Rehavia
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Rehavia or Rechavia (Hebrew: רחביה) is a Jerusalem neighborhood. It is bordered by the neighborhood of Nahlaot to the north, Talbiya and Katamon to the south, Shaarei Chesed to the west, and the Old City to the east.
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[edit] History
Rehavia was established in the late 1920s on real estate previously owned by the Greek Orthodox Church purchased by the Israel Land Development Company in 1922. The ILDC hired architect Ricard Kaufmann, a German Jew, to design the neighborhood as a "garden neighborhood" to be modeled after the garden cities of Europe, with an emphasis on the International Style popular at the time in Israel. The first phase, called Rehavia A, was bordered by King George Street to the east, Ramban Street to the south, Ussishkin Street to the west, and Keren Kayemet Street to the north. To preserve the quiet character, the neighborhood association allowed commercial businesses only on the two main roads at the neighborhood's edges. The roads open to traffic were deliberately built narrow, to keep them less busy and thus quieter. The main, tree-lined boulevard which bisected the neighborhood was open to pedestrian traffic only.
Among its early residents were Menachem Ussishkin, Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, Dov Yosef, Gershom Scholem, Hugo Bergman, and Gad Frumkin. When the Ethiopian leader Haile Selassie was exiled from Ethiopia in 1936, he lived on Alharizi Street. Rehavia became known as a neighborhood of upper-class Ashkenazi Jews, home to professors and intellectuals.
Landmark buildings in Rehavia include the building of the Jewish Agency for Israel, the Gymnasia Ha'ivrit high school, the windmill on Ramban Street, the Terra Sancta building on the corner of Paris Square, the Prime Minister's Residence, the Jerusalem YMCA, the King David Hotel, the Ratisbonne Monastery and the U.S. Consulate-General on Agron Street. In the center of historic Rehavia is Yad Ben-Zvi, a research institute established by President Yitzhak Ben-Zvi.
Later expansion was primarily to the south, in the direction of Gaza Street.
[edit] Street Names
Many of Rehavia's streets are named after Jewish scholars and poets from the Golden Age of Jewish culture in Spain. Among them are Abarbanel, Ben Maimon, Ibn Ezra and Ramban. Other streets are named for Zionist leaders, among them Menachem Ussishkin and Ze'ev Jabotinsky.
[edit] References
[edit] Notable residents
- Chaim Potok
- Aron Brand
- David Flusser
- Moshe Goshen-Gottstein
- Avraham Burg
- Moshe Greenberg
- Else Lasker-Schuler
- Miriam Yalan-Shteklis
- Benjamin Netanyahu
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