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On December 11,
1917, General Edmund Allenby, the commander-in-chief of the British
forces in the Middle East, officially accepted the surrender of
Jerusalem. While the battle between the British and the Turks still
raged a few kilometers north of the city, the military governor of
Jerusalem quickly enacted the first regulations to safeguard the
historic character of Jerusalem. Six months later, the first town
plan was authorized and, with the establishment of the British
Mandate in 1920, the first master plan for Jerusalem was prepared.
The plan established Jerusalem as a modern capital, according to the
grand tradition of British town planning. The British municipal
concept was to build two parkways in Jerusalem that would provide
rapid access from one side of the city to the other, while
simultaneously creating a special, enjoyable vista for the city.
To the city’s west, the “Western Parkway” was paved along the Valley
of the Cross. Along the ridge immediately to the west of the Old
City, the British paved the “Inner Parkway.” During the Mandate
period, the “Inner Parkway” was called Julian’s Way in honor of the
fourth-century Roman emperor who had allowed Jews to return to and
settle in the city. After the creation of the State of Israel, the
street was renamed King David Street.
In 1928, the
Palestine Hotels Company purchased four acres, at the highest point
along Julian’s Way, from the Greek Orthodox Church for $150,000. The
Palestine Hotels Company planned to build the best and grandest
hotel in Jerusalem on this site.
From Cairo to
Jerusalem
Elie Nissim Mosseri
established the Palestine Hotels Company in Egypt in the 1920s. The
Mosseri family had arrived in Egypt in the beginning of the
nineteenth century at the invitation of Mohammed Ali, the Bosnian
governor of Egypt, who had turned Egypt into an independent kingdom.
Mohammed Ali and his successors encouraged businessmen, soldiers,
professionals, and scientists to settle in Egypt in order to
modernize the country. With the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869,
the stream of foreigners settling in Egypt mushroomed. They included
many Jewish families. By the end of the nineteenth century, Cairo
and Alexandria had relatively large Jewish communities.
The Mosseri family
had come to Egypt from Livorno, Italy, and its members had
established themselves as merchants, bankers, and professionals.
Agronomist Victor Mosseri discovered a treatment for a widespread
cotton disease that saved Egypt’s main cash crop. Elie Mosseri,
another member of the family, reorganized the Egyptian cement
company. Joseph Mosseri went into the movie-making business; he
established what would become the largest movie-making company in
the Arab world. But the family’s most important asset, and the
source of its wealth, was Banque Mosseri, one of the biggest
Egyptian financial institutions.
By the 1920s, when
the Palestine Hotels Company was established, the family had reached
the zenith of its prosperity. Elie Mosseri’s 11 siblings lived in
impressive mansions in Cairo’s upper-class neighborhoods of Zamalek
and Garden City, which were on the banks of the Nile. Most of the
mansions serve today as museums, libraries, and embassies.
Elie Mosseri
married three times. His wedding to Laura Felix Suares, a scion of
one of the richest Egyptian Jewish families, was the most dazzling
social event of the year. All of Egypt’s high society showed up,
from the royal family to the composer Camille Saint-Saens. The
wedding took place in the Great Synagogue of Cairo, which had been
built with the help of the Mosseri family. Egypt’s chief rabbi
officiated at the ceremony. Elie Mosseri’s first wife died before
her time. A short while later, Simonette, one of their two
daughters, also passed away.
Mosseri’s second
wife was Georgette Hirsch, the widow of Alphonse Kahn, the famous
French banker and founder of the Parisian department store, Gallery
Lafayette. Georgette died shortly after her second marriage, leaving
him with a Parisian inheritance.
Mosseri’s third
wife, Helene Polymeris, was an Egyptian society lady from a Greek
Alexandrian family. “Her beauty was as great as her fortune was
small,” the wags of the time declared. Helene Mosseri was the
closest friend of young King Farouk, the last king of Egypt, and his
confidant. The king called her “the beautiful Helene” in his
memoirs. After Nasser deposed Farouk in 1952, Helene committed
suicide. Elie Mosseri had died 12 years earlier on June 10, 1940.
The Mosseri family,
especially Elie Mosseri, was very active in the hotel business. The
Egyptian Hotels Company, which was owned by the family bank, managed
the most luxurious hotels in Egypt, including the Shepheard in
Cairo, the Mena House at the foot of the Pyramids, the Grand Hotel
in Helwan, and the Continental Savoy. Another of his companies, the
Upper Egypt Hotels Company, owned and managed the Winter Palace in
Luxor and the Cataract Hotel in Aswan, the two most important
locations, together with the Mena House, on the Egyptian grand tour.
