David Zakai

David Zakai (16 September 1886 – 15 January 1978) was a member of the Second Aliyah, a Hebrew teacher, a Histadrut leader, a Jewish journalist and publicist during the Yishuv era and for 30 years after the establishment of the state.

David Zakai was born in 1886 in the name of David Zhukovitzky in the town of Ostrowshitsky in the Minsk region, in the Russian Empire (today's Belarus), the son of Yitzhak Zhukovitzky (the descendant of Rabbi Yeshaya Zhukovitzer, an educated merchant, who wrote in HaMelitz and HaTzfira, and to on his mother's side to the house of Gitlin.

In the summer of 1914 he went to accompany a group of high school students from Herzliya to their parents' homes in Russia, and due to the outbreak of the First World War, he could not return to Israel until Passover 1920.

At the time of the 1929 riots, a weapon of the Haganah was hidden in the cellar of his home in Tel Aviv, on the Keren Kayemeth LeIsrael (later Ben Gurion Boulevard).

In the yard of his home, there was a tiny meteorological station, which reported for many years the amounts of precipitation measured.

His son Yaakov was active in the Haganah, his daughter Hanna served in the Auxiliary Territorial Service of the British Army, and Avraham was the first commander of the Palyam and an officer in the Israeli Navy.

A group photograph on the occasion of the publication of the newspaper Davar , numbered: 1 David Ben-Gurion , 2 Paula Ben-Gurion , 3 Zalman Shazar , 4 Eliezer Kaplan , 5 Eliyahu Golomb , 6 David Zakai, 7 Moshe Sharett , and 8 Israel Guri , 1925.
The Zakai family from left to right: Irma the wife of Yaakov, the father David Zakai, the eldest son Yaakov, the daughter Chana, the mother Rachel, and the youngest son Avraham