Portuguese, Mendel

Son of Atara and Ze’ev. He was born in 1887 in Kalrash, in Sarabia, to a merchant family. He studied at a trade school and as a young man turned to Zionism and socialism. As a socialist, he worked among peasants and was deported, at the age of 16, by the Russian authorities to Siberia. At the beginning of 1905, when he returned from exile, he participated in the Jewish defense organization in his vicinity and later immigrated to Eretz Israel. He was one of the founders of Bar Giora (1907) and in 1909, with the founding of Hashomer, was one of its first members. In this association, he was assigned key functions of organizing a guard organization, arranging work, worrying about economic matters, etc. For this purpose he would move with his mare from one moshav to another, and among other things he would come to Petach Tikva to recruit guards for the Galilee. In many places in Israel: Metula, Hadera, Karkur and Beit Gan in the Lower Galilee, he stood out among his friends as a man without fear, encouraging and exciting, loved poetry and dancing, and was humorous. In one speech he gave in Ben Shemen he expressed the view that that was the basis of his activities and tenacity of purpose, “Enough of making revolutions in favor of other nations. First of all we will do the necessary revolution within us.” On 10 Shvat, January 4, 1917, he returned from guard duty to his home in Beit Gan and began cleaning his gun. The gun dropped from his hand and spewed a bullet that hit his neck and wound a mortal wound. He was buried in the settlement of Yavne’el in the Lower Galilee near the graves of some of his friends in the Hashomer association who died before him. Then his body, together with the bodies of the other members buried next to him, was transferred to Kfar Giladi in the Upper Galilee. He left a wife and two sons. His character was immortalized in many books on the history of modern Hebrew settlement in the Land of Israel.