As visitors to
Mandatory Palestine began to increase, especially business people,
Zionist delegations, and British military and government personnel,
it was only natural that the Mosseri family would realize that a
grand, luxury hotel would be needed in Jerusalem. In 1921, Elie
Mosseri founded the Palestine Hotels Company. Shares in the company
were sold to Jewish families in Egypt and the United States, as well
as to Swiss financiers. The shareholders included the Rothschild
family.
Ancient Semitic
Style
The well-known
Swiss hotel architect, Emil Vogt, was chosen to design the building.
Vogt was known for his fairy-tale hotels in St. Moritz and Lucerne
and recently had renovated the famous Grand Bretagne in Athens. J.P.
Hoffschmid, the hotel’s Swiss interior designer, was told to “evoke,
by reminiscence, the ancient Semitic style and the ambience of the
glorious period of King David.”
The hotel was built
during the 1929 riots, during which the Jewish community of Hebron
was massacred and Jews in Jerusalem, Safed, and other parts of
mandatory Palestine were murdered by Arab gangs. Of the 240
construction workers, 210 were Jewish. They included 60
stonecutters, 25 masons, 60 carpenters, 25 plumbers, five
electricians, and other skilled workers, all of whom worked
side-by-side with their 30 Arab colleagues. But the struggle between
Jews and Arabs in Palestine would engulf the hotel as soon as it
opened its doors. Both Jewish and Arab national institutions sent
representatives to the hotel to investigate the number of Jews and
Arabs employed there. They not only monitored the numbers, but also
which jobs were filled by Jews and which by Arabs and who was
promoted and who was fired. The issue was reflected in the
newspapers of the day, as well as in pamphlets calling for boycotts,
struggles, and reports by each side about alleged discrimination
against its members discovered at the hotel.
The Expected
Standard
In December 1930,
the Grand Hotel of Palestine, as the King David was called in the
press, opened for a trial run with 200 rooms and 60 bathrooms. A
month later, on January 20, 1931, the hotel was officially
inaugurated. Five days after the official opening, Marcus Issa and
George Tshar, scions of prestigious Arab families in Jerusalem, put
an advertisement in the Arab newspaper Palestine calling on the
wealthy Arab families of Jerusalem not to hold parties and dinners
at the King David because they believed the hotel was a Zionist plot
to ruin the city’s Arab hotel owners.
The Jews, on the
other hand, complained that the hotel employed mainly Arabs. A few
years after the hotel opened, the Jewish Agency examined the “issue
of Jewish employment at the King David Hotel.” A Jewish Agency
official was sent to talk to the hotel’s Swiss manager, “Comrade
Ziller,” after a stormy meeting with “representatives of the Jewish
workers of the hotel.” Regarding the question of “firing of Jewish
workers from the hotel,” Ziller said he “had fired no Jewish
employees.” Comments by the union representatives made it clear that
the only employees laid off were a Greek night watchman and a Jewish
chambermaid.
Ziller didn’t
understand what the ruckus was all about. “The workers here don’t
have the professional standards needed for a first-class
European-style hotel,” he explained. “In order to keep up the
standards, the hotel management brings in a professional team of
hotel personnel from Switzerland every year.”
In 1936, the Mufti
of Jerusalem, Haj Amin el Husseini, proclaimed the beginning of the
Arab Revolt against the Jews and British with the goal of stopping
Jewish immigration to Palestine. This was the beginning of three
years of terror perpetuated by Arabs in the cities and along the
main roads of the country.
While the Arab
Revolt was raging, the Palestine Hotels Company decided to upgrade
the hotel. Professional hoteliers from Europe were brought in to
fill all the main positions in the hotel’s management. 100 Sudanese
were brought in to serve as waiters and doormen. They dressed in
wide baggy pants, embroidered shirts, small jackets, and red fez.
Around the same
time, it was decided to upgrade the hotel’s cuisine. The result was
the La Regence restaurant, which by the end of the British Mandate
had become the central meeting point of Jerusalem society, the
British administration, visiting dignitaries, and world travelers.
By the end of the 1930s, while the clouds of war were gathering over
Europe, the King David had become an important stop on the travel
routes of the British Empire.
