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Tel Aviv : Frivolity and Sharing the Burden | Shlomo Shva On the fifth day of Hol ha-Moed ( the Intermediate Days of ) Passover , April 11 , 1909 , the representatives of sixty-six families from Jaffa and the adjoining Jewish neighborhoods assembled for a lottery , to distribute the plots on which they would build their homes , in a new neighborhood to be established . The photographer who was present captured the scene with his camera : a group of men and women , crowded together in the middle of the sand dunes . A single person stands facing them , casting a long shadow . Legend has it that this was the crazy man of Jaffa who , so it is said , shouted : “ Crazy people ! You’re building on sand !” The engineer , Meir Dizengoff , won the hill upon which the residents of the future neighborhood stood , and it was there that he built his home . Two years later , Dizengoff would be elected head of the neighborhood council . Later , when the neighborhood became a city , Dizengoff was elected mayor , a post he filled for some twenty-five years . During his lifetime , he donated his house for the establishment of an art museum . Thirty-nine years and fifteen days after that lottery , on Friday , 5 th of Iyyar 5708 , May 14 , 1948 , in that museum , David Ben-Gurion proclaimed the establishment of the State of Israel . Tel Aviv , the largest city in the country , then had a population of about 150 , 000 , and was home to the institutions of Jewish rule and the headquarters for the fighting forces of the young state . The Second Aliyah , at the beginning of the twentieth century , was considered a workers ’ immigration . Many of those who came were young , unmarried people who founded the public enterprises that would later function as the infrastructure of the State of Israel . Several of these immigrants would also be the country’s future leaders . They also , however , included “ civilians ” - middle-aged , to-do professionals with families - who desired to participate in building the land in their own way . They founded the Herzliya Hebrew Gymnasium , the first high school in which all the classes were conducted in Hebrew ; managed the Anglo-Palestine Bank ; and they founded the Technion ( institute of technology ) and a neighborhood in Haifa . These members of the middle classes could not adjust to agricultural labor , in which most of the immigrants from the First Aliyah , and the majority from the Second Aliyah , were employed . The revolution of the Young Turks in the Ottoman Empire Remembrance Alliance , that was founded upon the initiative of the Swedish government in 1998 , with Prof . Yehuda Bauer and Prof . Dina Porat serving as its advisors . In the assessment of various researchers , Holocaust denial has suffered several blows recently , such as the Irving trial , the activity of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance , and the Pope’s visit to Yad Vashem . In contrast , the issue of the return of Jewish property has somewhat strengthened negative tendencies among populist groups .
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