Shaar Zion Lodge in Neve Tzedek brings a wave of modernization to the Jews of the Yeshuv
Years before Herzl dreamed of a Zionist movement, and well before Tel Aviv was even an idea, 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.
Toward the end of the 19th century, over merely five years, a revolution took place in Jaffa. The first wave of Jewish immigration had just arrived, and many of these Jews were joining the multicultural Jewish community of the town, which was made up mainly of Sephardic families with a few Ashkenazim. The newcomers raised the percentage of East Europeans in the increasingly fractured, disorganized community. One young man brought about change: Shimon Rokach, twenty-one years old, who had arrived in Jaffa from Jerusalem in 1883. Rokach united the community at a surprising speed, setting up infrastructure and organizations that radically improved both living conditions and Jewish life.
Yitzhak Rokach, Shimon’s father, had been a prominent Jerusalem merchant, taxing every carriage traveling from Jaffa to Jerusalem. His mother, Miriam, was the daughter of Rabbi Israel Bak. Born in June 1863, Shimon was ostensibly a typical product of traditional Jerusalem, studying at Etz Hayim Yeshiva and married at sixteen to Rachel Shostakovsky. In 1884, his father sent him to supervise the family’s affairs in Jaffa, particularly toll collection. Joining forces with Muyal, Zion’s land-purchase agent, Rokach got both halves of Jewish Jaffa to cooperate. The resulting institutions worked wonders in improving Jewish life in the bustling port.
B’nei Zion was a thirty-strong organization set up by Rokach and his elder brother Elazar to assist Jewish immigrants. The meetings were social as well as charitable, intended to promote the cohesion of Jaffa’s diverse Jewish community, particularly its Ashkenazim. Then the brothers and their partners founded Ezrat Yisrael (Israel Aid), to which new arrivals could turn directly for help. Its first directors were Elazar Rokach and Dr. Mark (Menahem) Stein, a physician and member of the BILU pioneer group. Their flagship project was a hospital serving Jaffa’s Jewish poor along with pioneer farming colonies such as Gedera and Rishon Lezion.
Shimon and his brother Elazar were also instrumental in founding the Jewish neighborhood of Neve Tzedek, a hospital, and a library, but also led to the creation, 131 years ago, of a B’nai B’rith branch in Jaffa, named Sha’ar Zion (the name was based on the fact that most Jews arrived in the Holy Land through the port of 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.
Sha’ar Zion (Gate of Zion), transformed the way Jaffa’s Jews perceived themselves and their goals, nurturing a 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 Lodge 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 contribution of Sha’ar Zion and Shimon Rokach to the Yishuv, and to the creation of Ahuzat Bayit (later Tel Aviv), established in April 1909 on the sandy hills near the shore. Four Sha’ar Zion members served on Ahuzat Bayit’s founding council – Meir Dizengoff, Yechezkel Danin, David Smilansky, and David Ismogic – solidifying the connection between Sha’ar Zion and Tel Aviv.
Jewish Masons
It all began across the sea, amid the West’s social and political awakening in the late 19th century. Alongside the surge of nationalist movements, of which Zionism was only one, society resolved to improve itself. Organizations such as the Rotary Club, the Lions’ Club, and even the Salvation Army sought to engage the increasingly comfortable middle class in assistance to the less fortunate. The most eminent and perhaps oldest group were the Freemasons.
As in numerous other organizations, only Christian men were allowed to be members. According to many scholars, this restriction prompted the founding of B’nai B’rith, the oldest international Jewish association still in existence. Some claim that the rejection by the Freemasons of German Jewish engineer Henry Jones prompted him and eleven fellow Jews to establish their own men’s philanthropic organization in New York. The new organization sought to help poor Jewish immigrants upon their arrival in the United States.
The order was founded in 1843, and the name B’nai B’rith (Sons of the Covenant) reflected the essence of the solidarity that the organization intended to promote. Jewish immigrants already settled in the U.S. were to support their newly arrived brethren despite their different economic statuses and the fact that the newcomers were Ashkenazim whereas the veteran immigrants were primarily Sephardic.
By 1852, New York’s B’nai B’rith lodges came together as the Supreme Lodge, founding hospitals, old age homes, orphanages, libraries, and schools. B’nai B’rith lodges subsequently sprang up all over America and Europe, and in 1896, Daughters of Judah, a women’s lodge, was established.
From the end of the 19th century, Jews settling in the land of Israel became a major focus of B’nai B’rith’s philanthropy. In 1947, at the behest of B’nai B’rith president Frank Goldman, Eddie Jacobson persuaded President Harry Truman to meet with Chaim Weizmann. The encounter convinced Truman to prevent the exclusion of the Negev from the Jewish state under the United Nations’ Partition Plan.
By Ilan Schori