Each April and May,
the wealthy and royal families of Egypt and the wealthy families
from the Palestine coast arrived for the summer. The families stayed
at the hotel for six months, until the beginning of October, when
Cairo’s burning heat and sultry coastal humidity abated. The men
conducted their business in Cairo during the week and returned to
the hotel by train for the weekends. After a new road across
northern Sinai was built in the late 1930s, it quickly became
fashionable to drive between Cairo and Jerusalem; the journey took
10 hours and was the fastest way to get from one city to the other.
September 1939, the
month that World War II broke out, was a busy month for the hotel.
“The weekend at the King David has been a very busy one with many
officers of the army and air force coming and going, both those
already in Jerusalem, and those from the outlying districts,”
reported the hotel’s log for the week of September 4, 1939, four
days after Germany had invaded Poland. The same week, “Capt.
Collingwood, who has been transferred to Egypt, gave a farewell
dinner at the King David. The room, lit with soft candlelight,
looked very beautiful; the dining table was charmingly arranged with
primrose-colored marigolds. The Winter Garden was furnished as a
drawing room and used for serving cocktails before dinner and coffee
after.” The Saturday dinner dance that week was “well patronized and
the dance music of the Palestine Police Band was well received and
happily encored.”
On September 24,
the King David’s daily log noted, “A new landmark was established in
Palestine and a new leaf turned in the history of the King David
when the Lydda Airport Restaurant was opened, with the hotel in
charge of the catering department.” The new restaurant quickly
turned into one of the busiest meeting places in the center of the
country. In-flight meals were not yet served on planes and so many
airlines scheduled stopovers in Lydda on flights between the Far
East and Europe so that passengers could enjoy lunch.
In October 1939,
the British Army expropriated 40 bedrooms and 17 offices on the
uppermost story of the hotel and turned them into British military
headquarters in Palestine. In November, the civilian authorities of
Palestine expropriated 45 rooms for the secretariat of the British
Mandate. The hotel was left with only 62 bedrooms and 24 halls for
its own use. The hotel was now the center of British administration
in Palestine. British troops guarded the building; machine gun
emplacements were set up at the entrance to the hotel.
World War II
brought economic prosperity to Jerusalem. Supply and production
centers for the British Army were set up in Palestine to serve the
thousands of British troops stationed in the Middle East. Many
different units arrived in Jerusalem: Free Polish and Free French
troops, Gurkhas, New Zealanders, Australians, and many more. Exiled
emperors, kings, princes, and dukes also found refuge in Jerusalem.
Many of them lived in the hotel for extended periods.
When the news of
the Nazi atrocities against the Jews in Europe reached the city, the
Jewish underground movements and the British came to a cease-fire
agreement. The British stamped out the Arab Revolt in 1939; the
Mufti and other radical Arab leaders, who had voiced support for the
Nazis, were deported. Jerusalem now managed to have a few years of
quiet. The King David finally began to prosper.
New Year’s Eve,
1940, was celebrated with the hotel’s usual pomp. “In spite of the
war-time atmosphere, a record crowd gathered at the King David,” the
hotel log reported. “The banquet hall was decorated to look its very
smartest. Music was provided by Rosler’s Band, a new band that
blended very well with the hotel’s Saturday night dinner dances. The
dance band of the Black Watch, the British Army’s elite Scottish
unit, also played. Dancing went on until just before midnight, when
the guests gathered in the main lobby of the hotel.
A hush fell over
the guests. Every heart beat with hope for the New Year. Every voice
prayed that the New Year would bring some kind of solution.
Precisely at midnight, the bay windows’ silvery satin curtains were
drawn aside to show two Black Watch Pipers standing on the balcony.
As the strokes of 12 began, lights carried by soldiers behind them
spelled out ‘Happy New Year.’ The pipers raised their pipes, and
their music started, and precisely as the New Year began, the date
‘January 1, 1940,’ was lit up, and ‘Auld Lang Syne’ was played. When
the song was over, the pipers broke out into a brilliant sword
dance, the bands picked up, and the dancing continued until the
early hours of the morning.”
In late March 1941,
the log recorded the arrival of Emir Abdullah, soon to be King
Abdullah of Jordan. At the same time, the hotel’s daily log noted
the visit of Prince Abdel Monheim, the Egyptian regent. The emir
visited various sites around the city and hosted dinners for
Palestinian notables.
