April 11, 1909: Tel Aviv was founded

Ahuzat Bayit
the original name of Tel Aviv

Tel Aviv was founded on April 11, 1909 on the Mediterranean coast in what today is central-west Israel. On that day, several dozen families gathered on the sand dunes on the beach outside Jaffa to allocate plots of land for a new neighborhood they called Ahuzat Bayit, later known as Tel Aviv. As the families could not decide how to allocate the land, they held a lottery to ensure a fair division. Akiva Arieh Weiss, chairman of the lottery committee and one of the prominent figures in the city’s founding, gathered 66 grey seashells and 66 white seashells. Weiss wrote the names of the participants on the white shells and the plot numbers on the grey shells. He paired a white and grey shell, assigning each family a plot, and thus Tel Aviv’s founding families began building the first modern, Hebrew city.

 

 

 

Today, Tel Aviv is the second most populated city in Israel (following Jerusalem), with a population of over 400,000 within its administrative limits. It is located within Gush Dan, Israel's largest metropolitan area, containing 3,500,000 residents.

Tel Aviv was ranked one of the two most innovative cities in the world by the Wall Street Journal, and one of the top three tourist destinations by Lonely Planet.

 

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