FOUR VIEWS FROM THE ROOF - SOUTH

The ‘old’ central bus station, in Neve Sha’anan, south Tel Aviv. 1950s.

Stepping off into the hot street

Was for me a pathway into the world

Of a drunk selling cold malabi

With nuts and red sugary syrup

A belt for ten and a cassette for free

Grape juice and a newspaper

A cinema showing porn

A Persian embroidered hat

I would get off at the old station

And for me it was a different country

A country of a reality in waiting

Whether it was pouring or whether the sun was burning

I suddenly belong and sometimes I feel different

Inside this packed, hurrying world

In the boulevards of cheap shoes

In the falafel stalls with all the extras

The public toilets that smell for a mile

Taxi drivers who don’t shut their traps

A drunk and a blind man gazing at the world

Yeshiva students earning a mitzvah

I would get off at the old station …

On the way to gleaming Tel Aviv

I stop off at the cracked reality

Of pita and za’atar, a hardboiled egg on the side

Of is he a rabbi or perhaps a beggar

Three cassette tapes for ten shekels

And songs from all over the world

And black mud on every pavement

And the driver mumbling a blessing.

I would get off at the old station…

Unofficial translation of lyrics to the song The Old Station by Kobi Oz.

Click for music video with evocative images of the old central bus station.

Beyond the dark mountains

    ‘The Old Station’ (Ha-Tachana Ha-Yeshana),  Kobi Oz’s evocative 1995 song  about landing in the gritty  but colourful world  of the ‘old’ Central Bus Station in Neve Sha’anan in south Tel Aviv will resonate with anyone who stepped off a bus there between 1960 and 1993 when it moved to its new site. The music and the lyrics even manage to add a nostalgic gloss to the exhaust fumes, stinking toilets and pleading beggars that remain embedded in a collective memory. (For some visuals of the situation in 1965 click here ) Still, for many visiting Tel Aviv from other parts of the country at that time, the old central bus station represented nothing more than a temporary stopping off point for the beaches and cultivated shopping streets of the north.

    Two years later another song – Maka Afora (Grey Plague) by the rock band Monica Sex introduced a different image of south Tel Aviv to the Israeli public. Not, “a country of reality in waiting” but a land of fresh new blood, of ‘urban renewal’. Seedy, dilapidated but affordable Florentin originally populated by poor Mizrahi immigrants was becoming a magnet for young creatives and had quickly developed into a local Greenwich Village complete with artistic graffiti, music bars and street parties. The Florentin phenomenon spawned an eponymous TV series and Maka Afora was used as its theme song. A video  featuring the song will give you an idea of what Florentin looked like at that time.  

The lyrics caught the bohemian Florentin zeitgeist:

 “She said to me look/ it’s quite easy /we’ll rent a room in south Tel Aviv / and we’ll live the life/ live from minute to minute/ we’ll find temporary jobs, nothing serious/ and we’ll sign onto the dole/maybe you’ll find something to write about/ not something deep, something sweet….

    The TV series and the song put Florentin on the map and demonstrated that a south Tel Aviv neighbourhood could be cool. This was a seminal moment because until then South Tel Aviv had always been the very opposite of cool. It had been forgotten.          

Cool Florentin

Florentin, 2018. The neglected old lanes of carpentry and metal workshops are being replaced by stylish buildings like the ‘Florentin Quartet’ designed by architect Ilan Pivko in the background. Florentin today still retains some of its grit but gentrification is simultaneously making it more pleasant and less interesting.

    The story of Tel Aviv’s founding and first decades has been immortalised in its own official biography as well as in innumerable songs, stories, novels, films, histories, biographies and studies. However in all these, life south of the Jaffa-Jerusalem railway line was barely mentioned. The rich documentary and artistic evidence of the middle class, Zionist Ashkenazim from Ahuzat Bayit/Tel Aviv to the north has no counterpart (with the exception of Jaffa) amongst the more heterogeneous communities south of the tracks.