In the first week
of June 1941, the hotel log recorded that a severe hamsin (heat
wave) had struck the city. On June 4, the log noted the death of
deposed Kaiser Wilhelm II. On June 8, it reported that Free French
forces, together with British, Australian, and Indian troops, had
invaded Syria. That same week Mr. Morton, the correspondent for the
Daily Telegraph, hosted Prince Peter and Princess Irene of Greece
for lunch, and Major Prince Aly Khan, the son of the Aga Khan, at
the hotel.
On June 1, 1941,
15,000 British troops were evacuated from Crete. The next day,
American forces occupied Iceland. Shavuot fell that same week and
“many visitors came to Jerusalem.” The King David was fully
occupied. A week later, the hotel log states, “Many guests arrived
from Haifa and Tel Aviv to avoid the nights of the full moon, when
there were numerous air raids.”
At the end of July,
Frya Stark, the British traveler and confidant of Lawrence of Arabia
and King Feisal, made a few visits to the hotel. Her travels through
the Arabian Desert with Abdullah and members of the Hussein family
made her a celebrity in the salons of Cairo, Delhi, and London.
Halil al-Assad and Emir Abd al-Razek of Syria were honored guests of
the hotel that week, as well as W. Averell Harriman, the personal
representative of U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt.
The end of World
War II brought a period of rejoicing to the British Empire. But
peace in Jerusalem was short-lived. In July 1946, the Jewish
underground movements resumed their battle against the British
“White Paper,” the policy restricting Jewish immigration to
Palestine. In one night, the Haganah blew up all the bridges leading
in and out of Palestine. The British retaliated with a massive
search and arrest operation – called “Operation Agatha” by the
British and “Black Sabbath” by the Yishuv – in which most of the
leaders of the Jewish community were arrested. The Irgun decided to
retaliate.
The Explosion
On July 22, 1946,
Irgun members, disguised as Arabs, placed two milk urns filled with
350 kilograms of explosives in the La Regence kitchen, under the
southern wing of the King David Hotel. After lighting time-delayed
fuses, the Irgun called the secretariat, stating that a bomb had
been planted and was set to go off in 30 minutes, and that the hotel
should be evacuated immediately. Meanwhile, the Irgun exploded two
diversionary bombs outside the hotel. Although the secretariat
received the warning, confusion reigned about whether it was
referring to the explosions outside the hotel, or if this was a
false alarm. The hotel was not evacuated. At 12:37, a huge explosion
shook Jerusalem and the whole southern wing of the hotel collapsed.
For two days,
British Army engineers struggled to rescue survivors. 91 people
died: 28 British, 41 Arabs, 17 Jews, and five guests of the hotel.
The Jewish community condemned the attack, which worsened relations
between the Haganah and the Irgun, and between the Yishuv and the
British administration.
The world was
outraged. The British turned Jerusalem into a fortified city of
barbed wire, checkpoints, and security areas. British military and
administrative officials traveled in convoys. The cease-fire in
Jerusalem was over.
A Divided City
On May 15, 1948,
the Union Jack was lowered from the roof of the King David. British
High Commissioner Sir Alan Cunningham had left Jerusalem the day
before.
As fighting between
Jews and Arabs broke out in the city, the hotel was turned into the
Red Cross headquarters. Max Hamburger, the hotel’s manager,
succeeded in reaching an agreement between the Israel Defense Forces
(IDF) and the Jordanian Arab Legion to declare the King David a
demilitarized zone. Neither side managed to keep the agreement.
With the hotel once
again a battle zone, the Red Cross evacuated the building and the
hotel was taken over by the United Nations. The U.N. flag was
hoisted up the hotel’s flagpole, but this did not make an impression
on the warring sides and snipers continued to fire at the hotel.
Following the U.N. evacuation of the King David, it became an
Israeli military position and a target for the Arab forces’ mortars
and cannons.
Once the fighting
ended, the hotel tried to resume operation. But the divided city was
not the world capital that it had been during the mandate period,
even if it now was the capital of the small, new Jewish state. The
wealthy residents, who had fled Jerusalem during the war, were
replaced by new immigrants, many of them penniless.
The Palestine
Hotels Company did not see a bright future for the King David. All
it hoped for was that the King David would cover its operating costs
and maybe collect the debt that the British government still owed
it.
