Akiva Aryeh Weiss

He also helped establish the Jewish diamond industry and textile industry in Palestine.

• Native Name — עקיבא אריה ויס • Born — 11 December 1868 • Birthplace — Grodno, Grodno Governorate, Russian Empire (present-day Belarus) • Died — 23 May 1947 • Place of death — Mandatory Palestine • Known for — Founder of Ahuzat Bayit • Relatives — Yosef Yekutieli (son-in-law) Daniel Yekutieli (great-grandson) • Illustration — Akiva Arie Weiss House, ground floor built 1909

Weiss, a jeweler and watchmaker, was born to a Jewish family in Grodna (in present day Belarus) in 1868, but raised in Łódz, Poland. Along with his wife and six children, he immigrated from Russian Poland to Palestine in 1906. • Illustration — Ahuzat Bayit, 1929. Weiss is at center. As president of the then newly established building cooperative named 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 Abraham Soskin's 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.

The cornerstone of Weiss's Tel Aviv house at #2 Herzl Street was laid in 1909. Originally a single-story structure, the upper floor was added in the 1920s. The house was restored between 1996 and 2011.