Alexander Zaïd was born in 1886 in
Zima, a town in
Irkutsk Governorate, in
Siberia. His father had been deported from
Vilna to
Siberia due to revolutionary activity and his mother was a
Subbotnik. In 1889, the family moved to
Irkutsk. In 1901 they returned to
Vilna, where his father remarried. Two years later, the father died, too. The orphaned teenager met Michael Helpern, a
First Aliyah pioneer sent to Vilna to promote immigration to
Palestine. Zaid moved to Palestine in 1904, under the auspices of the
Zionist Labour Movement. He worked at the
winery in
Rishon LeZion, where he met
Israel Shochat, as a
construction worker in
Ben Shemen and a
stonemason in
Jerusalem. In 1907, he helped establish the first Jewish watchmen's organization, the clandestine "
Bar-Giora". Two years later, in 1909, he was one of the founders of
Hashomer, a Jewish defense organization, to safeguard the Jewish agricultural settlements in Palestine. In 1926 Zaïd moved to
Sheikh Abreik in the
Valley of Jezreel, where he worked as a watchman, overseeing the lands of the
JNF. The residents of the Arab village at the site had been evicted a few years earlier when the
Sursuk family of
Beirut sold the land. The locality was known to have archaeological importance but had never been excavated. In 1936, Zaid reported that he had found a breach in the wall of one of the known caves which led to another cave decorated with inscriptions. This led to the excavation of the site and its identification as
Beit She'arim. Zaïd survived two attacks by
Arabs, but on the night of 10 July 1938, he was killed. He was ambushed by an Arab gang while on his way to meet members of kibbutz
Alonim. The killer was Qassem Tabash, a
Bedouin from the al-Hilaf tribe. In 1942, the
Palmach killed Tabash in retaliation. Zaïd was survived by his wife and four children. ==Commemoration==