Lottery of the Plots in Ahuzat Bayit

IsraelTel Aviv

The lottery of plots for Ahuzat Bayit, the neighborhood that became Tel Aviv, is a defining moment in the city's history. The lottery was held on April 11, 1909, which is considered the day of Tel Aviv's founding.

Members of the Ahuzat Beit association gathered in the sands north of Jaffa, on the lands they had purchased, to divide the plots among the 66 founding families of the first Hebrew city by means of a lottery to ensure equality and fairness. The lottery was organized by Akiva Weiss who headed the association, using white and dark seashells on which the numbers of the lots and the names of the families were written. The seashells were put into two boxes, and one of the children of the future city randomly pulled out a pair of seashells each time, thereby determining the division of the lots.

The lottery was held in the center of the area purchased by the members of the association. The place where they stood later became part of Rothschild boulevard. Later, the neighborhood's first water house was established on it, where the council house also operated, which became the first town hall. Meir Dizengoff's house was built a few meters from the place where the lottery took place, which after his death became the Tel Aviv Museum and where the ceremony of declaring the state of Israel by David Ben-Gurion was held in 1948. In 1949, the monument to the founders of the city of Tel Aviv was erected on the site.

The lottery of the plots was commemorated in the mythological photograph of Avraham Soskin, the renowned photographer of Tel Aviv, who documented with his camera many of the prominent people and features the young Jewish settlement in Israel.

(Anecdote authored by: עמיר)

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