Nahalat Binyamin

Nahalat Binyamin ( he, נחלת בנימין, also spelled Nachalat, Nachlat, and Nahlat Binyamin) is a partially car-free street and a neighbourhood in Tel Aviv, Israel.

Name

Nahalat Binyamin is translated as "the estate of Benjamin".

'' Nahala'' (with different ways of transliterating/spelling it), is a Hebrew word for either heritage or estate.

The second part of the name, Binyamin (the original Hebrew form of the English name Benjamin) has two possible origins: officially it refers to the Hebrew name of Theodor Herzl, the founder of modern political Zionism. However, local lore has it that the founders of Nahalat Binyamin asked for money from both the Jewish National Fund (JNF) organisation, closely linked to Herzl's activity, and from Baron Edmond de Rothschild, whose Hebrew name was also Benjamin, a man famous for being a major benefactor of Jewish settlement in Ottoman Palestine.

Location

Nahalat Binyamin Street runs north to south. It begins in the north at Magen David Square, where it intersects with four other streets: Allenby, King George and its continuation HaCarmel, and Menahem Sheinkin. As of 2020, it has a car-free section down to Gruzenberg Street, and the municipality is planning to add to this the section between Kalischer Street and Rothschild Boulevard.New Pedestrian Streets
Municipality of Tel Aviv-Yafo, 20 May 2020. Accessed 15 August 2020. Continuing southwards, Nahalat Binyamin crosses Jaffa and Florentin Streets, and ends ar Shalma Road.

The street's pedestrian section runs very close to the Carmel food market and Allenby Street, which is one of Tel Aviv's major arteries, and is close to the Kerem HaTeimanim quarter (lit. "Vineyard of the Yemenites"), an old, poorer neighborhood boasting a great number of good eateries, all of which helped Nahalat Binyamin becoming fully commercial, and since 1987 adds to its attractiveness as an arts-and-crafts fair.

History

Ahuzat Bayit, the home-building association of wealthy Jewish families which started off the city of Tel Aviv, started building in 1909. The purpose was escaping the crowded and unsanitary Old City of Jaffa. At about the same time, the Nahalat Binyamin Association, consisting mainly of tradesmen and clerks, craftsmen, shopkeepers, booksellers, a baker and a laundress, had trouble financing their own, similar project. The Jewish National Fund, which had helped out Ahuzat Bayit, was not forthcoming, as was the bank they approached. In 1911, a journalist and Zionist activist known as Rabbi Binyamin (actual name: Yehoshua Redler Feldman), a pioneer of the Second Aliyah (see #External links), wrote an angry article accusing the two institutions of favouring the well-off. Soon after its publication, the association acquired a long strip of land among the sand dunes running parallel to the coast. The 20 dunams (five acres) the association had purchased were divided into 35 plots. They started building right away, at first modest Arab-style homes with two rooms and a kitchen. The first houses of both Nahalat Binyamin and Achuzat Bayit were one-storey buildings with residential purpose, with Jaffa still being the main hub for work and business. Most houses were built of local kurkar, by Arab workmen from Jaffa, without an architect's plan and just following their experience. That same year, 1911, the association also signed an agreement with the renamed Ahuzat Bayit, by then already called Tel Aviv, partly joining it and agreeing to connect its streets to Tel Aviv's and to participate in the infrastructure costs, in exchange for being connected to Tel Aviv's water supply system and other services. The next year, with 23 houses already standing, Nahalat Binyamin became an integral part of Tel Aviv. The neighborhood consisted of Nahalat Binyamin Street itself, which ran parallel to Herzl Street, Tel Aviv's main axis, as well as Kalisher Street.

In its early years, Nahalat Binyamin Street was the longest road in Tel Aviv. Along with its residential role, right from the beginning it housed small shops,
with many of its first inhabitants being metal craftsmen, as well as booksellers and various shopkeepers.

In the 1920s, a decade of repeated anti-Jewish Arab riots in Jaffa, many Jews left that city and moved to a constantly growing Tel Aviv. At this time Nahalat Binyamin Street became Tel Aviv's main commercial thoroughfare. The houses underwent a process of transformation, additional storeys being added and the shops occupying the bottom floor. The residential buildings of the neighbourhood had been initially planned to be surrounded by gardens, and were built on raised platforms or podiums lining the Sidewalk">pavements