    How did these neighbourhoods evolve and who were the people who moved to them?  You won’t find a lot of material on the subject. Nor will you encounter tour guides in Kiryat Shalom or the Hatikva Quarter pointing out buildings of interest as you would on Rothschild Boulevard or Dizengoff Street further north.  Before maps went digital, large parts of south Tel Aviv were not even included on tourist maps of the city. Yet south Tel Aviv neighbourhoods with interesting stories to tell, like Neve Sha’anan, Florentin and Shapira , were all established in the 1920s, a full decade before the wave of International Style ‘White City’  building that has become synonymous with Tel Aviv.

In 1926, Neve Sha’anan was the largest neighbourhood in Tel Aviv with some 1,500 residents. It was founded both as a housing solution for the Jewish refugees from Jaffa after the 1921 riots, with the additional ambition of cultivating fruit and vegetables. The original plan for the neighbourhood represented an 8 branched menorah (candelabra) but this was never completely achieved in practice.

    One of the reasons for this apparent collective amnesia is that the sort of people who forge narratives were largely absent from south Tel Aviv. The civic and commercial leaders who navigated Tel Aviv’s development did not live here, nor did the poets, painters and photographers who entered Tel Aviv’s canon. The people who lived there were artisans, small shopkeepers, manual labourers, teachers, carriage drivers, rabbis and their flocks. Many of them were new immigrants or refugees, speaking a variety of languages and dialects and speaking, if at all, weak Hebrew.

    Looking at my modest library of books on Tel Aviv, only two out of twelve deal comprehensively with the south, both with the involvement of Sharon Rothbard -architect, lecturer, publisher and south Tel Aviv resident. In his ‘White City Black City’ he caustically deconstructs Tel Aviv’s self-congratulatory modernistic ‘White City’ self-image and turns a harsh spotlight on the forgotten, marginalised or erased ‘Black City’ of Jaffa  and south Tel Aviv. His co-edited  ‘Not in Jaffa and Not in Tel Aviv’ (Hebrew only) was the result of a community project to stitch together a chronological portrait of the Shapira neighbourhood based on the stories, photos and  documents of its few remaining original families.

    Despite the extenuating circumstances, the omission or marginalisation of south Tel Aviv from the official histories appears to be systematic. As in Jaffa and Manshiyeh, (see West) there is an evident tendency to erase a history that does not sit comfortably with the burnished official narrative.   In those cases the acts of erasure seem to stem from a fear of opening up the can of worms known as the Nakba. In contrast, the background to the marginalisation of south Tel Aviv was intra-Jewish and more complex. Nevertheless, one element was certainly the ethnic make-up of the population.  In theory, ideally, heterogeneous south Tel Aviv should have been embraced and integrated into mainly Eastern European north Tel Aviv, especially after 1948 when the Jewish neighbourhoods that previously belonged to Jaffa were annexed to Tel Aviv. This was not the case and despite improvements in attitude and in infrastructure in recent years, south Tel Aviv still lags behind the north. Why did this come about? Rothbard, paraphrasing Toni Morrison, puts it like this: “[…] the white element was stronger than the Jewish element.”

    The circumstances surrounding the establishment of south Tel Aviv neighbourhoods differed from those in the north as did the people drawn to them. These communities, came from wide and far - the Balkans, the Central Asia, Persia, the Middle East, Yemen, North Africa – all places considered foreign and exotic, not to mention primitive, inferior and potentially dangerous,  to the Russians and Poles, who were running Tel Aviv in its early decades.

    Consequently it seems, Tel Aviv found it convenient to ignore and neglect the south, which became Tel Aviv’s dark backyard, its dumping ground situated, in the mental geography of north Tel Avivians, not just over the tracks but somewhere “beyond the dark mountains.”

Floods on Salameh Street, winter 1949….

…and in winter 1974. Somehow the worst flooding in Tel Aviv was always in the south.

    In a tone reminiscent of an intrepid white explorer reporting from darkest Africa, the author of a 1936 article in the socialist daily Davar described the living conditions on Tel Aviv’s southern periphery as no better than those in refugee camps or the alleyways of the Old City of Jerusalem. Many lived in dark and mouldy one room rented shacks, with a few sticks of furniture and numerous children of all ages. “Lots of children, no money and no work,” summed up one Yemenite lady in broken Hebrew. In the densely packed Shivat Tzion neighbourhood lived: “ […] various ethnicities Ashkenazim and Yemenites, people originating in Persia, Syria and Egypt.” (note that the Ashkenazim are mentioned first). The situation was no better in Jaffa and the Yemenite Quarter where the next generation of Jewish children were illiterate and lacked basic skills. Tel Aviv, he charged, had all sorts of housing plans and commercial and public activity but no-one seemed willing to take on the task of providing simple but publicly regulated basic accommodation for the poor.

