1843 - 1910.
Moshe Yehuda Leib Lilienblum was a journalist and writer who wrote in Hebrew, Russian, and Yiddish.
As a young adult, he opened in Kovna (Russian Empire) a yeshiva for young people and taught there.
During the time spent in Odessa (Russian Empire) in the 1870s, he was disappointed by the secularity of all the things he considered sacred (from his affinity for Jewish tradition and religion).
He was afraid of what he defined as "the spirit of charlatanism and heresy the nation's spirit carries". He lectured on his views on promiscuity.
During this period, he despaired from correcting people through religion or the Talmud and turned to preaching economic and social change as a solution for the Jewish people. In order to implement his method, he developed his idea of establishing colonies for Russian Jews
Following the 1881/82 pogroms in the Russian Empire, he became convinced that the Jewish people's future and hope were only in the land of its ancestors, Israel.
He decided to join the Hovevei Zion movement, an organization promoting Jewish immigration and settlement in the Land of Israel.
He served as secretary of the movement until he died in 1910. After the First Zionist Congress (Basel, 1897) Lilienblum became a practical Zionist (in Herzl's way), and opposed Ahad Ha'am's Cultural Zionist view.
Kfar Malal in the Sharon region of Israel (location here) honors him (initials of Moses Leib Lilienblum), along with many streets in Israel.
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