Kiryat Yam, ISRAEL

In 1928, 9,000 acres (about 37,000 dunams) were purchased in the Haifa Bay area by the East Palestine Coperation and the Jewish National Fund. In most of the area, swamps were infected with malaria, and the two companies began drying, planning and development. The area was designed according to the "Modern Town Planning" method, by architect Alexander Klein, and was divided into residential, industrial and agricultural areas. In 1939, the construction company Gav Yam purchased part of the area and began construction of the first neighborhood. In the first stage, 60 housing units were built, 40 of which were made available to the British army, and the rest were offered for sale. Some of the settlers purchased their apartments in "key apartments" and therefore could not expand them and raised their children in the small two-room apartments. The first neighborhood, Kiryat Yam A, is in the south of the Kirya, north of western Kiryat Haim. The first buildings are located on streets named after them in the 2000s: the founders (formerly Arpelsa), the Notaries, Herzl, Ahad Ha'am, Berdichevsky, Tchernichovsky, Bialik, West of which there were sand dunes that disappeared as construction progressed westward, until the 1960s the houses on the eastern side of Peretz Street were the last street, west of them was a lonely house surrounded by sand dunes and later the Miami hotel and Galia beach. For a few years, the single house and the geriatric center (instead of the hotel) were swallowed up between apartment buildings. Until the end of the 1950s, it was not clear what the name of the new settlement was: Kiryat Yam or Gav Yam. The source of the mistake was the signs of the "Gav Yam" construction company, which were sprayed on the construction sites there. Therefore, residents of the Kirya, as well as the people of nearby cities, called the Kirya "Gav Yam". However, the map of the planned settlement from 1939 is already known as "Kiryat Yam". In order to correct the mistake, the local council published a notice in "Pages for the Residents of Kiryat Yam", No. 4, page 4, of July 1954: "Dear resident, Our name is Kiryat Yam and not Gav Yam. ! "[Requires source]. The location of the settlement was an important strategic point for the British, mainly in order to protect the Haifa port and the refineries during the Second World War. Thus, observation towers and a battery of two six-inch cannons were placed on the shore. Before the establishment of the settlement, a school for the artillery of the British army was established in its territory. In July 1940, Italian Fascist planes bombed Haifa and the refinery area. According to Sabra, one of the bombs landed in the sands of Kiryat Yam and created a large depression in which residents with British soldiers built a temporary tennis court in the 1940s. In 1956 the first tennis court was built in the Kirya, on which the Menachem Center was built in 1976, at the corner of Jerusalem Boulevard and Jabotinsky Street. Seventy Jewish guards under the command of Sergeant Yaakov Nimri maintained the British base in Kiryat Yam and the British army camps in Kiryat Motzkin. The guards' homes were located in Kiryat Yam A, which is being built, in the residential units assigned to the British army, and for this reason the guards were integrated among the first settlers and together they worked for the Kirya. Two of Kiryat Yam's sites fell during the War of Independence: Shaul and Sarzog fell in the slaughter at the refineries and Meshulam Shor fell in battle in Ramot