Jaroslav Dobrovolský was a teacher, artist and municipal politician. From 1935 to 1938 he was the mayor of Hodonín.

Jaroslav Dobrovolský was the last descendant of the 14 children of Josef Dobrovolský, a mine smith, and his wife Filomena, née Hofer. After graduating from the municipal school in Lužice (1901/2 to 1905/6), he began his studies at the Czech Provincial Real School in Hodonín in the school years 1906/7 to 1912/13, where he also passed his adulthood exam on 10 July 1913. After a one-year study break, he continued his studies at the C. kr. institute for teacher education in Kroměříž in the school year 1914/15 as a student of the 4th year. He finished his studies with the so-called supplementary examination of adulthood, thanks to which he was able to start teaching as a "temporary teacher in public general schools with the Czech language of instruction". Immediately after completing this pedagogical education, he was appointed by a decree of the district school board in Uherské Hradiště to the five-class municipal boys' school in Staré Město u Uherské Hradiště as an assistant teacher.

However, Dobrovolský was already conscripted on 15 November 1915 into the 25th Regiment of the Austro-Hungarian Army, with which he underwent three months of basic training in Pöchlarn. From there he transferred to the officer's school in Most nad Litavou. After a short stay in St. Hipolit in Lower Austria, he is sent to the front with Rifle Regiment No. 25 of Woyrsch's Division on the Eastern Front on 23 June 1916. On 1 February 1917 he is promoted to the rank of ensign. From the Russian front he is transferred to the Italian front (Asiago), where he travels ill from the battlefield to the hospital, where he remains until 20 November 1917. In early November he is promoted to the rank of lieutenant. Until 15 January 1918 he is in the reserve battalion and then serves in the reserve hospital No. 2 in Bílsko as commander of the relief squad (guard centenary). On the third day after the end of the war, Dobrovolský reports to the garrison headquarters in Hodonín under Lieutenant Dr. Úlehla and remains at the station headquarters in Hodonín while organizing the Slovacka Brigade. From 2 November Dobrovolský is in charge of the 1st Field Battalion, which performs tasks in Hodonín, Breclav and Lednice as an aide to the commanders of Lt. Then he interrupted his active military service for half a year and went to teach in Mikulčice, where there was a shortage of teachers. However, immediately after the end of the school year, he reports back to active service with the Slovacka Brigade and serves as commander of the 3rd Guards Company of the 4th Stage Battalion in Kremnica, Slovakia. On 10 November, he leaves active military service for good, but remains an off-duty military trainee, participating in military exercises, attending instructional courses, and is also gradually promoted to the rank of captain.

In November 1919 he returned to the Mikulčice school and in the school year 1920/21 he came to the Lusatian school. While teaching in Lusice, he married Emilia Bdínková at the Municipal Office in Hodonín (19 October 1920). Soon after (22 May 1921), the young couple gave birth to a solid child, a daughter named Danuška. Although Jaroslav Dobrovolský's family continued to live in Lužice, the higher school authorities transferred him to teaching posts outside the village. In September 1922, he started the school year still in Lusice, but in October he travelled to the remote Jelšava, Slovakia, to the Andrej Cházár Institute for the Hearing and Visually Impaired. She stays there until the middle of 1925 and from September starts at the Břeclav girls' bourgeois school. In his one-year stay in Břeclav we can see the cradle of important impulses that influenced Dobrovolský for years to come. These were mainly the cooperation with the printing house of František Vavřík and Vladimír Chlanda, which published (apart from mercantile printed matter) also printed matter seeking a more demanding readership and bibliophilias relating mostly to the Slovak environment or patriotic themes. In this period she began to create her first ex-libris, first graphic cycles and illustrations.

On 5 August 1926, the Dobrovolskis gave birth to their second child, named Jaroslav after his father. After the birth of his son, Dobrovolský changed his teaching position again. This time he works at the burgher boys' school in Uherské Ostroh until 1929.

With the establishment of the Provincial School Board, Jaroslav Dobrovolský was given a teaching post in Hodonín from September 1929, as a definitive teacher at the burgher boys' school, where he worked until 1939, and is thus finally a more stable period from which his varied activities can grow. He taught mainly drawing, but in some years also drawing, gymnastics, arithmetic, German and civics. Dobrovolský shared his opinions and methodological experience in professional journals, lectured and conducted drawing courses. He also wrote a manual, Drawing in Primary School (1931), in which he elaborated on the curriculum of the first two school years. The following year he published Drawing in Grades 3-5. During the holidays he goes on study trips to painting exhibitions at home and abroad. He also works his travels into art cycles, such as his stay in Kupari, Yugoslavia, which he publishes in 1933 under the title On the Blue Adriatic (8 colour linocuts). Since 1929, he has hung exhibitions of ex-libris at the Los Angeles Museum of History, Science and Art. In May 1931, at the seventh exhibition of this annual show of the International Society for Exlibris, which received 764 works from all over the world, Dobrovolsky received an honorable mention for Jaroslav Herman's book mark. He had 22 works accepted for this exhibition. In the following year he received this honorable mention again, this time for the book mark for V. and J. Krátkých. His work is thus selected as the best of a group of ten Czechoslovak artists who submitted a total of 80 works.