   Some of Tel Aviv’s southern Jewish neighbourhoods were founded outside Tel Aviv’s jurisdiction, either under the aegis of Jaffa’s municipality or as private, unregulated projects under no-one’s jurisdiction. This meant that Tel Aviv standards need not apply. Instead of by-laws demanding properly laid roads, with pavements, a sewage system and running water in all houses, a Jewish neighbourhood built outside Tel Aviv in the 1920s could be established simply by buying up the land and selling individual plots to poor Jewish buyers who would erect cheap shacks with no infrastructure whatsoever and with neither the developers nor the purchasers paying taxes. The Shapira neighbourhood, one of the first Jewish neighbourhoods in south Tel Aviv, is a good case in point.

Shapira - a South Tel Aviv Parable.

       The early days of the Shapira neighbourhood

    In 1924, Meir Getzel Shapira, a self-declared, “one man Jewish National Fund”, who had made a fortune in real estate in Detroit, bought a large plot in the citrus groves belonging to the Palestinian village of Abu Kabir between Jaffa and Tel Aviv. He named it after his daughter Naomi -Miriam Shapira. The question of the nomenclature was no small matter because at the time Shapira was still smarting from a humiliating confrontation with Tel Aviv’s domineering mayor Meir Dizengoff over names. Shapira, who had moved to Tel Aviv, built a charming mansion for his adored younger wife Sonia (who later deserted him) in two small alleys off King George Street in central Tel Aviv. According to urban legend, to round off the project he wanted the two alleys to bear the Shapira family name. Dizengoff, not one to allow private citizens street-naming rights, refused and to end the argument derisively named the streets Simta Plonit and Simta Almonit (Unknown Alley and Anonymous Alley). Outside of Tel Aviv’s control however, Shapira could call his new neighbourhood whatever he liked and the name Shapira has stuck to this day (no doubt to Dizengoff’s posthumous regret). Dizengoff in general was opposed to building new Jewish neighbourhoods outside of Tel Aviv and accused Shapira of not being a Zionist.

The house that Meir Getzel Shapira built for his wife Sonia.

    Shapira decided to sell off small plots of 250 square metres but despite the Zionist rhetoric, did precious little to develop the place. His publicity poster read: “Don’t miss the opportunity. Buy plots in the Naomi-Miriam Shapira Neighbourhood and build the Land.  The best plots for factories. No need to pay taxes and no problems building. The plots do not belong to Jaffa or Tel Aviv. The conditions are very easy, a first small payment and then one Eretz Yisrael lira every month […]

.

Meir Getzel Shapira with his wife Sonia and their daughter Naomi, 1920s

Houses in Giv’at Na’ar (Na’ar Hill) that became part of Shapira, 1920s.

    Shapira’s plot became the kernel of a much larger neighbourhood that coalesced around it as new parcels of nearby orchards and groves were purchased from the local Arab landowners by other Jewish entrepreneurs. In an aerial photo taken before 1948, Shapira looked like, “an archipelago of hamlets surrounded and divided by citrus groves.”  Between 1934 when the village of Abu Kabir (and with it Shapira) was annexed to Jaffa and 1948 when it was finally annexed to Tel Aviv, the mutual hostility between Tel Aviv and Jaffa accelerated in tandem with the rise in nationalist passions on both sides.  Shapira and the other extra-Tel Aviv Jewish neighbourhoods found themselves stranded on the wrong side, their houses eventually targeted by Arab snipers.

