Ardent Labor Zionist
1. Dov Hos is not well known or widely documented, but he was among the leaders of labor Zionism, the founders of the Haganah, the pioneers of Israeli aviation, and the Jews who worked to establish a nation in the interwar period.
2. He was born in Byelorussia in 1894 and emigrated to Ottoman Palestine with his family in 1906. From 1909, he was part of the group that organized guarding of the new city to become Tel Aviv. He was among the first graduates of Herzliya High School (1913).
3. During World War I, the Turks sentenced him to death for aiding Jewish settlement in Palestine; he managed to slip through their hands and flee south to the zone newly captured by the British.
4. By 1920, he was a member of Haganah’s central committee. From 1931-40, he served as a member of the Haganah command center. In 1935, he became deputy mayor of Tel Aviv. He served, as well, in the Histradut.
5. He was CEO of Aviron, the company that trained pilots and established flight lines in Israel and beyond, and also is said to have served as a cover for the Haganah. On his way to a meeting at Aviron, Dov Hos died in a car accident in December, 1940. Sde Dov Airport in north Tel Aviv is named for him.
6. In the aftermath of World War II, the famous ship Dov Hos galvanized world attention on the plight of European Jewish refugees.
In Tel Aviv, you’ll find Dov Hos Street running north from Frischmann, parallel to, and east of, Ben Yehuda.
Streets of Israel 