Yaakov Dori (; October 8, 1899 – January 22, 1973), born Yaakov Dostrovsky, was the first Chief of Staff of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). He was also the President of the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology.
Biography
Yaakov Dostrovsky (later Dori) was born in Odessa in present-day Ukraine (then part of the Russian Empire) to Tzvi and Myriam Dostrovsky. The family immigrated to Ottoman Palestine following the anti-Jewish pogrom in Odessa in 1905. Upon completing high school at the Hebrew Reali School in Haifa, he enlisted in the Jewish Legion of the British Army during World War I. Following the war he studied engineering at the University of Ghent.
His son, Yerachmiel Dori, served as commander of the IDF's Engineering Corps. His daughter, Etana Padan, was a biochemist and a professor of microbial ecology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His youngest son, Zvi Dori, was a Chemistry Professor at the Technion and the founder of the first Israeli Science Museum (Technoda). Israel Dostrovsky, physical chemistry and former President of the Weizmann Institute of Science, was his first cousin.
Military career
When he returned to Palestine in 1926, he joined the Haganah and adopted the underground name of "Dan". In the Haganah, he was the commander of the Haganah Forces of Haifa.
In 1939, Dori was appointed Chief of Staff of the Haganah, a position he held until 1946. As CoS Haganah it was Yaakov Dori's duty to take the Haganah from a diffuse self-defense organisation to a model army. He followed Shlomo Kaplansky, and was followed by Alexander Goldberg.