Nachalat Yisrael - Rama was an association founded in 1886 for the purpose of establishing a Jewish settlement close to the traditional tomb of Samuel. The association counted among its sixty founding members, most of which came from Jerusalem's Old Yishuv, the rabbis Yaakov Mendelbaum, Yitzchak Rubinstein and Yitzchak Zvi Rivlin. Rabbi Yitzchak Zvi Rivlin (1857-1934), a first cousin of Yosef Rivlin, was known as the Living Talmud due to his genius, and later, in the 1920s, acted as the chairman of the association. The project was held back by numerous difficulties. The association successfully sold the land to Russian Jews, but these didn't manage to establish the envisaged moshava. Only at the beginning of the 20th century were the houses finally legalised, and fifteen association members moved in. Moshava Nachalat Yisrael Rama was the resulting experimental settlement. The residents, Yemenite and Ashkenazi Jews, received arms for self-protection, and large plots of additional land were bought by the association in the area. The outbreak of World War I created new legal problems. The village had to be abandoned during the 1929 riots, when the Arab neighbours destroyed the houses and removed the border stones. Today's Ramot neighbourhood stands in the same area.