On the occasion of the 80th birthday of President Masaryk, Dobrovolský publishes his series of 20 colour woodcuts recording various notable places in the town of Hodonín. Dobrovolský was able to personally present this cycle to the President because he was part of a delegation from the Hodonín district that was sent to celebrate his birthday on 3 March 1930. The trip was obviously an extraordinary experience for Dobrovolsky and an impetus for further work for various interest circles in his area. Dobrovolsky became not only a propagator but above all a practical implementer of many of Masaryk's ideas, especially those which emphasized his own moral responsibility in relation to his personal vocation and the development of the general good of society. Since the beginning of the 1930s Dobrovolsky's public activity has been growing unusually - he is a member of the editorial board and executive of the Masaryk Region, chairman of the Free Thought of the XIIIth Region, a member of the Masaryk Museum, the Workers' Academy, the Art Association of Teachers in Prague, the Group of Teachers of Drawers in Hodonín and others.

Sometime after 1933, when Scouting was restored in Hodonín, Dobrovolský also joined this organisation. In 1935 he is a member of the local council committee and in 1936 and 37 he is the chairman of the honorary council and in 1938 he is the 1st vice-mayor of the local association. Around 1938 he is the commander of the entire Masaryk County (which included districts from Zlín to Breclav).

Dobrovolský was also a member of the T. J. Sokol, where in the 1930s he acted as an educator.

In 1933, Alois Kučík, a leading organizer of the Breclav circle of Moravian bibliophiles, published Petr Bezruč's poem Kalina in Chland's printing house, as well as a collection of his poems South Moravia in Petr Bezruč's Songs. This collection of eleven poems is supplemented by 13 two-colour and 2 one-colour linocuts by J. Dobrovolský and is also graphically edited by him. Bezruč was very pleased with this publication, as evidenced by his letter to A. Kučík: "Dear Sir, I have only seen the book briefly so far and I think it is a wonderful work for which the whole of South Moravia will be grateful to you and Mr Dobrovolský." Petr Bezruč's positive attitude towards Chland's printing house and Jaroslav Dobrovolský led to his agreement to publish the entire set of his Silesian Songs in a bibliophile edition in Breclav on his seventieth birthday. Dobrovolský carved 50 linocuts for the set of poems and this work thus figures in his oeuvre as his most extensive project.

Dobrovolský was also a member of the Czechoslovak Social Democratic Workers' Party (a member of the presidium of its district executive committee in Hodonín), for which he ran for the town council in 1935 and on 12 November 1935 took office as the fourth Czech mayor of Hodonín. Dobrovolský resigned from his post in November 1938, as had been previously agreed by the winning coalition of parties, and handed over the post in January 1939.

Still in the first half of 1939 Dobrovolský completes his last school year in Hodonín at the boys' burgher school and then, after many years of waiting (in August 1939), is given the post of district school inspector. However, it was a post in the district of Moravian Ostrava and he decides to move to northern Moravia with his whole family and settles in Silesian Ostrava.

After the occupation of the Czech lands, it was natural for Dobrovolsky, as a captain in the Czechoslovak army reserves, a member of Sokol, a scout and a patriot, to join the resistance. He took on tasks in the anti-Nazi resistance with ease, already during the gloomy post-Nazi months. He was involved in the resistance organization Defence of the Nation, where he was a member of the Skt. Karel Jansou from Hodonín, who was entrusted with the post of commander of the ON for the Hodonín district. Dobrovolský organized resistance units, recruited reliable collaborators, arranged crossings of the Moravian-Slovak border in the Hodonín region and collected funds for the organization's purposes. His position as former mayor of the town and reserve officer also gave him the opportunity to secure weapons. He was also in written contact with foreign resistance figures and especially with President Dr. Edvard Beneš. After leaving Hodonín for Ostrava, Dobrovolský was involved as a school inspector, for example, in a leafleting campaign in Ostrava.

Dobrovolský was arrested by the Gestapo on the night of 11-12 September 1940 in his office on the basis of a denunciation and subsequently imprisoned successively in Moravská Ostrava, Ratiboř, Olomouc and Brno. On 15 October 1941, he was sentenced by a martial or special court for treason and placed in the Mauthausen extermination concentration camp near Linz, Austria, with the designation "return undesirable". Although he was physically and mentally strong, his body eventually gave out on him. His feet froze, he developed poisoning accompanied by high fevers, and he died on April 29, 1942.

Dobrovolsky was awarded the Czechoslovak War Cross 1939 In Memoriam and the Junácký Cross "For the Fatherland 1939-45", gold grade.