Tel Aviv Celebrates Twenty-fifth Year

Twenty-five years ago a group of Jewish businessmen, teachers and others living in Jaffa decided to establish a garden suburb on the sanddunes northward of the town, within easy distance of the seashore. They obtained a loan of 300,000 francs from the Jewish National Fund, and bought 140 dunams (about thirty-five acres) at a cost of nearly $10,000.

The houses which these pioneers constructed were the nucleus of the bustling Jewish city of Tel Aviv, and those original 140 dunames are today worth probably a hundred times more than was paid for them.

It is difficult to imagine now, as one walks down spacious Allenby street to the beach and observes the constant traffic or along one of the shady thoroughfares of Lev Tel Aviv, that these settled districts were a desolate, sandy expanse only five years before the outbreak of the European War. Naturally there are many features in the Tel Aviv of today which do not meet full approval, but none can deny the essential virility and symbolism of this teeming city which has sprung up phenomenally in the short span of a quarter of a century.

THE FOUNDING OF THE CITY

It was in the year 1908 that Meir Dizengoff, Akiba Weiss, Yechezkel Danin, David Smilansky, Isaac Haissmann and others, conceived the idea of breaking away from Jaffa and founding a small suburban center that would give form to their desire for an independent Jewish life. Rents were then rising in Jaffa, due to the increased trickling in of Jewish settlers and the prospective commuters, all of whom had their business and work in the port town, felt that a residential division of their own would be of economic advantage.

They called their first company by the name of “Ahuzat-Bait” (Homestead), and undertook to repay the first loan in eighteen years at four per cent interest. Later on that year they merged with another group called “Nahlath Benjamin” (Benjamin’s Estate), and decided to name the combined venture “Tel Aviv,” which means literally, “The Hillock of Spring.”

A year later there were sixty houses and 300 inhabitants. By the middle of 1913 there were over a hundred homes and just on to a thousand residents. When the War broke out, there were 140 homes and 1,500 inhabitants. The suburban council had an income of about twelve thousand dollars. Some workshops were opened around that time, and twenty-nine artisans were earning a livelihood at different trades. The pre-war days of Tel Aviv may be described as the Russian phase, for most of its denizens were of Russian nationality.

WAR INTERFERED

The war years arrested the development of the quarter; in some respects the existing structure was destroyed. But none the less in 1921, three years after war had ended, there were 250 houses and 3,600 inhabitants. That was part of the French “phase” of settlement. I remember the Tel Aviv of that day as a pleasant collection of houses and shops, and the approach to the seashore was over the sands. There were few roads of asphalt construction in those days, and my first impression of the suburb in 1921, I remember, was getting my shoes crammed with sand and grit.

That year too, marking the ghastly messacre of Jews in the Immigrants’ Hostel of Jaffa, saw an impetus in the movement to Tel Aviv and the erection of new sections. The work provided opportunities for chalutzim coming in as part of the Third Aliyah. The factory system rose to fifty-two separate establishments. Tel Aviv was in 1921 granted autonomous status as a township under the Local Councils Ordinance and established its own police force.

The incorporation into Tel Aviv of the various independent sections–Tel Nordau, Nordia, Merkaz, Mischari, Nevei Zedek, Neveh Shalom, Schunat Tchlenow, Neveh Shaanan–was effected in 1923. Elections to the first Municipal Council of Greater Tel Aviv took place that year, and women were given the vote.

BOOM YEARS AND THE STUMP

The boom years of 1925-26, the Polish era of settlement, gave way to the slump of 1927, when land speculation, uneconomic investments, the disastrous credit system, frozen assets, the failure of production services to keep pace with development, all contributed towards a temporary collapse. But nevertheless, the population in 1927 had grown to 38,000. Some idea of the craze for expansion may be had from the figure of $7,500,000 invested in buildings in 1925, about seventy-five per cent of the total amount spent that year on construction throughout the land.

By 1931, the area had grown to six and a half million square meters from 109,000 square metres in 1910. Houses had jumped to a total of 4,029, and the population had increased to 46,116. There were 294 factories and workshops and ninety-two schools in 1931. School children numbered 12,321, about a half of all the Jewish pupils in Palestine, and municipal income was $530,000. Compare this with $12,000 in the summer of 1913!

THE GERMAN ERA

During the past year, the German era, the city has grown into an agglameration of 10,196 houses, factories, office premises and shops and a population of eighty to eighty-five thousand. Almost 20,000 of the latter are school-children. The number of workers and artisans in the city today-amount to 15,000.

Tel Aviv will celebrate its quarter of a century of progress this year at festivities to be held during the period of the Levant Fair, starting at Passover. It will be a celebration in true Tel Avivian style, with all the gayety and merriment that distinguishes this Jewish watering-place when in gala mood. Purim of this year too will be a joyous occasion, fulfilling the Gomorrah injunction that one might drink hearty and be merry until he knew not the difference between cursing Haman and blessing Mordecai.

This unique license “to go out and get as drunk as a lord” gave rise to the appellation of “Adloyada” (Until He Knew Not) for the Purim festivities of Tel Aviv, and indeed the annual occasion of observing the great Feast of Esther has become one of those memorable Jewish festivals of Eretz-Israel that attract visitors from far and wide. The picturesque Carnival draws scores of thousands to the streets, and the whole affair is a real national celebration that has firmly established Tel Aviv in the favor of the Jewish and non-Jewish multitudes.

The twenty-fifth anniversary of the only Jewish city in the world which occurs this year marks a milestone in the history of Jewish national regeneration, and it is the conclusion of the first epoch in the stirring life of this unusual city.