BOGER (Bograshov), ḤAYYIM

BOGER (Bograshov), ḤAYYIM (1876–1963), educator and yishuv leader in Ereẓ Israel. Boger was born in Chernigovka, Crimea. He first received a religious education, and later acquired enough secular education to enable him to receive a degree and teaching diploma from the University of Berne, Switzerland. Boger, an active opponent of the *Uganda Scheme, was a leader of the Ẓiyyonei Zion movement in Russia, and helped organize its conference in Freiburg (1905). In 1906 he settled in Ereẓ Israel, where he was a founder of the Hebrew Gymnasium Society in Tel Aviv. Deported in 1915 by the Turkish authorities, Boger founded a Hebrew school in Alexandria, Egypt. He returned to Palestine in 1919 and became joint headmaster of the Herzlia Gymnasium, with Benzion *Mossinson. A leading figure in the affairs of Tel Aviv and the yishuv, he represented the General Zionists and served as a member of the Tel Aviv municipality, as delegate to the Asefat ha-Nivḥarim ("Elected Assembly"), and later as member of the Second Knesset, whose opening session in 1952 he chaired as its oldest member. He wrote Ba-Araẓot Reḥokot ("In Distant Lands," 1930), and Tiyyul bi-Yhudah ("Journey in Judea," 1930). In 1921 he helped found the Nordiah district in Tel Aviv for Jews from Jaffa made homeless by the Arab riots of that year. The district's main street is named Bograshov Street in his honor.

bibliography:

D. Smilansky, Im Benei Dori (1942), 151–7.

[Abraham Aharoni]