Tel Aviv

We spent Tuesday and Wednesday of this week in Tel Aviv, touring the city and attending an orientation program for Molly’s Fulrbight program. Nir took us to Tel Aviv for dinner our second night here, but this visit was the first time we had a chance to walk around and see the city during daylight. We had a whirlwind tour of city history, architecture, some great food, and a little biblical history and mythology thrown in in Jaffa. We saw Independence Hall, the Reuven Rubin museum, Hayim Bialik‘s home, the old city hall, and a few neighborhoods. All things we’ll hopefully be able to explore in more detail in the future!

Tel Aviv (or just a section?) is known as “The White City”, a nickname that refers to the large concentration of Bauhaus or “International” style buildings built by German Jewish architects in the 30s. Tel Aviv itself is a mix of very old European-style single family homes, Bauhaus style buildings, eclectic-style buildings, plain concrete apartment blocks from the 60s and 70s, and high-rise office buildings and hotels.

From Tel Aviv we went south to the neighborhood of Neve Tzedek, which was founded as a suburb of Jaffa in the late 19th century by people looking to escape overcrowding in Jaffa. Neve Tzedek predates Tel Aviv by about two decades, but now Tel Aviv to Jaffa (and beyond, in most directions) is a more or less continuous urban area. Neve Tzedek has a number of early 20th century European-style houses with red tile roofs that predate the modernist architecture in Tel Aviv. The area fell into disrepair and was nearly demolished in the 60s, but has recently been (re)-gentrified and is apparently something of a trendy neighborhood.

We also spend a little time walking around Jaffa, just south of Tel Aviv. Jaffa dates to at least 7500 BCE (!) and is one of the oldest ports in the world. It was an important regional harbor for thousands of years: the cedars from Lebanon used to build Solomon’s temple in Jerusalem were brought through Jaffa. Today there’s a lot of tourism intermixed with some old neighborhoods more off the beaten path.