Peter Martin Metzler

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Family

German evangelical missionary who built a mission school and a hospital in Jaffa, Israel. In his youth he learned the trade of a blacksmith. He went to Munich in 1846, where he attended the missionary service of Dean Christian Friedrich Böckh (1795-1875). He fell ill. After his recovery he devoted his life to the mission. In 1847, he met Christian Friedrich Spittler (1782-1867), who had founded the pilgrimage mission St. Chrischona near Basel a few years earlier, and was now able to fulfill his desire to become a missionary. At the beginning of 1858, the pilgrimage mission decided to send Metzler to Jaffa, where he was to head the branch of a commercial business in which European goods could be bought at fixed prices. On 5 October 1859, Peter Martin Metzler and Dorothea Bauer (1831-1870) from Heubach were married in the Christ Church of Zionberg in Jerusalem. The Metzler couple soon began operating their own businesses in addition to the trading centre in Jaffa. Dorothea Metzler started a small hostel for pilgrims at their house. Metzler himself set up a steam mill in 1865. A mission school and a hospital were built with financing from one of their hostel guests, the Russian nobleman Platon Grigoryevich Ustinov (Russian: Платон Григорьевич Устинов, 1840-1918, grandfather of actor Peter Ustinov). In the 1860s, Metzler became not only the founder of social institutions in Jaffa, but he also actively participated in the preparation of the modern colonization of Palestine by supporting a group of 156 colonizers from Maine. Led by George Jones Adams (1811-1880) and Abraham McKenzie, they arrived in Jaffa on 22 September 1866, and erected a colony in the citrus gardens near Jaffa. A new group of Christian settlers, the temple society under the leadership of Christoph Hoffmann and Georg David Hardegg, had meanwhile also emigrated to the Holy Land. In April 1869, Metzler and his whole family, wife and four children, went to Ustinowka (Устиновка), today in Saratov, where a new chapter of his life began. Before leaving Jaffa, Metzler, who was well acquainted with Christoph Hoffmann from his time as a missionary of St. Chrischonas, sold the majority of his properties and companies in Jaffa to the new colonists on 5 March 1869. In Russia, Metzler became the manager of the entire estate of Baron Plato d'Ustinov. On 20 March 1870, Metzler's sixth child, Paul Gerhardt, was born. A month later, on 23 April 1870, Dorothea Metzler died of the consequences of this birth. In 1875 Baron Plato d'Ustinov decided to leave the Russian Orthodox Church to accept the Protestant faith. Between 1876 and 1881, Metzler lived with his four younger children in Stuttgart. On 18 July 1898, Metzler transferred his last plot in Jaffa to the Protestant community founded there in 1889-1890. Metzler died on 8 December 1907, aged 83, in Stuttgart. Link to Wikipedia biography (German)