Zev Vilnay ^People

Zev Vilnay was born as Volf Vilensky in Chisinäu. He immigrated to Palestine with his parents at the age of six and grew up in Haifa. He served as a military topo- grapher in the Haganah, and later in the Israel Defense Forces.Vilnay was a pioneer in the sphere of outdoor hiking and touring in Israel. Vilnay lectured widely on Israeli geography, ethnography, history and folklore. His Guide to Israel was published in 27 editions and translated into many languages. In his 1950 book The Hike and Its Educational Value, Vilnai traced the Jewish emphasis on walking the Land of Israel back to the Bible. He describes a continuous historical thread that passes through the Jewish sources, and quotes the Talmudic dictum thatanyone who walks three or four cubits through Erez Yisrael merits a place in the world to come (Ketubot 111a).In the 1974 edition of his guide, Vilnay describes how he helped bring back to Israel the boat of a British naval officer, Thomas Howard Molyneux, who sailed the Jordan River from the Sea of Galilee to the Dead Sea to map the region in the19th century. Vilnay was a member of the first place-naming committee established by Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion in 1950. Awarded: In 1974, Vilnay received the Yakir Yerushalayim (Worthy Citizen of Jerusalem) award. In 1981, he was the co- recipient (jointly with Avraham Even-Shoshan) of the Bialik Prize for Jewish thought.