Known as the "City That Never Stops," Tel Aviv is a city with a youthful soul. Currently celebrating its 90th birthday, Tel Aviv is the quintessential modern Israeli city. The countrys economic capital, it exudes energy and dynamism, and vies with Jerusalem, the nations political capital, for cultural hegemony.
by Simon Griver
From the long golden beaches of the Mediterranean and street-side cafes of Nahlat Binyamin and Dizengoff streets by day, to the restaurants, pubs and clubs of the Yemenite Quarter, the trendy Shenkin Street and bohemian Florentine Street by night, Tel Avivs naturally exuberant residents will be letting their hair down this summer as the city moves into its tenth decade.
Established in 1909, Tel Avivs founding fathers had only modest ambitions for the new community. While nearby Rishon Lezion and Petah Tikvah were agricultural settlements, they envisioned Tel Aviv as a garden suburb and commuter satellite of the neighboring city Jaffa. The name Tel Aviv is mentioned in the Book of Ezekiel as a town in Babylon; it was chosen because of its old-new connotations in Hebrew Tel is a mound of layers of ancient civilizations, while Aviv means spring, the season of renewal.
Tel Aviv quickly blossomed into a flourishing metropolis as waves of Jewish immigrants, fleeing the anti-Semitism of Europe, arrived in the region, first from Russia, then Poland then Nazi Germany. By the 1930s, Tel Aviv rivaled Jerusalem, the 3,000 year-old city which Jews cherished and longed for throughout two millennia of exile, as a major Jewish city. If Jerusalem symbolized the glory of Jewish history, then Tel Aviv represented the promise of a prosperous future.
British journalist Robert Byron visited the city in 1937 and wrote about it in his travel diary, The Road to Oxiana: "Tel Avivs planning and architecture, its smiling communal life, its intellectual pursuits and its air of youth enthroned are all an accomplished fact."
Indeed, by 1939, after just 30 years, the citys population had grown to more than 160,000; cultural institutions such as the Habimah Theater and the Palestine (later Israel) Philharmonic Orchestra had been established. The city is still famous for its many Bahaus-style buildings, with the fashionable minimalist designs of the 1920s and 30s.
After the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, the city grew from strength to strength as Jewish immigrants flooded in from post-Holocaust Europe, Arab countries and later from the former Soviet Union. In 1950, Tel Aviv merged with Jaffa, the ancient port city to the south, through which King Solomon imported cedars from Lebanon to build the Temple and from which Jonah set sail on his ill-fated voyage.
Today, while Tel Aviv-Yafo has a population of nearly 400,000, it is the heart only of a vast conurbation stretching from Rishon Lezion in the south to Herzliyah and Kfar Saba in the north, and housing more than 2.5 million people.
Tel Aviv-Yafo is Israels commercial and financial capital with banks, insurance companies and industrial organizations based there as well as a small but buoyant stock exchange. Diamond cutting and polishing (most of the trading is conducted in adjacent Ramat Gan) earns the country $5 billion per year in exports while tourism is another important foreign currency earner.
"We have nearly 8,000 hotel rooms in the Greater Tel Aviv area," says Eli Ziv, head of the Tel Aviv Hotels Association. "We offer people sea, sand and year-round sunshine as well as entertainment, culture and night-life, colorful markets and the history of biblical Jaffa."
Celebratory events for the 90th anniversary will include a spectacular multi-media show in the citys main plaza, Rabin Square, and a festive concert in Yarkon Park performed by the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra and conducted by Maestro Zubin Mehta.
"Part of the citys cultural tradition every summer is to hold outdoor events," explains Danny Weiss, director of Programming in the Tel Aviv Municipalitys Culture and Arts Department. "These events are informal and free and especially attractive for visitors because they are designed to make people mingle. Israelis are naturally outgoing and friendly and its easy to meet new people at these events."
With its azure coastline, crowded beaches and fashionable boulevards, Tel Aviv is unashamedly materialistic and hedonistic compared to quiet, spiritual Jerusalem. Jerusalem prays while Tel Aviv plays says the adage.
Weiss advises visitors that they must adjust to "Tel Aviv" time. While the restaurants, pubs, clubs and even the sea-front promenade are busy at ten in the evening, it is only after midnight that the citys night-life really shifts into gear.
But Tel Aviv has much more to offer. It is also a city of endeavor and enterprise where high-rise commercial buildings spread throughout the metropolis. The city prides itself on its culture, too, with world-class orchestras, dance companies, opera and theater as well as museums and art galleries.
Tel Aviv-Yafo draws hundreds of thousands of tourists each year but the city has recently become best-known for its high-tech industries. Much of the software, electronics, telecommunications, medical equipment and biotechnology are manufactured throughout Israel, but the venture capital and financial infrastructures and headquarters of the largest advanced technology firms are based primarily in the Tel Aviv area.
Newsweek magazine recently named Tel Aviv-Yafo as one of the worlds top ten high-tech cities worldwide (one of only three cities outside of the US, along with Cambridge, UK and Bangalore, India). Newsweek also named Tel Aviv as one of the top ten worldwide cities to which young people migrate.
The 20th century has seen Tel Aviv-Yafo rise from the sand-dunes on the eastern shores of the Mediterranean into a model modern city. The 21st century could see the Israeli high-tech resort emerge as one of the worlds great metropolises.