Tel Aviv's forgotten neighborhood

Hasdai Crescas Street in Tel Aviv's Shapira quarter exemplifies the neglect, or at the very least carelessness, with which Tel Aviv treats its southern neighborhoods. In "Neither in Jaffa nor in Tel Aviv: Stories, Testimonies and Documents from the Shapira Neighborhood," architect Sharon Rotbard demonstrates the absurdity to be found in a stroll down the street. Rotbard is the founder of Babel Publishers, which recently issued his latest book.

The philosopher and rabbi Crescas was a leader of 14th-century Spanish Jewry, but in Shapira he is variously Hasdai of Crescas, the Hasidim of Crescas or even the Hasidim of Caracas. His name is spelled differently on nearly every building, and it is not the only street name with this problem.

In "White City, Black City" (Babel, 2005, Hebrew), Rotbard, who also teaches architecture at Jerusalem's Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design writes that cities, like history, are always made by the victors and ultimately always in accordance according to the victor's history, and are not equally welcoming to all.

To change the city, Rotbard says, one must first change its story.

To a large extent "Neither in Jaffa," which he edited together with Muki Tsur, is an attempt to change the city, to provide entree to the history books to the Shapira neighborhood and to tell a story that no one else had bothered to tell. The book was published in collaboration with the Bina Center for Jewish Identity and Hebrew Culture, associated with the United Kibbutz Movement.

According to Tsur, a historian, a member of Kibbutz Ein Gev and a teacher at Bina's secular yeshiva, Shapira embodies all of Israel's social problems: the multiplicity of communities and of opinions, and of imaginary conflicts - between foreign workers and Palestinian collaborators resettled by the security agencies in Israeli neighborhoods; between ethnic groups, between synagogues, between religious and secular Jews.

"Since the neighborhood was neglected, no one fought for it. It received little publicity due to its marginality but it has many interesting things to teach about the difficulties within Israeli society."

In its early days Shapira was not a part of Tel Aviv; it belonged to the periphery of Jaffa. In an advertising poster from the 1920s, developer Meir Getzl Shapira exhorts potential buyers: "Buy lots in the Naomi Miriam Shapira neighborhood and build the land. The best lots for factories, no need to pay taxes and there are no impediments to construction. The plots do not belong to Jaffa and Tel Aviv, the terms are very convenient and the downpayment is small..."

Meir Getzl Shapira was born in Lithuania in 1881. At the age of 14 he left his parents and sailed to America, where he worked in real estate. In 1922, at age 41 years old, he came to Palestine and bought plots along the seashore, on Salameh Road (Shapira neighborhood) and Samuel Road (King George Street). He met and married met Sonia Moselbuts, his junior by 23 years, with whom he had three children. They lived in the legendary house that he built for her Sonia on Simta Plonit, a tiny dead-end street perpendicular to King George.

Shapira invested little in developing Shapira, which for him was mainly a business venture. Rotbard moved into the neighborhood nine years ago, and founded Babel there.

"When we moved here questions about the location came up, naturally. I found nothing about the neighborhood in the books. It didn't seem right that in a canonical book on Tel Aviv there'd be one paragraph on Shapira and 15 pages on a water tower in the center of Tel Aviv. It's part of what I call 'the black city' - all the areas that are overshadowed by 'the white city.'"

Lost world

In 2001 a joint project of the neighborhood's community center library and Bina began. Residents and former residents met once a week to swap stories.

"Much of the material in the book came as stories, oral history," Rotbard says.

The project continued at the library for about four years, coordinated by librarian Yossi Granovsky, Bina activists Itamar Gil, Dana Halevy and Ayelet Kestler and Rotbard.

"At first, neighborhood residents came, then people who had grown up there and were glad to return and meet with childhood friends. Before our eyes an entire world of which there's no trace was recreated," Rotbard related. Recordings were made, and then transcribed, and intensive archive research was conducted.

Tsur, who has always been particularly interested in the area and in pre-State history, pushed the project along. "People came as educational volunteers. We wanted to study the neighborhood because we can't do educational work in a place with nothing to teach us," Tsur said.

As a result of his research, Tsur has concluded that the entire state of Israel is paying a heavy price "for thinking that if it has an excellent air force then society will develop in its wake. This hasn't happened. There's a lot of neglect and irresponsibility. The fact that the municipality enabled this project obligates it in some way."

Ifat Tehrani, 35 and a Shapira native, heads the neighborhood scout troop, the same one she belonged to as a girl. It was shut down in 1999, but in 2003 Bina volunteer Yoni Meshal suggested she revive it for a group of teens, the children of illegal migrant workers.

Today the troop has about 100 members, from Colombia, Peru, Thailand, the Philippines, Morocco, Turkey, Congo, and Nigeria, as well as Palestinians and Israeli Jews. Recently the troop has taken in refugees from Darfur.

The troop also joined the struggle to obtain citizenship for the children of foreign workers. The troop members who applied were granted temporary citizenship, which will become permanent when they complete their military service.

Citrus groves, not sand

Tehrani describes Shapira as unique place. "It doesn't resemble any other neighborhood in Tel Aviv, but embodies all the characteristics of Israeli society, all the tensions that Israeli society is grappling with. Migrant workers, Jews, Arabs, a new population that has only come here recently and has good economic potential versus a disadvantaged veteran population. It is for the most part coping not badly at all. In certain places, such as the scout troop, which is multicultural, it represents an alternative and shows that it is also possible to do things differently."

Tsur questions the image of Tel Aviv as a city of sand. "Chronologically this is a late neighborhood, based on the groves and vineyards that are the core of Tel Aviv. Tel Aviv is not the city of sands, it's the city of groves. When you look at it through the lens of the Shapira neighborhood you discover that the image of Tel Aviv as a city of culture and leisure is only one side of the coin. This side is full of irresponsibility, and this book is a call for responsibility."

Tehrani believes that the Shapira neighborhood is not a part of the urban narrative of Tel Aviv. "I am glad that at long last the residents realize we need to create our own narrative. It's a little sad, because Tel Aviv has achieved a status that enables it to look at its margins without feeling threatned."

Rotbard speaks of the difficulty in defining a city and its boundaries. "At the start of the decade we sat with a municipal official who laughed when we asked for the mayor to visit the neighborhood. No mayor had ever visited. Once Chich (former Tel Aviv mayor Shlomo Lahat) was asked to come and he said outright that no one there voted for him so he wouldn't. But [Mayor Ron] Huldai has come, several times. So in that respect there has been a big improvement.

Rotberd argues that Tel Aviv is still positioning itself within its historical, pre-1948 boundaries. "That's what creates the border between north and south, the white city and the black city and so forth. It comes out in the most basic things such as sanitation and development. But relative to other southern neighborhoods, Shapira has succeeded in resisting developers' plans or redevelopment initiatives, and I believe a lot of this is because people realize that there is a place here, and a story that must be respected.

For now the book is available only in Shapira, at places such as supermarket Alon, at 139 Salameh St., Moshe Hut Paint and Home Store at 143 Salameh St. (NIS 75 for outsiders, NIS 50 for residents and former residents). As a special gesture, it will also be sold at the Bauhaus Center, 99 Dizengoff St. in central Tel Aviv.