מקור השם דגן

Arnold Daghani (born Arnold Korn, aka as Dagani) (1909-1985), painter, born in Suceava, in the historical region of Bukovina, Romania (then part of Austria-Hungary). In the 1930s he moved to Bucharest and studied economics. After the annexation of northern Bukovina by the Soviet Union in June 1940, he moved with his wife to Czernowitz (Chernivtsi) in the Soviet area. However, in the summer of 1941 after the start of the war against the Soviet Union, the area was captured by Romania and in 1942 Daghani and his wife were deported to Transnistria, but were caught by the SS when trying to escape and sent to a forced labor camp near Mikhailovka in the Nazi occupied Ukraine. In the camp he secretly kept a diary with paintings of evefry day life in the camp. They managed to escape to the Romanian occupied Transnistria, wher they were again arrested and detained in the Bershad ghetto. He was released in December 1943 and returned to Bucharest.

Groapa este in livada de vişini (“The grave is in the cherry orchard”), his camp diary, was published in 1947. It was translated into English and in German. The German edition published in 1960 served as evidence in the Federal Republic Germany for a number of investigations of Nazi crimes in forced labor camps.

After the establishment of the Communist regime in Romania, he refused to create in the Socialist Realism style advocated by the regime and to join the state artists’ association. He continued to draw secretly scenes of every day life.

Daghani immigrated to Isreal in 1958, but was not permitted to bring with him many of his drawings. He consequently lived in Israel, Switzerland, southern France and in 1977 he settled in Hove, near Brighton, in southern England. Many of his works are part of The Arnold Daghani Collection at the University of Sussex in United Kingdom.

Gedeon Dagan (born Guido Drimmer) (b.1932), professor of hydrology, born in Galati, Romania. After WW II, he joined a Zionist youth movement with the aim of immigrating to Israel, but the communist regime that ruled Romania aince late 1940s prevented him to leave the country. He completed his degree in hydraulic engineering at the Bucharest Institute of Civil Engineering in 1956, while concurrently he studied Applied Mathematics at the University of Bucharest. Subsequently, he worked as a research engineer at the national Hydraulic Laboratory in Bucharest and authored several articles in a local professional journal. In 1959, he was detained for eight months by the Securitate, the Romanian communist secret police, for alleged political Zionist activities. In 1962, he was allowed to emigrate to Israel. Dagan began working as a research engineer at the Technion, Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa, eventually becoming a full professor in 1974 within the faculty of Civil Engineering. In 1976, he joined the academic staff of the newly established Faculty of Engineering at Tel Aviv University. Over the years, he held visiting professorships at various research institutions, including the University of Iowa (1974), Delft University in the Netherlands (1975), Princeton University (1979), the University of California, Santa Barbara (1986), the University of California, Berkeley (1991), Pierre and Marie Curie University in Paris (1991), and Imperial College in London (1995). Dagan also served on several committees for the Israel Ministry of Science and the Water Authority. During his career, Dagan published over 230 articles in numerous international journals.