Philpovitch, Shlomo

Shlomo, son of Mira and Eliahu Dov, was born in 1899 in Lodz, Poland In 1934 he immigrated to Eretz Israel via Berlin and settled in Jerusalem. He was a textile merchant who owned a shop on 14 Ben Yehuda Street in the city center and lived with his family in the house opposite the shop. During the month of February 1948, Abd al-Qader al-Husseini, commander of the Arab forces in the Jerusalem area, decided to carry out a major attack in the heart of Jewish Jerusalem. This mission was carried out by six British deserters, policemen and soldiers Who collaborated with the Arabs and stole for them three military trucks and a British armored vehicle. The three trucks were loaded with explosives and On February 22, 1948, at the entrance to the city, they were stopped by a Jewish checkpoint whose men were ordered to search the vehicle and Arab passengers, but not by car. So the checkpoint personnel could not stop the caravan and continued on its way to Ben Yehuda Street in the Jewish center of Jerusalem. The vehicles stopped, their passengers lit the detonators and shot two Jews who passed by. They then boarded the car and quickly left. In the explosion that took place near 06:30 on the morning of February 12, 1946, four buildings were demolished. Including “Atlantic” and “Amdorsky” and two other apartment buildings. Most of the victims were in destroyed homes and hotels, among them entire families. This was the worst disaster in the Jewish community in Jerusalem, in one incident, during the War of Independence . Among those killed in the explosion was Shlomo, who had just begun guarding the checkpoint as part of the ‘People’s Guard’ and was injured there by the explosion. He was 49 when he died, left a wife and two sons, was brought to rest in the cemetery in Sanhedria, Jerusalem.