Tel Aviv: Frivolity and Sharing the Burden

| Shlomo Shva On the fifth day of Hol ha-Moed ( the Intermediate Days of ) Passover , April 11 , 1909 , the representatives of sixty-six families from Jaffa and the adjoining Jewish neighborhoods assembled for a lottery , to distribute the plots on which they would build their homes , in a new neighborhood to be established . The photographer who was present captured the scene with his camera : a group of men and women , crowded together in the middle of the sand dunes . A single person stands facing them , casting a long shadow . Legend has it that this was the crazy man of Jaffa who , so it is said , shouted : “ Crazy people ! You’re building on sand !” The engineer , Meir Dizengoff , won the hill upon which the residents of the future neighborhood stood , and it was there that he built his home . Two years later , Dizengoff would be elected head of the neighborhood council . Later , when the neighborhood became a city , Dizengoff was elected mayor , a post he filled for some twenty-...  אל הספר
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