When you read Steve Kramer’s vignettes about sites and sights in Israel, you’ll feel like you’ve been there yourself. Divided into three sections, Central, North, and South, Encountering Israel will give you an almost-first hand experience of Israeli life and its attractions. You’ll never feel closer to Israel unless you land at Ben Gurion Airport!
Encountering Israel
TEL AVIV’S CHALLENGE TO ZIONISM
Paradoxically, the growth of Tel Aviv was a major challenge to the Zionism of Israel’s founding fathers. This unexpected conclusion was proven to the audience at this year’s first lecture of the English-Speaking Friends of Tel Aviv University. Dr. Haim Fireberg, a specialist in urban history in the Jewish History Department of TAU, spoke to us on the topic: Tel Aviv and the Zionist Vision of Eretz Yisrael.
The history of Tel Aviv began about a century ago – the official centennial date is 2009. Actually, it began before that, in the dreams of hundreds of pioneers who came to Israel in the late 19th century and who settled in the ancient port city of Jaffa. Chafing under the need to spread out from the crowded, mostly Arab city, in 1906 a group of pioneers formed a society called Ahuzat Bayit (homestead), to establish a new neighborhood based on scientific urban planning. In 1908, using funds borrowed from the Jewish National Fund, twelve acres of sand dunes northeast of Jaffa were purchased and divided into 60 plots.
On May 21, 1910, Ahuzat Bayit adopted Tel Aviv as the name for the new city, acting in conjunction with two other pioneering societies. The name means “Hill of Spring” and it was chosen because of its associations with rebirth and revitalization. In addition, it had been used by Nahum Sokolow as the title of his Hebrew translation of Theodor Herzl’s novel “Altneuland”. In that book, Herzl described a European-style garden suburb next to Jaffa, containing wide streets and boulevards. With high hopes, the Jewish pioneers began the building of such a city. Tel Aviv was expected to be inhabited only by Jews who spoke Hebrew. Its model was New York City. (Even today, Israelis like to think of Tel Aviv as a little New York.)
The pioneers’ ambition to leave Jaffa and build a city on sand dunes sounds like Zionism at its best. This was not the case, however, for all Zionists. From its beginning, Zionism was a political movement of two main streams. The first was Social Zionism, a pastoral ideology which imagined a socialist, agrarian homeland for the Jews, built on Jewish labor. It was led by David Ben-Gurion and its adherents were mainly Russian socialists and communists. Revisionist Zionism, led by Ze’ev Jabotinsky, was a more nationalistic ideology and followed more closely the blueprint envisioned by Theodor Herzl.
David Ben-Gurion’s faction became more prominent in the Yishuv to the detriment of the Revisionists. This being the case, the Social Zionists pushed for smaller, agrarian communities instead of large cities in the European mold. Obviously, the prospect of a large city – Tel Aviv – populated by small shopkeepers and tradesmen, was not what Ben-Gurion was promoting. Tel Aviv’s growing size and importance was in opposition to the Zionist rural ethos, even though it was what Herzl had foreseen and written about.
The growth of the city was not without its problems. It couldn’t be planned in the conventional sense because the ruling Ottoman Turks constrained Tel Aviv’s growth during its first decade. However, within a decade the Turks were defeated in WWI and usurped by Britain. But the British were also intent on limiting the ambitions of the Jews throughout Palestine. Nevertheless, Tel Aviv’s first mayor, Meir Dizengoff (a founding member of Ahuzat Bayit), was able to say in 1922 that Tel Aviv was “an ultra-modern city that is exclusively Jewish” and that it was the “most important Jewish experiment in 2,000 years”.
Tel Aviv’s rapid growth, especially during the 1930s with the influx of German refugees, was viewed with consternation by the Social Zionists, who were trying to create a “new Jew”. Tel Aviv was bursting with bourgeois Jews who didn’t know one end of a shovel from the other. Unfortunately for Ben-Gurion and his followers, the city dwellers could do very well without the produce of the Jewish agriculturists (there were plenty of Arab peasant farmers), but the country folk couldn’t get on without the commerce that emanated from Tel Aviv. The only solution for the Social Zionists was to try to take control of the municipality. In the 1920s they went so far as to run Golda Meir for mayor of Tel Aviv. She lost.
In the period between the early 1920s and Israel’s War of Independence in 1948, Tel Aviv grew to be something of a city-state. The Social Zionist leaders and the Histadrut (the huge, socialist trade union) watched glumly as the city tripled in size to 160,000 by the late-1930s, with a budget that eventually grew larger than that of the Jewish Agency, the Yishuv’s largest institution. Nevertheless, Britain did prevent the city’s leaders from enlarging the boundaries of the city. The result is that the cities of Bnei Berak, Ramat Gan, Givatayim and Petah Tikva are all contiguous to Tel Aviv but remain separate from it and each other. This is in contrast to New York City, which expanded to include Brooklyn, once America’s third largest city, and three other adjacent areas. If it had been up to Tel Aviv’s founders, the city would have become a metropolis stretching thirty miles along Israel’s coast, as far north as Netanya.
Jaffa, once the largest Arab city in Palestine, today is part of the Tel Aviv municipality. As noted, Tel Aviv began as a small suburb of Jaffa. But by 1936, with the outbreak of the Arab riots, Mayor Dizengoff urged that the Jewish Agency’s offices be opened in Tel Aviv. He also succeeded in establishing a separate port there. With these accomplishments, Tel Aviv had become totally independent of Jaffa and its port, segregating Jews in the new city from Arabs in the old town. The situation changed just a dozen years later, when during the War of Independence, Jewish fighters defeated the Arabs who were firing on them from Jaffa. The Jewish army conquered Jaffa in 1948 and the Tel Aviv municipality took effective control of all services there. In 1950, the reunification with Tel Aviv was formalized.
