Stein, Dr. Menachem (Mark)

Son of Hannah and Dov Ber. Born in Bialystok in 1855, Menachem studied at the cheder and graduated cum laude from the Gymnasium in his city, and was accepted to the Moscow Polytechnic. He was arrested and exiled to Siberia, fled from his country and settled in the city of Leipzig, Germany, where he continued his high studies, but this time he decided to study medicine. After the “disturbances in the Negev” that took place in Russia, He made aliyah on December 6, 1882. Dr. Stein arrived in Jaffa and immediately joined his friends who had received their training at the Mikvah Israel. Despite the harsh living conditions – work from morning to evening in the field and with a meager salary – Menachem and his friends continued their work with the goal of establishing a Jewish colony in the land of the forefathers. In 1889 Baron Rothschild appointed him “Father of the Yishuv” as a physician in his moshavot Rishon Lezion and Akron. Menachem was not satisfied with this work, and he would ride on his horse from Jaffa to Rishon Lezion, from Rishon Lezion to Jaffa and from there to Petach Tikva. He also opened a small clinic in Jaffa where he received patients. Together with the Rokach brothers he managed to establish a company called “Ezrat Israel” which rented a small house that served as a “Bikur Cholim” hospital. In 1887, Dr. Stein traveled to Russia, married a wife and brought his parents and sister to Israel, and when he returned he began to work as a doctor in Hebron and in Jerusalem, where he was the private doctor of the local Pasha. Dr. Stein advocated preventative medicine and wanted to keep the Jews of Jaffa out of the city’s poor sanitary conditions and therefore initiated the establishment of a separate neighborhood – Neve Tzedek neighborhood – one of the streets of the neighborhood is now named after him. During the First World War Dr. Stein was recruited despite his age (over sixty years) to the Turkish army and sent to work as a physician at the Infectious Diseases Hospital in Jerusalem. There he contracted typhoid fever from one of the patients and on the second of Pesach, 16 Nisan, 19 April 1916, died of his illness. Dr. Stein was brought to burial in the cemetery on the Mount of Olives. He left a wife, a boy and a girl, a brother and two sisters. He is remembered in the writings of Moshe Smilinsky, Yehuda Gur, the book “Tel Aviv Yafo” and others.