(Lovers of Zion)
This Russian Zionist group and BILU (the other key Russian Zionist group) found Rishon LeZion (translation: first to Zion) agricultural co–operative settlement (the first Zionist settlement) in Palestine,
a–nu bah–nu artza,
livnot
– u–l’ihibanot, bah
*
we have come to our Land
to build it
– and to be built–up, by it
*
This group was integral to First Aliyah spanned 1882–1903 [the First Aliyah meaning the first wave of immigration to modern Israel (then, Palestine)]. See exhibit chart which summarizes the first several aliyot.
Hovevei Zion group financially–backed by Baron Edmund James de Rothschild.
[BILU was a contemporaneous related Russian Jewish group of primarily young idealists with almost precisely the same ideology and activist goals as the stronger Hovevei Zion. The first group of Biluim was founded by fourteen ex–university students from Kharkov (Ukraine, Russia) who joined in the founding of Rishon LeZion, and later founded the settlement of Zichron Yaacov. Both settlements are in the Galil, a.k.a Galilee, northern Israel.]
– after Wikipedia