Gedaliah, the son of Ahikam, was appointed by Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon, as governor of the Jews who remained in the land of Israel after the destruction of the First Temple. He was assassinated on the third of Tishri (582 BCE) by Ishmael son of Nethaniah of the royal family.
After he was murdered, large numbers of the people fled to Egypt (Jeremiah 40 and 41), and the last vestige of Jewish autonomy in Judah came to an end. The sages established the Fast of Zechariah, mentioned in the Bible (Zechariah 8:19) as the “fast of the seventh month,” in “order to demonstrate that the death of the righteous is equivalent to the destruction of the Temple, which is also commemorated by a fast'' (Rosh ha-Shanah 18b).