Dr. Fireberg summed up his introduction to the history of Israel’s first Hebrew city by contrasting the visions of Ben-Gurion and Dizengoff. Ben-Gurion venerated the old 19th century European ideal of rural communities and medium-sized cities, with a large dash of socialism thrown in. Dizengoff shared Herzl’s vision of a futuristic, thriving, and dynamic metropolitan society. As anyone who visits Israel can see, the visions of both men have been realized as Greater Tel Aviv has nearly three million people and is Israel’s cultural capital. I think that contemporary Israel represents a fusion of Theodor Herzl’s vision for “Altneuland” (Old New Land) with the pragmatic Zionism of the founding fathers.
THE YEMENITE QUARTER OF TEL AVIV
When I first traveled to Israel as a tourist, I had the impression that Tel Aviv was not an essential destination to visit during a short trip — not special or worth wasting valuable time on. Since moving to Israel, we have discovered quite the opposite — Tel Aviv is unequaled by any other Israeli city for its liveliness and trendiness, as well as its (modern) history as a spin-off of ancient Jaffa. In addition, UNESCO has designated Tel Aviv a World Heritage Site as “The White City”, the world’s largest assemblage of Bauhaus architecture – some 4,000 buildings in one sq. mile.
My wife and I recently explored the Yemenite Quarter, built on sand dunes overlooking the Mediterranean Sea. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Jaffa – then predominantly Arab – was also home to many Jews who had made aliyah (immigrated), including a significant number of Yemenite Jews. Since the cemetery which served Jaffa’s Jewish population was miles away across hot sands, one enterprising Yemenite built a shack supplying refreshments for the hot, tired mourners on their way there. Within a few years, that one shack had become a small village which, as the city of Tel Aviv rose from the sand dunes, became the Yemenite Quarter.
Yemen is located at the southern tip of the Arabian Peninsula on the Gulf of Aden, by the mouth of the Red Sea. Most historians date Jewish settlement in Yemen from the time of the destruction of the First Temple in 586 BCE, or more likely from the dispersion of most Jews from the Land of Israel by the Romans in 70 CE, concurrent with the destruction of the Second Temple. The Yemenite Jews left their domicile of a few thousand years for two reasons. The first was the age-old desire to return to Zion (Jerusalem), the center of Jewish life. The second was to flee the Muslims, who resented the Jews ever since Mohammed failed to convert the plentiful Jews of the Arabian Peninsula, a resentment enflamed by the rebirth of Israel.
Mohammed stated that man’s natural religion was Islam, and that he was its last and greatest prophet (after Moses and Jesus). In Yemen, if someone who had been raised as a non-believer (Jew or Christian) became an orphan or was separated from his family, he was to be returned to his “true” faith, Islam. Consequently, young Jewish children were at risk of being kidnapped and forcibly converted. Numerous young, Jewish boys fled Yemen by water to nearby Ethiopia, then north by foot to Egypt, and eventually to the Land of Israel. Entire families also came, mostly in the great migration known to Westerners as Operation Flying Carpet, or as the Yemenites called it, the Wings of Eagles. To the relatively backward Yemenites, the giant aircraft which ferried them to the State of Israel after its re-founding in 1948 resembled the giant eagles that had been prophesied in the Torah to speed their return to Zion (Exodus 19:4).
The Yemenite Quarter today is in the process of gentrification. It is known especially for the covered Carmel Market it borders and the many restaurants which are busy night and day serving typical Yemenite oriental fare. The Yemenites were predominantly devout Jews with large families. Now their descendants live throughout Israel and the Quarter is also home to numerous other nationalities. Our guide told us many stories about colorful individuals, including one old, white-bearded patriarch who smiled pleasantly at us from his yard while we listened to great tales about him in English, a language which he doesn’t know. A child of one of the first settlers in the Quarter, he has scores of grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Who knows what will become of this nonagenarian’s valuable property when he is unable to climb the flight of stairs to his tiny synagogue next door? It’s there that he reads (or perhaps has memorized) the entire service in Hebrew and Aramaic. Homes like his, which are eventually left to multiple descendants, are typical of many of the dilapidated properties in the Quarter.
We’ve eaten in several restaurants in the Yemenite Quarter, some fancy and some holes-in-the-wall, but all with excellent food. Because the Quarter is next to the trendy Neve Tzedek which boasts great restaurants and cafés, some notable small museums, and the Suzanne Dellal Center for Dance and Theater, its quaint alleys and tiny homes are being transformed into a very expensive neighborhood. There’s even a huge condominium tower looming above the area, much to the chagrin of the residents. However, the municipality’s plans to upgrade the large Carmel Market are a sign that the Yemenite Quarter’s charm as both a neighborhood and tourist attraction will probably ensure its survival.
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Stephen J. Kramer grew up in the Atlantic City, NJ area and graduated from Johns Hopkins University in 1967. After several years of traveling and working across North America, Steve worked for two decades at his family’s beverage distribution company in southern New Jersey. With his wife Michal and their two young sons, the family made aliyah to Israel in 1991, where they live in Alfe Menashe. This is his second book about Israel.
Encountering Israel
