David Tidhar

David Tidhar (; 1897–1970) is most noted as the editor of the 19-volume Encyclopedia of the Founders and Builders of Israel compiled from 1947 until his death. His career included the police - during the British mandate of Palestine, a private detective, a communal leader and an author of detective stories.

Early life

Tidhar was born in Jaffa in 1897, his parents’ seventh child but the first to survive. He attended a religious school in Jaffa's Neve Shalom district that was founded by his father, Moshe Bezalel Todrosovitz. (Moshe Todrosovich was a philanthropist who had been instrumental in bringing Abraham Isaac Kook to serve as a rabbi in Jaffa - and Rabbi Kook later expressed admiration for his son, saying he had zekhut avot i.e. that he took after his father ). Tidhar would later recall his childhood in Jaffa's pre-Tel Aviv era in his memoirs.

Tidhar was involved in community affairs from an early age, including preventing Christian missionary activity during the British mandate period. However his main early passion was football. In 1913 he became the initiator and player of the Maccabi Tel Aviv football team.

Communal activity included founding a charitable organisation (gemach) to provide clothing and shoes to the poor and also to provide advice on avoiding cholera during an epidemic in 1916. In 1918 he volunteered for the Jewish legion, and was involved in the defence of Jaffa's Jews during the 1921 Jaffa riots.

Early career Tidhar was among the first people to join the Haganah self-defense group and in 1921, he joined and served in the British-run Palestine Police Force, where he initially served in Jaffa but soon moved and became commanding officer in West Jerusalem

In 1926 he opened a private investigation bureau in Tel Aviv. The firm specialized in commercial investigations for local banks and companies. In December 1926, he published an article in a Tel Aviv weekly criticizing the commander-in-chief of the Mandatory police force. Realizing that he was liable to be tried and possibly imprisoned for it, he moved to Cairo with his wife and their infant daughter. He returned to Tel Aviv in 1931 and reopened his bureau. Throughout the years he put his particular knowledge of Arab affairs and of the Mandatory government at the disposal of the yishuv institutions and of the Jewish Agency. who founded The Detective Library, wrote a series of weekly chapbooks with Tidhar as the protagonist - seen now as the progenitor of Hebrew detective literature. This character, appeared in 28 short detective novels that created quite a stir in the local community in the 1930s. ) The encyclopedia itself has now been put online by Touro College with permission of the Tidhar family. ) and the Ramat Hasharon Municipality, established the Tidhar Citation Award for Detective Fiction in Israel, with Aryeh Sivan as the first winner.

In 2024, a documentary film "רצח במגדל המים" ("Murder in the water tower") was released in Israel looking at his life through one of the murder cases he investigated.

Streets named after him are currently in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, Rishon LeZion and Petach Tikva.

Family Tidhar married Rebecca nee Kapiluto in 1924. The couple had two children, Bezalel Tidhar and Esther-Rachel Weitz.

External Sources National Library of Israel Collection of David Tidhar's papers