Zev Vilnay

Zev Vilnay was born in Kishinev in 1900 and moved to Palestine with his parents at the age of six, settling in Haifa.[1] As a young man he walked from Haifa to Jerusalem — a journey that proved decisive. At the ceremony where he later received the title Yakir Yerushalayim, he recalled falling in love with Jerusalem at first sight and resolving to settle there and devote his life to studying the city and sharing knowledge of it with others.[3]

His listed educational associations included the Hebrew Teachers Training School in Jerusalem, the University of London, and Dropsie College in Philadelphia.[4] He also lectured for the Labour Federation of Palestine and the Zionist Federation of Great Britain and served as an associate of Dropsie.[4]

By the mid-1920s, Vilnay had become one of the principal guides of organized walking tours around the country.[1] These tiyyulim drew workers and youth groups and ranged beyond the borders of Mandatory Palestine, extending into Lebanon, Syria, Transjordan, and Sinai.[1] He was among the first members of the Palestine Wanderers' Association, characterized as the first organized group to arrange in-depth tours by car and on foot in Palestine and neighboring countries.[5] A 1935 notice in the newspaper Davar advertised a public lecture by Vilnay on a trip to Syria, illustrated with a magic lantern — an early slide projector.[5] He described walking across the country as the best way to feel a connection to the Land of Israel, saying that impressions from walking on a trip remain in the heart.[6]

Vilnay also held a substantive role in military education. He taught military topography in the Haganah and continued to do so during the 1948 War of Independence and the 1967 Six-Day War.[1] During the War of Independence, he helped young people and forces unfamiliar with Jerusalem learn the city's approaches, spending days and nights with them learning its passageways.[3] A fellow participant's account records Vilnay serving as their guide before an anticipated operation to enter the Old City.[3]

Beyond military service, Vilnay lectured widely on the geography, ethnography, history, and folklore of Israel.[1] His research and walking tours — often conducted with a Bible in hand — deepened visitors' connection to the land and helped foster a new Israeli and Hebrew identity.[3] Vilnay described his role as that of a "matchmaker" between people and the land.[3] He also initiated the project "Circle Zion and Circumnavigate It," leading groups around Jerusalem's walls during the three pilgrimage festivals and sharing stories along the way. He led tours of the Old City and its walls with the Jerusalem branch of his "Wanderers' Circle."[3] He served as the first president of the Council for Conservation of Heritage Sites, and a center for Jerusalem research and historic-site conservation was later established in the Sergei Courtyard, anchored by a large library donated from his personal collection.[3]

Vilnay jointly edited books about the history of the Land of Israel with Rehavam Ze'evi, who also cared for Vilnay during the illness that ultimately caused his death in 1988.[7]

Vilnay was the author of dozens of books spanning guidebooks, encyclopedias, and collections of legend and folklore. His Hebrew three-volume Madrich Eretz Yisrael (Guide to the Land of Israel), published in an expanded second edition by Jerusalem publisher Tur between 1945 and 1952, covered the country region by region — Jerusalem, Judea, the Dead Sea and Samaria in the first volume; Tel Aviv, the Sharon, the Shephelah, and the Negev in the second; and Haifa, the valleys, Galilee, and Hermon in the third.[8] Its English-language counterpart, The Guide to Israel, first appeared in 1955 and reached fourteen editions by 1971.[1] A further edition, The Vilnay Guide to Israel: A New Millennium Edition, co-authored with Rachel Vilnay and Oren Vilnay, appeared in 1999 as a two-volume English-language work covering the entire country.[9]

His encyclopedic works include Ariel, an encyclopedia of knowledge about the Land of Israel, published in a fourth printing by Am Oved in Tel Aviv in 1977 as two illustrated volumes with maps and facsimiles.[10] He also produced the Vilnay Encyclopedia of Jerusalem and the work And You Shall Love Your Land as Yourself.[3]

Vilnay's collections of regional legend and folklore constituted another major strand of his output. Agadat Eretz Yisrael (Legends of the Land of Israel) gathered legends, traditions, and sayings arranged by regions, cities, and villages; its expanded third edition, published in Jerusalem by Kiryat Sefer in 1952, contained 146 drawings and pictures.[11] The English-language Legends of Palestine appeared in 1932.[1] Legends of Galilee, Jordan, and Sinai, published by the Jewish Publication Society of America in Philadelphia in 1978, was organized into sections on Galilee, Jordan, and Sinai.[12] The collection included material from the Jerusalem Talmud.[13] His other English-language titles included The Holy Land in Old Prints and Maps (1965) and The New Israel Atlas: Bible to Present Day (1968).[1]

In 1962, Vilnay initiated a collaborative project with Bezalel art student Tzvi Berger to retrace key points in the nineteenth-century journey through the Land of Israel made by Scottish artist David Roberts.[14] Drawing on Roberts's travel diary, route map, and artwork, Berger produced the pictures while Vilnay supplied the accompanying historical and geographic information.[14]

The collaboration resulted in Israel Horizons, an art album featuring 56 original lithographs of Israeli landscapes.[14] Published three years after the journey began, the album won a silver medal at the sixth art-album festival in Milan in the year it appeared.[14] The project was not without constraint: political and geographic access restrictions at the time prevented Vilnay and Berger from reaching some of the locations Roberts had depicted, including East Jerusalem, Gaza, and the West Bank — known by its original, indigenous Jewish name of Judea and Samaria. Consequently, certain works, such as Roberts's rendering of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, could not be recreated.[14]

Vilnay received the Israel Prize in 1982 for the acquisition of knowledge and love of the Land of Israel.[2] He was also awarded the title Yakir Yerushalayim (Worthy Citizen of Jerusalem).[3] A 2001 study day marking the centenary of his birth identified him as the person most associated with touring the Land of Israel and described his love of the country and its landscapes as a central influence on his family.[15]

His request to be buried near Beit Shemesh, close to Moshav Nehem — because youthful visits to the area between Zorah and Eshtaol had made a deep impression on him through the biblical figure of Samson — speaks to the intimate, scripture-laden connection to landscape that defined his life's work.[3] The large library he donated to the research center at the Sergei Courtyard in Jerusalem stands as a lasting institutional contribution to the study of the city he devoted himself to.[3] Maariv argues that his research demonstrated the Jewish people's historical connection to their homeland.[16]