page_title: Akiva Aryeh Weiss
section_title: Biography
hierarchical_section_title: Akiva Aryeh Weiss / Biography
caption_attribution_description: עברית: שיפוץ לצילום ישן של חברי אגודת אחוזת בית. נציגי 60 משפחות מייסדי תל אביב בתמונה משותפת ב-1929 בעת שמלאו לתל אביב 20 שנה. במרכז המייסד עקיבא אריה וויס ובשרוה למטה ביתו אחוזה בית וויס
context_page_description: Akiva Arieh Weiss, also spelled Aryeh, was a Zionist activist, architect, and city planner in Palestine. He is best known as the primary founder of Tel Aviv. He had been the initiator of the project to create the "first Hebrew city" in Palestine and presided over its establishment. He also helped establish the Jewish diamond industry and textile industry in Palestine.
context_section_description: Weiss, a jeweler and watchmaker, was born to a Jewish family in Grodno (in present day Belarus) in 1868, but raised in Lodz, Poland. Along with his wife and six children, he immigrated from Russian Poland to Palestine in 1906.
  As president of the then newly established building cooperative named simply Ahuzat Bayit, Hebrew for Building Society, Weiss wrote and presented a prospectus to the group in which he laid out his vision for a new Jewish city. Arthur Ruppin's memoirs recount that Weiss demanded the creation of "a Hebrew urban centre in a healthy environment, planned according to the rules of aesthetics and modern hygiene." Weiss would later on tell Ruppin; “Outside Jaffa, on the road to Petach Tikva...we intend to found a modern Jewish urban district. We already have our eye on a particular tract of land.”
  Currently scholarship also suggests that he likely presided over the 1909 real estate lottery (and is the leading figure in Avraham Soskins' famous photograph of the event) in which 66 Jewish families drew numbers written on seashells to determine the allocation of lots in the about-to-be established city of Tel Aviv.
  Weiss was a founder of the textile industry in Mandatory Palestine, and built the earliest textile factory, the Lodzia House.
  One of Weiss' visions which became reality was the establishment of a Jewish diamond industry in Palestine.
caption: Ahuzat Bayit, 1929. Weiss is at center.
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