    The Jewish communities were now forced to pay taxes to Jaffa but Jaffa was not exactly providing them with services. With the outbreak of the Arab Revolt in 1936, calls for Tel Aviv to fully adopt the thousands of Jews living just outside its official borders grew stronger. In a letter begging Tel Aviv to help sever their ties with Jaffa, the extra-Tel Aviv Jewish communities wrote, “We have suffered greatly during the six months of horrors and riots and now we can expect new suffering for legally still belonging to Jaffa… [Jaffa’s] cruel and unending use of its formal authority stems from a law that runs against the united wishes of all the residents […] We will no longer be passive and indifferent regarding this constant burden!!!“  

    After the First World War, Tel Aviv under the British Mandate was encouraged to expand northward and eastward but was not allowed to expand southward into the areas close to Arab Jaffa.  Tel Aviv also wanted to control its own development and was opposed to these independent neighbourhoods springing up outside its jurisdiction.  It was therefore able to claim that it was legally constrained from annexing them but was evidently not interested in doing so. With Jaffa and the British opposed and Tel Aviv itself at best ambivalent, the southern neighbourhoods were stuck with Jaffa. At some point, after all lobbying efforts had failed they even considered setting up their own autonomous council that would belong to neither Tel Aviv nor Jaffa but this idea too fell by the wayside.

    With the annexation of the southern Jewish neighbourhoods and Jaffa after 1948, Tel Aviv became land rich overnight but continued almost instinctively, to turn its back on south Tel Aviv. Jaffa and the southern and south-eastern neighbourhoods became Tel Aviv’s back yard, a dumping ground for anything that would be considered excessively troublesome in the north. In Rothbard’s telling, the creation of this ‘Black City’ was the result of what he called the “Tel Aviv ideology”. Or put more bluntly– the racist attitude of Ashkenazi Tel Aviv towards a south largely populated by Mizrahim and physically close to Jaffa and therefore associated with Arabs. Hence south Tel Aviv was filled not only with noisy, polluting installations, the most egregious being  gargantuan white elephant of the New Central Bus Station but also with unacceptable “non-normative” people, Sephardim/Mizrahim, and later Ethiopian Jews and African asylum seekers and foreign workers. Once annexed to Tel Aviv in 1948, Shapira was turned, “from a border settlement to the periphery of the big city”, part of the dumping ground. A working-class neighbourhood that had enjoyed a sense of community and solidarity now became synonymous, together with the rest of south Tel Aviv, with crime, drugs and prostitution.

Public housing in Shapira, 2009 (Roi Boshi)

Modern building in Shapira today.

    Shapira always was and remains one of the most heterogeneous neighbourhoods in Tel Aviv. Among the first to arrive there were a group of Jews from Samarqand in Bukhara (Uzbekistan). In the 1930s it was the turn of a large group of Jews from Salonika in Greece (which contained the largest Sephardi Jewish population in Europe before WWII) and in the 1950s came a group of immigrants from the city of Balkh in Afghanistan. In the early 1990s as the Soviet Union released its grip on Jewish emigration, there was a new wave of arrivals from Bukhara.  Each community built its own synagogues and institutions but otherwise all seemed to have co-existed happily and shared an attachment to their neighbourhood and to each other.  

Neighbours from Salonika playing cards in a Shapira courtyard, 1966. The courtyard contained 3 shacks housing 10 families or 52 people in all.

   In the mid-1990s, refugees from Eritrea and Sudan started to cross the border from Egypt into Israel and claim asylum. Israel fenced off the border in 2012 but by the end of 2018, some 64,000 Africans had already entered and the vast majority of them were living in south Tel Aviv. True to the well-worn tradition of using south Tel Aviv as a dumping ground, the newcomers once processed, or freed from detention, would simply be bused to Levinsky Street in Neve Sha’anan and left to fend for themselves.

    The release of such a large influx of non-Jewish African “infiltrators” into already weak and neglected, traditional Mizrahi neighbourhoods was bound to cause sparks. The Africans were accused of everything from “bringing in diseases” to “a demographic threat“, some liberal groups  counter- protested in their favour and the scene was set for rabble-rousing xenophobic politicians to stir the pot. “The Sudanese are a cancer in our body!” declared Likud minister Miri Regev before being forced to issue a weak apology.  The media followed the protests and interviewed the activists (mainly the anti-African camp) but few asked why the government had no better policy and what such a policy might be.  Plenty of Israeli politicians were happy to express their solidarity with the embattled Mizrahi residents of Neve Sha’anan and Shapira but none were willing to invite the African asylum seekers into their own neighbourhoods. Tel Aviv municipality seemed to be doing the minimum possible to help the destitute Africans. I remember taking blankets and clothes to a centre near Levinsky Park run by a sympathetic Israeli NGO and seeing the overcrowded and unhygienic conditions some of them were experiencing. All this so close to the boutiques and chef restaurants a few streets away in central Tel Aviv.

