"They say it was happy here before I was born" • 100 years for the Hadar neighborhood in Haifa

(live here in the neighborhoods) - The Hadar neighborhood was established about 100 years ago, in 1922, about half a year before the establishment of the state, according to the design of the architect Richard Kaufman. But it should be noted that the first houses in the neighborhood were built as early as 1907 on Herzliya Street, and in 1913 the Reali School and the old Technion were established there. In 1918 there were only 10 houses in Hadar, and two years later, in 1920, the first houses began to be built on Herzl Street.

In 1925 the Hadar neighborhood already had 2,500 residents and it was the central neighborhood in Haifa. From this it can be said that the decision to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the Hadar neighborhood these days is a somewhat arbitrary decision. At the same time, it's always good to celebrate, especially this special neighborhood, which in many ways has been the heart of Haifa for decades. To join in the festivities, we talked to some people who grew up in Hadar and lived there as children and remember how good it was to grow up in the old Haifa neighborhood.

"Social life was conducted in the street"

Yona Yahav, who was the mayor for 3 terms, grew up on Hillel Street in Hadar and throughout the years kept her youthful grace. "Hadar was the city's luxury neighborhood," says Yahav. "The middle class lived there, but it was considered a thing to live there. My parents settled at 6 Hillel Street in the 30s, later they moved to 53 Hillel Street. There were no cars then, so all social life was conducted on the streets. Our mothers didn't worry and didn't look from the balconies to see what we were doing, it really was a different time. People didn't lock the doors. Only one family in the building had a refrigerator, so we all left the food with that family. There were other relationships between the people then. At that time the mayor of the city, Abba Khushi, lived on Yerushalayim Street. Between 13pm and 16pm, inspectors stood at the entrance to the building, so that people wouldn't wake up Khushi's father from his afternoon nap. It really was a different world."

Gold tiles from the Bahá'ís

"I remember in 54, when I was a boy, they built the Baha'i Temple. My friends and I would pray inside to pick up gold tiles for them. Later we built the Baha'i Gardens, when I was already mayor. I told this to the head of the Baha'is, and at the opening of the gardens, when he was on The stage and I'm sitting in the first row, in the middle of his speech he asked for the tiles back."

"In the 50s, we had a great disaster in the country, when an epidemic of polio struck. It was a trauma that I will not forget to this day. Our friends simply disappeared from the street and when they came back from the disease, they came back deformed."

"I studied two houses from home, at Leo Buck School. My kindergarten was also on the street. I kept in touch with my teacher, mine from first grade until she passed away. She told me years later that my mother would sneak in during breaks to ask how I was doing At school. My father was a hard man during the day, he had a truck and he would leave the house in the early hours of the morning, even before we woke up and come back at night. There were whole years I didn't see him."

The potential and not the grades

The main thing of the city were the youth movements. I lived one house next to the scout hut and everyone would come to me before the operations. My mother liked it very much, because I wouldn't tell too much about what was happening with me, and she would get all the stories out of my friends."

"I went to study at the school of circles following my friend in the scouts. I met a girl in the scouts and when we became friends and she decided to study in the circles, I followed her. Later she became my daughters' teacher at the real school.

Once my father was called to school, he came with the truck, entered with it in this narrow street. He was very worried, because he was sure that he was called to tell him that I was being left out of a class. The teacher told him that they discussed the child's achievements, and decided to look at my potential And not about the grades and moving me up a grade.

One of the first things I did as mayor was to call all the school principals. I gathered them in a hall at a grammar school and asked them to look at the potential of each of the children and not just the achievements, and I promised them a budget in order to help the students."

memories for a lifetime

"My parents lived in the same apartment until I was 35 years old. It was an apartment with a key fee. They lived in the apartment until they passed away and because it was a key fee I lost it when they died. I became a poor man, and my friends had to help me in the beginning. To this day I I meet people and they tell me where they used to live in the neighborhood and where I am. It's a time that will remain in the memory for a lifetime for many people."

"As mayor, I undertook the rehabilitation of the neighborhood and placed students in it, but these days nothing continues. I believe with all my heart that the rehabilitation of the Hadar neighborhood is a supreme commandment."

Yahav currently lives in the Dania neighborhood, more than once in his speeches as mayor he mentioned the need to return the glory to the glory, and he also worked to that end.

