Dov Gazit

Dov Gazit came to Israel from Baku, Azerbaijan by way of the Russian Gulags. He joined the Haganah, and rose to chief-commander of the IAF (Israeli Air Force) Technical School in Haifa.

While serving in Africa, he acquired a lion cub, which became the first lion in Dr. Aharon Shulov's Jerusalem Biblical Zoo.

Dov Gazit (Hebrew: דב גזית, Born: June 17, 1908, in Baku, Azerbaijan) was born Borys (shortened form of the Russian name Borislav) Reuvenovich/Romanovich Grobshtein (Russian: Борис Рувинович/Романович Гробштейн), was the brother of Solomon Grobshtein, and one of three sons of Reuven (Roman) Grobshtein, an engineer in the Baku oil fields.

He was 8 years old (1916), when his father was murdered during the Armenian-Tatar uprisings.

At age 18, Borys went to study at the Saint Petersburg State Institute of Technology (Russian: Санкт-Петербургский Технологический Институт (Технологический Университет), where became a member of a Zionist student group.

The NKVD crashed a Zionist group meeting, and arrested all the participants, including Borys, who was convicted and sent to a Gulag in Siberia for three years.

After many applications for release, he was allowed to leave the Soviet Union and go to Palestine, without permission to see his family, and nor to ever return to the Soviet Union.

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