    In the past decade or so, Shapira has been discovered by young creatives, undeterred by its heterogeneity and allured by cheaper housing options. Not far from the ‘Hanan Margilan’ Bukharan restaurant, Café Shapira serves espressos to hipsters. Shapira, long regarded as somewhere poor and undeveloped “beyond the dark mountains“, has become a by-word for a hipsterish place to live. The municipality finally invested in infrastructure, the property sharks started to snap up the old plots and turn them into smart apartment buildings and the market is doing the rest. Today, in the hyper -inflated prices of the world’s most expensive city, a two-bedroom apartment in Shapira would be out of the price range of an average Israeli family.

Mizrahim and me

    The transformation of Shapira from an ignored slum to a metaphor for a cool ‘authentic’ neighbourhood is also a reflection of how attitudes to Mizrahim have changed over the years. The two large population blocs of the Jewish people have had a hard time getting along in Israel and there is still tension in relations but compared to the anti-Mizrahi stereotyping I heard in Ashkenazi circles when I arrived in Israel the early 1970s we have come a long way. Back then Sephardim (literally Spanish, more accurately referred to today as Mizrahim - easterners) were sometimes also referred to as - schwarzes (blacks).  They were “primitivim” who had unfortunately been “brought here” to beef up the Jewish population but were “destroying the country” in the process. Instead of the rational, European “model society” envisaged by its founders, they were transforming Israel into a “Levantine bazaar”.  They were the ‘frank’, the ‘frekh’, the “pushtak”, all derogatory references evoking dark skinned people, religious in a traditional way, often poorly educated, with ugly accents and ungrammatical Hebrew. People who ate spicy foods, were flashy, loud and vulgar, followed strange superstitious customs and played hideous music. Not the sort of people you’d want your nice white daughter to get mixed up with.

    Visiting my parents in Tel Aviv in the 1970s, Mizrahim for me were the people who sold watermelons from a cart in the empty plot up the road, next to ‘The Falafel King’. They were the cleaners, the road diggers and the plumbers.  They were also the waiters and washers up at the upscale wedding hall that my father managed with my uncle in north Tel Aviv. Their own weddings were held at cheaper, gaudier establishments in south Tel Aviv, a place none of us ever visited.  

A demonstration by the Black Panthers at Tel Aviv University in 1972. One of the placards reads: ‘The Hatikva Quarter = North Tel Aviv’. Another reads: “If there’s no equality we won’t be nice”.

Click for a rare film from 1963 of poor South Tel Aviv residents demonstrating for “an apartment in return for an apartment,” meaning a new apartment in place of the decrepit ones they were being evacuated from, some of which had previously belonged to Palestinians.  They met with the mayor, handed him a petition and asked him to support them in their battle against the building contractors.

    But under the Ashkenazi radar a cultural revolution was taking place. In 1977, Menahem Begin, the head of the Herut (Freedom) party and the former commander of the Etzel (whose rank and file in Tel Aviv came mainly from the poor Mizrahi neighbourhoods) swept the Mapai (precursor of the Labour Party) out of power for the first time since 1948. This defeat of the privileged Ashkenazi socialists by the eternal outsider of Israeli politics instilled in his outsider Mizrahi supporters a new sense of pride and assertiveness that gradually broke down the Ashkenazi hegemony in matters of taste and translated into Mizrahi culture becoming an equal partner in the Israeli mainstream.

