Akiva Aryeh Weiss
Akiva Arieh Weiss, also spelled Aryeh (1868-1947), 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. Biography Weiss, a jeweler and watchmaker, was born to a Jewish family in Hrodna (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