Nahalal is best known for its general layout, as designed by Richard Kauffmann: slightly oval round, similar to a spoke wheel, with its public buildings at the "hub" and individual plots of agricultural land radiating from it like spokes with symmetrically placed roads creating eight equal sectors, an inner ring of residential buildings, and an outer ring road.[2]
Archaeological findings in the area suggest human settlement there dates to the Bronze Age, and continued into the Iron Age, Persian era, Hellenistic period, Roman era, and Byzantine era. Among the artifacts found was an ancient Jewish inscription of the word "Sabbath" on a rock, from Nahalal or nearby Shimron.[3]
By the 20th century, Ma'alul's inhabitants were tenants of the Sursuq family of Beirut, absentee landlords who had acquired the land earlier. In 1921, they sold all but 2,000 dunams of Ma'alul's land to the ZionistPalestine Land Development Company.[4]Moshe Dayan mentioned Nahalal as an example of "there is not one place built in this country which did not have a former Arab population".[5]
Moshav Nahalal
Nahalal in 1932Nahalal school 1944Nahalal 1945Nahalal 1946
Some of them had been members of the first kibbutz, Degania. After working in farming communities for a decade, they dreamt of establishing an income-sharing farming community similar to a kibbutz, but they wanted to maintain the nuclear family and household structure (kibbutzim had communal dining, and children were kept in separate housing, where they also slept).[7]
The founders first arrived to the lands given to them by the Jewish National Fund on September 11, 1921. They first saw the allotted land from the hill, noticing that small rivulets transformed the plain into marshes that attracted malaria-spreading anopheles mosquitoes. Heeding the warnings of experts, such as Dr. Hillel Yaffe, the Jewish pioneers temporarily settled on a nearby hill, near the Arab village of Ma'lul. Later they came down from the hill and divided the land, initially into 80 equal parcels, 75 to the members and 5 to Nahalal agricultural school.[citation needed][dubious – discuss]
The physical layout of Nahalal, devised by architect Richard Kauffmann in 1921,[8] became the pattern for many moshavim established before 1948.[citation needed] It is based on concentric circles, with the public buildings (school, administration offices, services, and warehouses) in the centre, the homes of non-farming families (craftsmen, teachers, etc.) around the centre, then a ring street with the farmers' homesteads bordering on it on the outside,[2] and beyond those, ever-widening circles of gardens and fields.[citation needed] The equal parcelling of the land became the trademark geometric shape of Nahalal.[citation needed]
On 22 December 1932, a member of Nahalal, Yosef Ya'akobi, and his 9-year-old son David[10] were killed when a bomb was thrown into their home. Halim Basta, a Coptic policeman for the Mandatory government solved the crime the following year, identifying followers of Izz ad-Din al-Qassam as the murderers.[11] In 1937, Basta was himself murdered.
Ruth Westheimer (born Karola Siegel, 1928; known as "Dr. Ruth"), German-American sex therapist, talk show host, author, professor, Holocaust survivor, and former Haganah sniper.
Note:
Ilan Ramon (1954–2003), Israel's first astronaut, is buried in the Nahalal cemetery, though he never lived in Nahalal.
LIFE Magazin, Jul 5, 1937, "Jews made a garden" - aerial photo of Nahalal (page 55), and a girl from Girls' Agricultural Training Farm (page 54), at Google Books.
Israel