"Hedar of the 50s was a different world"

Prof. Bracha Yaniv grew up as a child in Hadar with her parents and younger brother. Bracha's parents immigrated to Israel in 1949 and settled in the lower city. "We moved to Yala Street in the Hadar neighborhood in 1953. The school at that time was under construction. I studied from the XNUMXnd grade at the popular XNUMXst school. Only after the first third of the fourth grade did they transfer me to the XNUMXth school, which was very close, because its construction was finished. The principal of our school was Avraham Shimhoni. They established the security guards then, and it was forbidden to be late to the school. The principal of the school would come to the gate And he saw with his own eyes all the latecomers and scolded them. In the XNUMXth grade I was on the safety shifts. I stood in the rain and waited for my shift to end, so that all the elementary school students would pass. It was not an option not to do the shift. Those were other days, very far from what happens today in the schools".

"The municipal library was in the building next to the school, which later housed the rabbinate. I will never forget how, as a student, I sat in the library in elementary school and did work there. We would shop at the Talpiot market, but we didn't play there. I was in the Hashomer Hatzair youth movement in Ken Hadar. On the way to Shomer Hatzair They sold falafel. My brother was in the choir of the great synagogue on Herzl Street. At the end next to us, on Bilo Street, there was a workshop in the basement and the owner of the place used to make brooms and brushes there. It is a profession that is no longer seen today. Between Herzl and BILO streets there was a textile store, and there my mother ordered me the dowry, a cotton bedclothes with embroidery of my monogram. Today people no longer know what a monogram is, but it is a combined initials, mine and the one I married, For our wedding.

Not far from our house there was also a Domino cinema on the way down between Herzl and Halutz streets, and its exterior design was black and white. This cinema has long since closed, of course. In the section on Halutz Street, very close to us, there was a down quilt workshop, and I loved seeing the religious business owners working there, women with head coverings filling the quilts upside down."

Bracha did not stay to live in Haifa. She moved with her husband and children to Jerusalem and currently lives in Herzliya.

"We lived away from home and had many adventures"

"I arrived in Israel as a 3-year-old girl in 1948, on a Ma'afilim ship that became legal halfway to Israel. When we arrived in Haifa, we got an apartment in Wadi Salib, right behind what is today Gilida Yonk. In the second grade, my parents bought an apartment with a key fee on Yosef Street (one of the directions from St. Balfour) and I studied at Geula School. I had many, many adventures, because my grandfather was a religious man. I had several duties as a girl, such as bringing my grandfather to the synagogue and returning him from there at the end of every Yom Kippur.

I would also bring a live chicken every weekend to the butcher and he would decapitate it, so that my mother could cook it for us on Shabbat. My mother would buy a live chicken and I would take care of it every week. She would also buy live fish, but with the rolling pin she handled them herself. It doesn't seem strange to me then to take the chicken every week, and then bring it to the butcher to have it slaughtered.

Shower once a week - all in the same water

We would shower once a week, one after the other in the same water. After that they would put the laundry in this water and wash it. We walked to school. We had the first phone in the building and the neighbors would come to us to talk on our phone and pay each two and a half. I remember I would get pocket money and buy a haircut near the school."

"I went to the library in Beit Pevzner a lot. We lived in a two-room apartment, my parents were in the living room, which became their bedroom. We were in the room with our grandfather. Guests would come and stay as long as they wanted. We had agency beds to sleep on. When a guest would come and stay to sleep They would add a bed for him next to me and my brother. If it was someone we especially liked, we let him sleep in our bed. It was very difficult to study in such a crowded house, and because of this I found myself studying a lot in the library.

On Yosef Street, there was a grocery store under every second house. There was closeness between the people, everyone knew what was going on with each other. We were outside a lot, we went to Binyamin Garden a lot. There were all kinds of crazy people walking around there, but we didn't know that we should be afraid of them."

dance ballet

"I was, of course, in the Redemption Scouts, until they threw me out of there because I wore nylon stockings and preferred the salon company. My aunt lives in the US and used to send us clothes that I was very ashamed to wear. There were a lot of fights in the house about the dresses she would send in parcels and I didn't want to wear them because no one else dressed like that.

There are stairs from Tel Hai Street to Arlozorov Street. Every day I would go there to look at girls studying ballet. There was the possibility to go under the stairs and sit and watch the girls who enrolled them in the ballet dancing class. I would not miss a single day of looking at them. The teacher wanted 15 lira per month, which was a lot of money and my parents didn't have it. I really wanted to study ballet, but it was impossible. My parents decided that if I managed to get 15 lira for the first month, they would sign me up for ballet and pay all the other months. My whole family rallied to help me get that 15 quid, I collected a penny and a penny until I was able to save, and then I was signed up for the ballet I so wanted. I danced for many years with the ballet teacher Miriam Ben Artzi."

