April 11: The Hill of the Spring

Sixty Jewish families gathered on a sand dune adjacent to Jaffa to found the city of Tel Aviv on this date in 1909. They divided some twelve acres of land by lottery and marked it with seashells. Tel Aviv (“Hill of the Spring”) increased in population dramatically when the Nazis came to power in Germany, with many refugees reaching its Mediterranean port and simply staying there. By 1939, the city’s population was 160,000, a third of the country’s Jewish population, compared to Jaffa’s 69,000 residents, mostly Arabs. The UN 1947 Partition plan assigned Jaffa to the Palestinian state, but after the War of Independence the two cities were merged into a joint Israeli municipality. Tel Aviv boasts 5,000 Bauhaus and Le Corbusier buildings that mark the city as a UNESCO World Heritage site. Today, the city is the liberal, cultural, secular center of Israel, home to its financial, media, and science industries, with a population of over 400,000 (Jerusalem, forty miles away, has nearly double that). Tel Aviv is one of the Middle East’s only liberated zones for LGBTQ people and hosts 1.5 million tourists per year.

“Many Israelis living outside the city call Tel Aviv, HaBu’ah (‘The Bubble’) or Medinat Tel Aviv (‘The State of Tel Aviv’) because the city seems to have a different reality from the rest of the country. . . . [W]hen bombs were falling in southern Israel and reservists were entrenched in a war in Gaza, Tel Avivians followed the news from Internet cafes on the beach or in the Dizengoff mall.” —Stuart Levy, Jewish Standard