Building a New Country

Grandkids and Family and Friends

Tel Aviv is the new City of the New Land of Israel.  It was built on sand dunes and swampland just north of Joppa.  Building a new country requires lots of preparations and hard work.  You have heard about America’s struggle to become a new country- independent of British rule in 1776.  But did you know that Israel has a similar story about struggling to become independent from British rule in 1948? Tel Aviv fits into that story because it was the first new city established by Jewish immigrants from European countries in about 1880.  These people came to establish a new Israel, after being dispersed throughout the world by the Romans and other conquerors after Jesus came as Messiah.  We were staying in the modern city of Tel Aviv for a couple days before our Bible Lands tour began.  Here is our hotel across the street from the 1-mile long beach.

We had breakfast on the patio at the front of the hotel- with lots of traffic going by- but we were looking across the street at the seashore and palm trees.  A small park dedicated to the memory of the hundreds of boats that brought immigrants to Tel Aviv and Israel during and after the first and second world wars.  Some had left Europe and Russia and other places before persecution of Jewish people became so terrible but many others arrived as refugees and survivors from work camps and worse.  They have worked very hard to build farms and settle the land and build many new towns with many tall modern buildings.

We took a taxi to the University of Tel Aviv to see a museum about the different Synagogues (meeting place) that were built by Jewish people in the many countries that they have been scattered to during the last 2,000 years.  They had films and displays about these Jewish “church” buildings” with many different styles to match the architecture and culture of the countries where they lived.  Here are some of the miniature replicas of synagogues- they had one that we have visited in Amsterdam.

We also visited the old train station near Joppa that was built in about 1900- it was the first train in the region and went to Jerusalem about 30 miles away.  Before the train you had to walk or ride a wagon or ride a camel.  The train allowed many more people and building materials and supplies to travel from the ships at the port of Joppa to Jerusalem. One of the immigrant families established a factory next to the train station to make floor tiles and other building materials for all of the new buildings in Tel Aviv and in other towns.  The Jewish immigrants who were coming back to Israel had to start from scratch- just like the settlers in America who travelled throughout the western states to establish new farms and homes and towns.