Dr Yehoyakim Paporish

(1906-1992)

Abstract

Yehoyakim Paporish was born in Galicia to a secular Zionist family, and had three sisters. His enthusiasm for nature and hiking paved the way for his decision to study Geography and History at the University of Vienna. In 1929 he was awarded a PhD degree for his dissertation “The Regional Geography of the Vienna Basin”, a regional geographic approach that he pursued for the rest of his life. In October that same year, he emigrated to Palestine. Paporish began his geographical career in 1930 as an assistant to the geologist Leo Picard at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. He then became a teacher at the local school in the village of Meir Shfeya. Towards the end of the decade he founded, together with several other teachers, the “Tichon Chadash” high school in Tel-Aviv, where he worked until his retirement in 1972. His philosophy of Geography was derived from the scientific approach that pervaded Vienna at the turn of the 20th century. This led him to embrace the deterministic school of Geography, viewing the geographer as a man of science who needs to study “man’s struggle against nature”. He observed that other than Brawers’ volumes on the Geography of the Land of Israel, there was no serious geography work available to the educational system. Therefore, he decided to write his own book, “The Geography of Israel”, which was published in 1943. Subsequently he wrote many other geographical volumes - 20 in total. They reflected his regional approach, but also made him realize that it was impossible to encompass the entire phenomena of a specific region - the ‘whole’ region that was the goal of the regional view. In addition to his books, Paporish wrote many articles for various professional journals, within the realm of the Teaching of Geography, and published two comprehensive monographs: one dealing with Egypt, and the other with the United States.