Jewish Jaffa’s Secret Society
Years before Herzl dreamed of a Zionist movement, and well before Tel Aviv was even a dream, B’nai B’rith’s Sha’ar Zion Lodge in Jaffa was hard at work bringing the American organization’s values of Jewish solidarity, progress, and culture to the port’s splintered Jewish community
In a mere five years, a revolution took place in Jaffa toward the end of the 19th century. The first wave of Jewish immigration was just getting underway, with many of these Jews joining the hodgepodge of the town’s Jewish community: mainly Sephardic families with a few Ashkenazim thrown in. The newcomers bolstered the proportion of eastern Europeans in the increasingly fractured, disorganized community until soon almost nothing could be agreed upon. One young man changed all that – Shimon Rokah, then only twenty-one, who’d arrived in Jaffa from Jerusalem in 1883. Surprisingly quickly, Rokach united the community, setting up infrastructure and organizations that radically improved both living conditions and Jewish life.
Shimon and his brother Elazar were the driving force behind Ezrat Yisrael, a Jewish aid society whose activities not only were instrumental in founding the Jewish neighborhood of Neve Tzedek, a hospital, and a library, but led to the creation, 131 years ago, of a B’nai B’rith branch in Jaffa. B’nai B’rith, whose first lodge in Ottoman Palestine had been established two years earlier in Jerusalem, became a powerful agent of progress in the city – and not only there.
Named Sha’ar Zion, Gate of Zion, since most Jews took their first steps in the Holy Land when they disembarked in Jaffa, the city’s lodge took over where Ezrat Yisrael left off, deepening and quickening the pace of change. Sha’ar Zion transformed the way Jaffa’s Jews perceived themselves and their goals, nurturing a public spirit of urban and national renewal a decade before Herzl’s political Zionism took root and the first Zionist Congress convened in Basel in 1897. The chapter spearheaded the establishment of the first Hebrew-speaking kindergartens in Neve Tzedek and Jaffa, founded Hebrew schools and an employment agency for new immigrants in Jaffa, and was behind the first Jewish public library, still operating today as Tel Aviv’s municipal library, now known as Beit Ariela. It was also responsible for the Jewish cemetery later named after Joseph Trumpeldor and for Jaffa’s first Jewish hospital, also called Sha’ar Zion.
Historians of Jewish Jaffa tend to overlook the major contribution made by Sha’ar Zion and Rokach. But the latter’s quiet revolution was a vital factor in the creation of Ahuzat Bayit, the precursor of Tel Aviv, officially launched in April 1909 by a lottery of plots on the Jaffa shore. Four Sha’ar Zion members served on the neighborhood’s founding council – Meir Dizengoff, Yechezkel Danin, David Smilansky, and David Ismogic – solidifying the connection between Sha’ar Zion and Tel Aviv.
Ilan Shchori