    I witnessed a slice of this revolution when I worked at CBS Records in the late 1970s. At that time the state-run radio was hardly playing Mizrahi music on the hollow grounds that it was not “authentically Israeli” and Mizrahi records were hard to find in even large record shops. However, on the buzzing streets of south Tel Aviv, Mizrahi music was booming. Albums, often recorded quickly in backroom studios, were distributed via cheap cassette tapes, (see lyrics of the Old Station above) and sold in places like the Central Bus Station in Neve Sha’anan and the Carmel vegetable market. Another important outlet were live appearances by popular singers like Ahuva Ozeri , Zohar Argov or Ofra Haza at large weddings or barmitzvas. On the call in programmes on the radio there was always at least one irate listener who complained that the radio was discriminating against Mizrachi music.

Mizrahi music cassettes

  CBS’s biggest Hebrew language sellers back then were classically Ashkenazi  - Arik Einstein and Chava Alberstein - and there was a feeling in the company that it was important to maintain high standards. So when one of the younger managers (my boss) started lobbying to tap into this potentially new lucrative market, some were horrified by the idea that its fine stable of artists with their perfect Hebrew pronunciation might be tainted by common accents and coarse lyrics of the Mizrahi stars.  My boss eventually got his way, signed Shimi Tavori as CBS’s first Mizrahi recording artist and the rest is history. Today, Mizrahi music, rebranded as ‘Mediterranean Music’ is the pre-eminent popular music  genre in Israel and has entered many Ashkenazi hearts (especially young ones).  

    But that didn’t mean that I liked it. It took me many more years of exposure to adjust my western ears to the scales of music from the Middle East and distinguish between a commercial schlagger (hit) and the beauty and depth of the classics. In other words, not to generalise. I have tried to apply that approach to other aspects of Mizrahi culture, not always with success. It is still not my culture but nor is it a culture that is foreign to me.  Gradually, through reading, watching films like Sallah Shabati and following the protests of the Black Panthers  (famously accused by PM Golda Meir as being “not nice”) I was also able to piece together the story of the disintegration of their family and community structures, the humiliating mistreatment and prejudice they suffered in Ben Gurion’s Ashkenazi-hegemonic Israel and the more subtle discrimination that still exists to this day.

    The marginalisation of south Tel Aviv by the power brokers of the north was part of this sad story and the south has not forgiven and not forgotten. In the 2021 general elections the rightist Likud received twice as much support in the south than in the north, even though overall Tel Aviv as a whole voted overwhelmingly for the centre-left parties.

Ofra Haza, a native of the Ha-Tikva Quarter in south-east Tel Aviv, and the youngest of nine children, pictured here in full Yemenite garb. In 1988, her version of Im Nin'alu, a song with lyrics by the 17th century Yemenite poet Rabbi Shalom Shabazi, became a massive international hit. She recorded my English translation of one of her local hits.

Scars

    For anyone who cares to see (and few do), scars of south Tel Aviv’s history lie scattered between the streets of low storey plastered houses and uninviting housing blocks. In some places these are pre-1948 Palestinian Arab structures that were never demolished and in others unregulated ramshackle Jewish neighbourhoods created out of the legal chaos that reigned in the early years of the state. Here are some examples:

• Deserted mosque and evacuation of Jews in Kfar Shalem (Salama) 

    In April 1948 the Haganah occupied the Palestinian village of Salama as part of Operation Hametz to capture the Arab villages east of Jaffa and blockade the city. Salama’s 12,000 residents and Arab troops (who had previously attacked nearby Jewish settlements) fled without a shot being fired via a passage that was deliberately left open for them. A few weeks after it was depopulated it was resettled with Jewish war refugees and later with Jewish immigrants and Salama was Hebraized to Kfar Shalem.  

    The new Jewish residents were never granted legal property rights. Nor were they provided with proper infrastructure.  The village became a sort of no-man’s land and lacking any zoning plan it became vulnerable to crime, drugs and intruders, another sad south Tel Aviv story ignored by the state and the municipality.

    Fast forward to the 21st century. Part of Kfar Shalem’s land is now needed for the construction of the Purple Line of the new Tel Aviv light rail system. The state alters its normal policy and offers financial compensation to the residents on the evacuation list who are legally defined as “trespassers”. However a Knesset committee finds that, “The proposed compensation in effect leaves the residents without a roof over their heads.” Some 90 families, exhausted by the legal process, accept the compensation and leave. On January 24, 2022, the remaining 16 families are forcibly removed and provided with temporary housing. Among them were Yossi (75) and Chaya (70) Levi, both disabled and living on social security. They would receive NIS 1.7 million, not enough to find a flat in the area, let alone one with wheelchair access. “Do they want to throw me into the street?” asks Yossi, “Let me live what remains of my life, let me finish it in peace and quiet. Don’t throw us out.”

