Nir and Inna Feldman collection of Haifa material 1790-1988 (bulk: 1900-1960) .

Format:

Other

Author/Creator:

Feldman, Nir, collector.

Contributor:

Barney and Eleanor Frommer Memorial Fund.

Perkins Architectural Rare Book Fund.

Mark S. Zucker Judaica Fund.

Goldstein Gensler Fund.

Gershwind/Bennett Endowed Fund for Judaica Collections.

Language:

Arabic

English

French

German

Hebrew

Romanian

Yiddish

Subjects (All):

Architecture.

Cities and towns--Israel.

Jewish refugees.

Israel--History.

Genre:

architectural drawings (visual works)

maps.

negatives (photographic)

photograph albums.

photographs.

Penn Provenance:

Sold by Robinson Bookseller, 2023.

Physical Description:

12 boxes (8.2 linear feet)

1.70 gigabytes

Arrangement:

Organized into 8 series: I. Haifa culture; II. Haifa infrastructure; III. Correspondence; IV. Film; V. Robert Ziller photographs; VI. Rudolf Jones material; VII. Reuven Adler material; and VIII. Moshe and Leopold Gerstel material.

Place of Publication:

1790-1988

Language Note:

In English, Hebrew, Romanian, Moldavian, Moldovan, German, Arabic, Yiddish, and French.

Biography/History:

Many scholars refer to Haifa as a "mixed city," denoting the rare integration of its Jewish and Arab populations for decades. As Israel's third largest city, Haifa is commonly overlooked in literature, while maintaining a history of rich cultural and religious tolerance. Although the city of Haifa existed for centuries, it wasn't until the ruler Dahir al-Umar conquered Akko (Israel) and the surrounding area that Haifa transformed into the city it is today. Under al-Umar's rule, he rebuilt Haifa as a fortress near Mount Caramel with a clear view of the sea from which they could spot potential armies. Around the mid-1800s, the Ottoman general Ibrahim Pasha conquered Haifa once again and, during his reign, put into place laws of tolerance which gave rights to all non-Muslim citizens in the city. These policies began an influx of immigration into the city of Jewish, Christian and Muslim Arabs. As a result, in 1868 German Templars, a Christian religious sect, started to immigrate to Haifa building what is now known as the German colony. In the beginning of the 20th century, Eastern European Jews started immigrating to Haifa and developed the Herzliya neighborhood near Mount Carmel. Towards the end of the Ottoman's rule of the area, the government built what is known as the Hijaz railway, which connected Haifa, Damascus (Syria) and the holy city of Medina (Saudi Arabia). The railway was originally designed as a quick method of transportation for Muslim pilgrims, but it was also used to transport goods. The creators of the railway chose Haifa to be the main hub because of its sea ports which allowed larger boats to dock and transport goods to the region. In 1912 the first Jewish institute, Technikum, now Technion: Israel Institute of Technology, opened its doors to students looking for an education in engineering and architecture. After Word War I and the area's capture by the British, Haifa was no longer under Ottoman rule and instead fell under Britain's Mandatory Palestine. At this time, Haifa became the British's northern headquarters for Mandatory Palestine, thus beginning a boom of industrialization and rapid growth of the city. The government officially opened Haifa port in 1933, a Jewish trading center in 1934 and an airport in 1942. With the opening of the port, an area which the British drained and expanded, oil refineries and factory plants starting popping up on the coast, boosting Haifa's economy. With the rise of the Nazis to power, many European Jews fled their countries and "illegally" immigrated to Mandatory Palestine. Through the early 1930s until the end of World War II, Haifa's port saw around a million Jewish immigrants land on its shores. This influx of refugees boosted Haifa's economy and workforce, but also forced expedited construction to accommodate its rapidly growing population. This led to integrated neighborhoods, including Ard al-Yahud and Harat al-Yahud, where Jews and Arabs lived side by side. Although the many religious and ethnic groups of the city tended to live peacefully together, the events of the 1929 Palestine riots, the 1936-1939 Arab revolt, the establishment of the State of Israel (1948), along with the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, led to the dissolution of ties between the Jewish and Arab citizens of Haifa. By 1950, only a few thousand Arabs remained. In this new era, the neighborhood of Hadar HaCarmel became almost exclusively Jewish, while Arab residents moved to the neighborhoods of Wadi Nisnas and Wadi Salib. After the establishment of the state of Israel, many of the surrounding countries ceased the exchange of goods to and from Israel, leading to closed borders, abandoned train lines, and lost revenue. This eventually led to the decline of industry in the Haifa port area. Although outside commerce greatly decreased after 1948, Haifa's mayor Abba Hushi boosted Haifa's cultural atmosphere in the 1950s and 60s by building community centers, and establishing the city's underground train system, the Carmlit, connecting the various neighborhoods of the city. Nir and Inna Feldmann, the collectors of this material, pulled together hundreds of documents and individual archives concerning the city of Haifa to create the Nir and Inna Feldman collection of Haifa materials.

Summary:

This collection of Haifa material consists of 11 boxes containing over 6,000 items pertaining to Haifa's culture, infrastructure and Israeli immigration and documenting the Israeli city of Haifa. It dates mainly from time of the British mandate in Palestine through the early State of Israel and includes photographs (early aerial photographs, negatives, photo albums, pocket albums, and photo-illustrated books), booklets, pamphlets, brochures, leaflets, exhibition catalogues, tour books, maps, diagrams, architectural plans, housing plans, color lithographs, historical documents, engravings, a watercolor painting of Haifa and its port, a stencil booklet, two autograph poems by the Israel prize-winning poet Shin Shalom, correspondence, four 16 mm films, and ephemera, such as event and anniversary programs, posters (including posters of a 1925 labor strike, which may have been the first in the Yishuv and thus in Israeli history), postcards, telephone directories dating from the 1930s and 1940s with advertisements, textiles, metal badges of youth movements in Haifa.

Local Notes:

Acquired for the Penn Libraries with assistance from the Barney and Eleanor Frommer Memorial Fund.

OCLC:

1501130792