Avraham Saide was born in 1906 in the Kikar Hatulim district of Jerusalem during the final period of Ottoman rule. His parents, Sion and Esther, faced severe poverty, often collecting discarded food from Ottoman barracks near Jaffa Gate. Esther died of tuberculosis in 1910 at the age of 24, a condition she likely contracted from wearing infected donated clothing.
Following World War I and the transition to British rule, Avraham’s father remarried and had seven more children. After a difficult relationship with his stepmother, Avraham left Jerusalem at age 17 to find relatives in Argentina. He traveled through French-occupied Syria to Buenos Aires, where his cousins were less welcoming than he had hoped.
During a subsequent visit to Argentina, Avraham secured the first registered British Palestine passport in 1925. This document was issued following the passage of the Palestinian Citizenship in the Mandate Act. He obtained it directly from the British Consul in Buenos Aires, joining a select group of early recipients that included Golda Meir and David Ben-Gurion.
Upon returning to Palestine, Avraham worked as a cloth seller and traveled to Alexandria with a Bedouin caravan to avoid the colonial railway. There, he met Mazal Fortuna, a 15-year-old at a synagogue, and was invited to her family for a Shabbat meal. Although she was engaged to another, her Zionist family favored Avraham because he was from Jerusalem. He stayed in Alexandria to work and eventually married her.
The couple returned to the Yishuv with their first son, named Sion after Avraham’s father. The 1929 Arab riots and subsequent violence in Jerusalem, Safed, and Hebron began to sour Avraham’s view of British colonial rule. Although he lived briefly in Petah Tikvah, the family eventually returned to his native Jerusalem.
Political developments in the late 1930s, including the Peel and Woodhead Commission reports and the 1939 White Paper, reinforced Avraham’s belief that Britain was abandoning the Balfour Declaration. The White Paper limited Jewish immigration to 15,000 per year. The threat of Nazi conquest during World War II, particularly the advance of Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, highlighted the precarious situation of Jews in the region.
At age 40, Avraham became a medical orderly to actively participate in the struggle for a Jewish state. He served in the Irgun underground, smuggling secret messages in sterile dressings to figures such as Yitzhak Shamir and Dov Gruner. He argued that opening the dressings for inspection would destroy their sterility and defeat their medical purpose.
During the 1948 War of Independence, the family fled the Old City with six children, including three-year-old Shlomo, as the Royal Jordanian Legion advanced under Lt. Col. Abdullah al-Tell. They moved to western Jerusalem, where they endured a siege and survived on meager rations of about eight grams of bread per day. On June 11, 1948, Israeli forces broke the blockade via the Burma Road, connecting Jerusalem to Israeli positions just before a UN ceasefire took effect.
After the war, the family lived in the Romema neighborhood until after the Six Day War. Avraham, who spoke eight languages, reconnected with old Arab and Jewish friends after Jerusalem’s reunification. He continued working for the Health Ministry while his sons fought in post-independence wars. He passed away in 1993, a few years after his wife, leaving behind five sons and three daughters.
On November 3, 2026, Avraham’s descendants marked the 100th anniversary of the day he received his historic passport. His life spanned from the arrival of Ben-Gurion in Ottoman Palestine to the tenure of Yitzhak Rabin as prime minister. The story of Avraham Saide reflects the journey of an ordinary family navigating the tribulations of the Jewish people in the last century.
