Tel Aviv-The Beach

Image from the book: Jewish Palestine: A Celebration of the Yishuv

Inconceivable as it may now seem, Tel Aviv was not initially conceived as a coastal city and least of all as a seaside town. Its legendary inaugural mayor, Meir Dizengoff (1861–1936), supposedly claimed that Jews and swimming in the sea did not go together. Yet the population of Tel Aviv and its environs had different ideas and, notably on Shabbat and religious holidays, they flocked to the city’s beaches in their thousands and, by the 1930s, in their tens of thousands.

None too surprisingly, it did not take long for the authorities and the papers to be inundated with letters lamenting that far too many people were having far too much fun at the city’s beaches which would soon precipitate the end of civilization unless the authorities put an end to the many intolerable transgressions. Young people in particular strutted about in nothing but their wet bathing suits, which clung to their bodies and failed genuinely to cover up what the complainants could not get themselves to refer to explicitly and therefore described using a range of euphemisms. Ridiculous debates ensued: there were no changing facilities, yet revellers were neither allowed to change on the beach nor were they permitted to patronize the seafront cafés in their bathing suits.

Photo: L. A. Robitschek. Published and printed by TMUNA Jerusalem P. O. B. 221. Printed in Palestine.