A Dream Redeemed
Yekutiel Federmann
was born in 1914 in Kamnitz, Germany. Xiel, as he was called by all,
and his brother Samuel (Samo), two years his junior, were ardent
Zionists. Xiel was active in the Jewish youth movement Habonim. On
January 30, 1933, the Federmann family’s four bakeries and coffee
shops were among the first Jewish businesses to be attacked by local
members of the Nazi party, who were celebrating their victory in the
elections to the Reichstag. Xiel watched helplessly as his father
was dragged into the street and humiliated by SS thugs.
These events only
made Xiel increase his Zionist activities. He became one of the
central figures in the Zionist movement Hahalutz, which prepared its
members to immigrate to Palestine. In addition to his official
activities in the movement, Xiel also was active in the clandestine
anti-Nazi Zionist movement. This organization’s members focused on
preparing hiding places and escape routes into Austria and
Czechoslovakia. But on Kristallnacht, November 9, 1938, the Gestapo
surprised the organization and managed to capture them, one by one,
with the aid of detailed lists it had obtained. Xiel and another
member were the only ones who managed to escape. With the aid of
forged travel documents, he reached London.
In London, Xiel was
put in change of the local Youth Aliyah branch, replacing Teddy
Kollek. His main responsibility was getting Jewish youngsters out of
Germany to centers in London, where they were prepared to immigrate
to Palestine. He repeatedly traveled to continental Europe and made
his way through Nazi Germany, using forged documents. With the help
of the good connections that he had developed with government
officials in London, he managed to get immigration certificates to
Palestine for the youngsters that he managed to get out of Germany
In March 1940,
Yekutiel and Bella Federmann made Aliyah. Determined to fight the
Nazis, Xiel prepared to enlist in the Royal Air Force (RAF). But the
British authorities were unimpressed with the pilot’s license that
he presented and were not too keen on accepting Jewish immigrants to
Palestine into the RAF. After spending a month in the Halutzim group
that was planning to establish a kibbutz in the Carmel Mountains,
Bella and Xiel realized that communal life was not for them. They
rented a small apartment in Haifa and with two partners established
a café called the Yardenia.
The café was a
favorite haunt of British officers and NCOs. Xiel’s friendly nature
made him a favorite of the customers, including high-ranking
officers in the British Navy.
In June 1942, Field
Marshal Rommel’s armored forces in North Africa won a decisive
victory over the British forces in Libya. A week later, Tobruk fell
to the Germans and 30,000 British soldiers were captured. The
British Army retreated to El Alamien in Egypt, about 100 kilometers
west of Alexandria, and in range of air attack. The German advance
forced the British to move their main supply center from Alexandria
to Haifa; the plan to do so was a major military secret. One Friday
afternoon, Xiel found a briefcase that a British supply officer had
left at the café. The briefcase contained the detailed plans for the
secret move to Haifa.
When the terrified
officer returned to reclaim his briefcase, Xiel told him that he had
been forced to look inside the briefcase in order to ascertain its
owner. While doing that, he explained to the officer, he had
inadvertently seen the plan. Xiel offered his services to the supply
officer. The officer was ready to put Xiel to the test. “I need
20,000 pairs of shorts,” the officer told him. Xiel quickly arranged
for the Moller and Ata textile works to supply them and was soon
taking orders for more clothing items. In a short time, Xiel managed
to arrange to supply the main items the British Army needed. He
rented a number of large warehouses and supplied the British Army
with everything from shoelaces to food to camping equipment.
British Army trucks
delivered Xiel’s supplies to the army bases. This opened the way for
a lucrative commercial enterprise. Most of the supplies were
transported by truck to bases west of Alexandria. At the time,
Alexandria’s harbor was blockaded and its merchants were stuck with
goods that could not be shipped out of the city. Xiel bought the
goods at a discount and transported them to Haifa in the returning
trucks, which would have been empty otherwise.
In late 1943, Xiel
was summoned to Jerusalem to meet with a British admiral. The
meeting was at the King David Hotel. As he entered the hotel, his
breath was taken away. He was enchanted by the architecture, the
splendor of the building, and the beauty of its garden. “I would
like to own this place one day,” he thought.
Samuel (Samo)
Federmann had remained in Kamnitz with his parents in order to help
them run the family business under the Nazi regime. In 1936, his
father, David Federmann, as the head of the family, was summoned to
the local Gestapo headquarters. A Gestapo officer, who had been a
long-time customer of Federmann’s, advised him, “Sell what you can
and get out as quickly as possible.”
