel

Son of Aharon. He was born in 1876 in Ostra, a suburb of Volhynia, Russia. In 1906 he went to Palestine to see Jerusalem and the other holy places and also visited the new colonies. He returned to his town, filled with admiration for the working communities, as opposed to the division of the old Yishuv, and joined the “Tzirei Tzion” and trained himself in the village to work the land. After World War I, he sold his assets and went with his family to Eretz Israel, which he had reached in the beginning of 1921 after wandering for seven months, and Jacob Fischel began to work as a farmer in the farm of one of the peasants. He wrote to friends and relatives and invited them to immigrate to Israel in one of his letters to his brother-in-law in Ostra. He wrote among other things: “You ask me what I am doing. I can tell you that before Passover I worked with the hoe, picking apples and lemons and other such works. Thank God, I had a better Passover than I had abroad even when the years were normal … here working eight hours is not terrible. If I can work, you will also be able to. This is not a disgrace, so long as we do not need a gift of flesh and blood … They may give land, so we will live in these fields in tents.” When they arrived in Petach Tikva, the news of the bloody riots in Jaffa (the riots of 1921) went out to the streets of the settlement to call for help, and five young men went there with him. On the 25th of Nissan 3.5.1921, three of them were wounded and two of them were killed, Yaakov Fishel was among them. He left a wife and a daughter were buried. The bodies of the two were not found. This fallen soldier is a makal – a soldier whose burial place is unknown.