Shlomo Ben Yoseph

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Shlomo Ben Yoseph (7 May 1913-29 June 1938) was the first Jew to be hanged by the British in the British Mandate of Palestine.

Born Shlomo Tabachnik to a Jewish family in the town of Lutsk, Poland (now in Ukraine), he was a Zionist from a very early age. He immigrated to Palestine when the first opportunity arose, in September 1937, aboard a ship carrying illegal immigrants. Tabachnik settled in the town of Rosh Pina in the Galilee and joined a labor battalion associated with the Betar youth movement, which was then active in the settlement. The members of the group worked during the day and conducted paramilitary exercises at night to prepare themselves to join the Irgun underground movement.

On 28 March 1938, a Jewish taxi was shot at on the road leading to the nearby town of Safad. Four of the passengers were killed, including a woman and a boy. On 16 April, in another attack, a car carrying members of the Haganah was also shot at, and three of the passengers were killed. Among the victims was David Ben Gaon, a former member of the Beitar group in Rosh Pina, and a close personal friend of Ben Yoseph. The murders threw the town, and especially the members of the Betar group, into turmoil. Ben Yoseph and two other members of the group, Shalom Zhorbin and Avraham Schein, decided to take revenge.

On 21 April 1938, the three of them shot at an Arab bus driving along the road leading from Rosh Pina to Safad. None of the passengers was hurt. The three then hid in a nearby cave (which is still known as the "Cave of Shlomo Ben Yoseph" and which has a small museum about him), but they were found by Arab shepherds and arrested by the British police.

At their trial, the three men were charged with illegal possession of a firearm and intent to cause bodily harm with a firearm, crimes for which the mandatory punishment was death. At the end of the trial, Zhorbin was declared mentally incompetent, while Ben Yoseph and Schein were sentenced to be hanged. Schein's sentence was reduced because of his age, but Ben Yoseph was hanged in Acre Prison on 29 June, 1938. The execution led to a wave of protests and strikes among Jewish settlers throughout the country.

There are streets named in memory of Shlomo Ben Yoseph in all of Israel's major cities, including Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, Haifa, Beersheba, Ashdod, and Bat Yam.