Moshe Dayan — general with roots in the Russian Empire
Moshe Dayan was born on 20 May 1915 at Degania Alef, the first kibbutz, near the Sea of Galilee, then in the Ottoman Empire. He was one of three children of Shmuel and Devorah Dayan, Jewish emigrants from Zhashkiv, a town in the Kiev Governorate of the Russian Empire, now in Ukraine. Sources differ on whether he was the first or the second child born at Degania. He was named after Moshe Barsky, a member of the kibbutz who had been killed while fetching medicine for his father. Soon afterwards the family moved to Nahalal, the first moshav, where he grew up and attended the agricultural school.
At fourteen he joined the Haganah, and during the Arab revolt of 1936-1939 he served in the Special Night Squads under the British officer Orde Wingate. In October 1939 he was among Haganah members imprisoned by the British authorities at Acre, and he was released in 1941. That June, serving with a British operation against Vichy French forces in Lebanon, he lost his left eye, and the patch he wore afterwards became his best-known feature.
In 1947 he worked on the Haganah general staff. In the war of 1948 he commanded on the Jerusalem front, in November 1949 became head of Southern Command, and on 6 November 1953 was appointed chief of the general staff, the fourth to hold the post, serving until 1958, including during the Suez crisis of 1956.
He then entered politics. He was Minister of Agriculture from 1959 to 1964 and became Minister of Defence days before the war of June 1967, holding the post until 1974, when he resigned with Golda Meir's government after the war of 1973. In 1977 he joined Menachem Begin's government as Foreign Minister, for which he was expelled from the Labor Party, began talks with Egypt that year and took part in the negotiations that led to the peace treaty. He resigned in October 1979.
He died in Tel Aviv on 16 October 1981, aged sixty-six, and is buried at Nahalal. His daughter, Yael Dayan, became an author and a member of the Knesset.
"Parents Shmuel and Devorah Dayan were Jewish emigrants from Zhashkiv in the Russian Empire who settled at Degania, the first kibbutz, and later moved to Nahalal."
Migration storyTracing the roots — Zhashkiv, Kiev Governorate (now Ukraine)
His parents, Shmuel and Devorah Dayan, were Jewish emigrants from Zhashkiv, in the Kiev Governorate of the Russian Empire, who settled at Degania on the Sea of Galilee, where he was born in 1915.
Parents Shmuel and Devorah Dayan, Jewish immigrants from Zhashkiv in the Kiev Governorate, among the founders of agricultural settlement in Palestine.
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Zhashkiv, Kiev Governorate (now Ukraine). At the time, this region lay within the Russian Empire, which spanned from Poland to the Pacific.