Founding of Tel Aviv

On 11 April 1909, 66 Jewish families gathered on the sand dunes north of Jaffa and divided the plots of their new neighborhood by lottery, drawing names and plot numbers written on seashells. Their association, Ahuzat Bayit, led by Akiva Aryeh Weiss, wanted a clean, modern Hebrew garden suburb away from crowded Jaffa. In 1910 the residents renamed it Tel Aviv, the title of Nahum Sokolow's Hebrew translation of Herzl's novel Altneuland, a name taken from Ezekiel 3:15. Its first streets included Rothschild Boulevard and Herzl Street, crowned by the Herzliya Hebrew Gymnasium.

Under Meir Dizengoff, its head and later mayor for most of the years from 1911 until his death in 1936, Tel Aviv grew into the first all-Hebrew city and the center of the Yishuv's press, theater, publishing and commerce. On 14 May 1948 David Ben-Gurion declared Israel's independence in Dizengoff's former home on Rothschild Boulevard. Its thousands of Bauhaus-style buildings from the 1930s earned the "White City" UNESCO World Heritage status in 2003.