Evacuating houses in Kfar Shalem, 2022.

• The Sheikh Murad cemetery on the borders of the Shapira and Kiryat Shalom neighbourhoods.

    A neglected and vandalised Moslem cemetery that dates back as far as the 15th century and was attached to the pre-1948 village of Salama. In 1921, the bodies of the Jewish author Yosef Haim Brenner and seven others killed nearby by rioting Arabs in the Jaffa Riots were hung from its walls. After 1948, like other properties belonging to the Moslem religious trust (Waqf) it was appropriated under Israel’s Absentee Property Law but unlike most Waqf property was not sold but merely neglected and used only to bury the bodies of Arabs who had collaborated with Israel. This, after the Arabs of Jaffa refused to allow them to be buried in other Moslem graveyards. Elsewhere in Tel Aviv Moslem cemeteries were covered with a hotel (the Hilton) and a parking lot (Tel Aviv University, itself built on the lands of Sheikh Mounis)).

• ‘The Crates’ Neighbourhood (Shchunat Ha-Argazim)

    The original residents of the ‘Crates’ neighbourhood were sent by the Jewish Agency to occupy Arab houses belonging to Salama after the 1948 War. However they were not allowed to register any legal rights in the land. They simply built makeshift shacks made out of crates, planks, sheet metal, plastic awnings and anything else they could lay their hands on. The original residents were augmented by newcomers, including a group of released prisoners, who built illegally and also had no legal rights to the land. In 1991 scores of temporary buildings were added officially to house immigrants from the Soviet Union. All this led to a legal quagmire in which various proposals for compensation of the residents in return for the demolition of the shacks were rejected. Only in January 2020 did the municipality approve a plan to build 1,800 apartments in the north of the neighbourhood with 200 of these set aside for the shack dwellers. Still, hundreds will remain. It is a shocking, surrealistic experience to wander between hundreds of shacks, many hidden behind walls of metal sheeting, an area reminiscent of a temporary refugee camp, all this in one of the richest cities in Israel.

• The New Central Bus Station

An aerial view of the New Central Bus Station, a folly that will be hard to demolish.

 It took almost 30 years to build and as soon as it opened in 1993 became a white elephant. The New Central Bus Station was a megalomaniac project to build the biggest bus station in the world in a linear city that did not need a central bus station. Polluting

large areas as buses spewed exhaust fumes from ramps a few metres away from residential buildings, it was a final “death blow” to the Neve Sha’anan neighbourhood, already weakened by the negative effects of the Old Central Bus Station. Some of the commercial areas were never opened. The building became a hub for asylum seekers and foreign workers and the entire half deserted hulk is now a venue for intrepid tour groups. Under a court order the bus station was due to be moved in 2023 but this was recently delayed until 2026. The future fate of the privately owned building is still to be settled.

Postscript: Shmuel Dov Haim Kriss (again)

    Searching online for photos of Shapira back in the day I stumbled across a reference in tlv100 - the excellent Tel Aviv online encyclopaedia (Hebrew only) - to one of the little sub-neighbourhoods within its radius known as Giv’at Na’ar (Na’ar Hill) named after one Salvador Na’ar who bought the land and, like Shapira, sold it off in plots. In its early years the chairman of its neighbourhood committee was Shmuel Dov Haim Kriss (קריס (who also built the Kriss Buildings not far away on Kibbutz Galuyot Street (See East for his biography). I still don’t know if Shmuel Dov Haim is related to my own Kris/Kriss/Krys family but it was good to meet him again. The entry goes on to mention that, “In the late 1990s the neighbourhood became a preferred location for investors dreaming of a better future that would include combining the plots and permission to build towers. Meanwhile, the little houses are mainly populated by foreign workers against the background of levels 6 &7 of the “biggest bus station in the world” (the New Central Bus Station).