Caring for parents: modern dwellings for elderly German-Jewish immigrants in Mandatory Palestine

Abstract

During the 1930s and 1940s, young German-Jewish immigrants in Mandatory Palestine joined forces to build old age homes for the middle-class immigrant elderly from Germany. Acclimatising to the new land was fraught with difficulties. In Germany, these aged individuals were respected figures until they were brutally rejected when the Nazis came to power. The young pioneers of Mandatory Palestine, who struggled to make a living in their new homeland, were worn out by the economic and mental burden of caring for their parents. 1937 marked a first attempt to build a modern old age home. But the idea came into fruition only in 1946, when the Women’s Social Service organisation opened a modern old age home in Tel Aviv. The entrepreneurs and architects involved had all emigrated from Germany. The home’s plans followed German modern architectural and social concepts adapted to the local lifestyle and climate. Presenting new historical facts, this article offers a significant understanding of modernism as a social instrument in Mandatory Palestine. It explores how new ideas transferred from one culture to another, and how these modernist ideas were integrated within the plans of old age homes in Mandatory Palestine.