December 29 1901 – 19 Tevet 5662
The fifth Zionist Congress voted to establish the Jewish National Fund, to purchase real estate in the Land of Israel and hold it in trust for the benefit of the Jewish people as a whole. The fund was the initiative of Zvi Hermann Schapira, a mathematician and member of the Lovers of Zion movement, who’d suggested it (as well as the concept of the Hebrew University) at the first Zionist Congress, but he died before the congress that made his dream a reality. The first donation – ten dollars – was made by Pinhas Rottenberg, later the founder of Israel’s National Electricity Company – in memory of Schapira. The second donation was made by Theodore Herzl.
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