Katamon Jerusalem Israel 9,1964 Gonen
The Katamon Jerusalem, Israel neighborhood is located in the southwest of Jerusalem and includes eight sub-neighborhood named Gonen A-V, and the next letter in the Hebrew language. It was replaced with the Pat neighborhood.
In 1952, new houses were built in the south of the Katamon neighborhood for the immigrants who came to Israel and were temporarily accommodated in tents.
The housing crisis was present even back then. So, cheap houses were built fast for the immigrants.
These were small two-family or four-family houses with gardens and adjacent land, that aimed to encourage families to engage in agriculture.
In the following years, unappealing four-story red stone buildings were rapidly built with cheap materials. This is how small 2-3 room apartments started to appear in order to accommodate the new waves of immigrants.
Those buildings were a melting pot and illustrated Israeli society as it developed.
Walking in the neighborhood, one could have spotted immigrants from Morocco and Syria, who dried kernels in the Israeli sun, pitas baked on an open fire inside the houses, lots of pickles, and bread with Halvah, grandmothers with braids and handkerchiefs who tucked their money deep inside their colorful dresses, Holocaust survivors from Romania and Poland living in small dwellings, parts of families that survived the inferno – a blend of cultures and identities melting together under the Mediterranean sun that became over the years a single community.
The population density in a neighborhood with small apartments, which were mostly inhabited by families with many children, the changes in the family hierarchy, when the head of the family had to do menial jobs, and the challenge of supporting a large family made life difficult for the inhabitants. Moreover, Hebrew was not an easy language for them. Some of the neighborhood areas became hotbeds of crime for immigrants’ children, and the feeling of deprivation and daily hardships was deeply embedded into the life of immigrant families.
Later, a large number of the apartments in the neighborhood were still owned by the housing companies of that time. They accommodated new immigrants from the Commonwealth of Nations and Ethiopia, some of whom arrived in the great immigration wave of the 1990s
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