"Everything for a seamstress"

"At school we studied sewing. It was a time when the girls studied sewing and home economics and the boys carpentry or something similar. I had a friend who by no means could embroider, but she would endlessly read books that were suitable for ages a little older than ours. Our teacher was a seamstress for her A student would sew what she was supposed to sew, and the student would tell us about books she had read. We would walk up to the center of Carmel by stairs. All life was outside the house. I met my husband at the age of 14, he lived on Arlozorov Street."

"In high school I went to the Bialik Gymnasium, a school that no longer exists. Here and there I still know people who lived near us. My brother also studied at the Geulah school and later in Ironi H'ah. My parents and I moved to Hassif Street in Carmel, near the Ironi H'ah school. Every time When I go down to Hadar, I have a lot of memories from there. There is a shop there called "Hall for a seamstress", which is located on Menachem Street. The shop remains exactly as it was 60 years ago, I remember the boxes, which are still there today with buttons, they remain the same." .

"Who likes the Sabbath?"

"When I was a child, the day I liked the most was Saturday, when my parents would take me for a walk on Herzl Street. We bought shoes and clothes there. Herzl Street was the best place, on Saturday, after an event, we would go there to buy hot corn or falafel. We went to the Ora, Armon cinemas And Atzmon. There was also an amphitheatre, which had an open roof in the summer. Every Independence Day evening, the entire Herzl Street would be filled with dancing circles and after that we would walk down to the sea."

"It hurts me a lot to see that the neighborhood has lost its uniqueness. My father liked to eat at home, but we really liked when my mother would take us out to eat. There was a dairy restaurant in front of the Ora cinema. We would go there and eat dumplings. I remember when they first opened the place that sold ice cream and popsicles".

Today, the Kovacs live in the Ramat Begin neighborhood in Haifa, but once a week Chaya comes to Hadar and remembers the beautiful days of the neighborhood, where she also met her husband at the age of 14.

"We had a very beautiful childhood in the Hadar neighborhood"

Hana Morg spent the first 12 years in Haifa, in the Hadar neighborhood. "I grew up on Bar Giora Street. My parents lived there until I was 12 years old, and then we moved to Shaul Street in Neve Shanan. I studied at the Bialik School on Montefiore Street, below the Rothschild Hospital (which today is called Bnei Zion). I still remember how at the front door of our house in Bar Giora was a small door that would allow the shopkeeper to leave the milk. When my mother would forget the key to the door, she would let my little brother through it into the apartment, and he would come in and open the door for us.

Grandma's candy store

My grandmother had a candy store in the Talpiot market, and there is no Haifai who did not know my grandmother and her special sweets. The State of Israel was in its infancy, people were still looking for how to get by and my grandmother was already offering very unique sweets, which could not be obtained anywhere else. I remember how I asked my parents to join my grandmother for a day of work at the store, and they refused. One day they approached me and told me that tomorrow I would be able to work with my grandmother, Grandma Sarah. That evening my parents brought me to my grandmother's apartment and I slept with her, because grandmother would wake up at 4 in the morning, when it was still completely dark, to get to the store early. I was very excited, because I loved my grandmother very much and I was very happy about the opportunity to sleep with her and work for her in the candy store.

Life in Israel and memory of the past

At 4 am the alarm clock rang and we got up together for the work day. We walked together in the dark, until we reached the store. It was really a very special day for me. When we got to the store, I saw all the special sweets that my grandmother used to sell. I was with her for a few hours at the store and at 8 in the morning my parents arrived and took me home. They told me that I hadn't yet reached the age where they would let me work with grandma all day."

"I loved my grandma very much, and I always thought she had a candy store because she was so sweet. My grandma had a big blue mark on her leg because of what she went through in World War II, and when I asked my mom about it, she told me exactly what my grandma went through My grandmother was able to live in Israel and enjoy her day-to-day life, and at the same time she did not forget what she went through during the Holocaust."

Photo Talpiot

"Compared to today, when each of us endlessly takes photos on our cell phones, once upon a time taking a picture was a very special thing. I remember how they took me and my little brother to take pictures at 'Photo Talpiot' on Purim. It was very common to have a picture taken by a professional photographer on Purim. I have two younger brothers, my brother and I were born in an apartment in Bar Giura in Hadar, but my brother, who is more than a decade younger than me, was already born when we lived in Neve Shanan."