David Federmann
followed this advice. He moved the family to Antwerp, Belgium, where
his eldest son, Shaya, had settled. From Antwerp, the family moved
to Brussels, where they established a successful Viennese pastry
shop. In May 1940, the Germans invaded Belgium and the Federmann
family had to flee once again. At the Belgian-French border, the
family discovered that all of the roads to Paris were blocked. The
family then tried to travel to Paris via Dunkirk, arriving in that
area just as the British Army was being evacuated. Finally, the
family managed to reach Paris.
The German conquest
of Paris uprooted them again. This time they fled to Spain. In
October 1940, Samo was arrested and imprisoned in northern Spain,
along with 4,000 others. The Spaniards were locking up every refugee
of army age entering Spain. After he made the difficult adjustment
to prison camp life, Samo opened a clandestine camp bakery. In 1942,
Jewish diamond merchants from Belgium began to arrive in the camp.
Many of them turned to Samo, who they knew from his days in
Brussels, and asked him to sell the diamonds that they had brought
with them in order to make their stay at the camp a little more
bearable. In a short time, Samo became the “diamond king” of the
camp. More importantly, he now had at his disposal the means to
organize his release.
In December 1943,
Samo and three partners rented a fishing boat, loaded it with 751
Jewish refugees, and set sail for Palestine. In January 1944, the
boat arrived at Haifa. Jewish Agency representatives welcomed the
immigrants and then the British hauled them off to the detention
camp at Atlit. Xiel, the chief supplier of the British Navy, soon
managed to arrange for his younger brother to be released.
The Dan in Tel
Aviv
When World War II
ended, the business of supplying the British Army dried up. The
brothers had to find a new source of income. Setting their eyes on
the hotel business, the Federmanns rented and renovated the
venerable Kaete Dan Pension on Hayarkon Street in Tel Aviv.
On November 29,
1947, the day that the General Assembly of the United Nations passed
the Partition Plan, the legal basis for the creation of the State of
Israel, a Jewish delegation from Miami was staying at the Kaete Dan
hotel. The delegation had not been able to return to the U.S. as it
had planned because Arab attacks on the roads had made it impossible
to reach the airport. After the U.N. decision was announced, the
delegation members – Max Horowitz, Rabbi Irving Lerman, and Mrs.
Zelog – watched the outbreak of joy and dancing in the streets of
Tel Aviv in amazement. While the events in the streets continued,
leaders of Aliyah Bet, the arm of the Haganah responsible for
clandestine immigration to Israel, paid a visit to the hotel to seek
Xiel’s help. They told him that a ship full of Jewish immigrants was
waiting just offshore of Tel Aviv, in full view of a British Army
camp. The ship’s captain refused to allow the passengers to be taken
off the ship and smuggled quietly to shore under the cover of night
until he received $5,000, which he said had been promised to him
upon arrival.
Xiel did not have
the money in the hotel and the banks were closed at that hour. He
decided to ask his guests from Miami to lend him the money until the
banks opened in the morning. The head of the delegation agreed, on
condition that the delegation be allowed to participate in bringing
the immigrants to shore.
At 9 o’clock the
next morning, Xiel returned the loan, as promised. This chance
encounter on that fateful night planted a seed that blossomed a year
later when Xiel was sent to Belgium in order to procure arms for the
IDF. As he stepped out of the elevator in the Belgian hotel, he ran
into Horowitz and two of his business partners. Xiel presented his
views on the development of tourism in Israel to them. He explained
that Israel needs hotels of a standard that can accommodate visitors
from abroad. The Miami businessmen decided to join him as investors
in a venture to create a luxury hotel in Tel Aviv.
The path to the
establishment of the hotel was still long. Xiel set out to persuade
government leaders and officials to allow him to import the
materials needed to construct the hotel without charging him the
huge tariffs imposed on imports in the first years of the state’s
existence. Finance Ministry officials were unimpressed with Xiel’s
vision. They did not see Israel as a place for tourists. Instead,
they only saw a young country with hundreds of thousands of new
immigrants living in tents and temporary housing, plus an acute
shortage in basic food products. In their eyes, this was not the
time for luxury hotels, but for basics.
However, following
an investment of four million dollars in new housing by the Miami
businessmen, the Israeli government officials were ready to allow
the construction of a 120-room luxury hotel.
The new hotel was
inaugurated in November 1953. Government ministers and officials,
who previously had mostly voiced their objection to the hotel,
fought for an invitation to the opening of the “first Hebrew luxury
hotel after 2,000 years of exile.”
Read full
article in: ERETZ Magazine, Feb. 2007 (Issue 107) |
