This is a 1935 photograph of Hillel Kempler and his fourth-grade class at the Bialik School in Tel Aviv. Two teachers are surrounded by forty-four boys. The teachers are sitting, one with his hands in his lap, the other with his arms crossed, and have serious looks on their faces. Both teachers are formally dressed and are wearing straw hats. The boys are sitting on benches wearing shorts and shirts and most are wearing caps or hats. Most of the boys have serious looks on their faces, although a few are smiling. Two boys are sitting sprawled on the ground in the front. They are sitting in a classroom, and the words Class 4 IV are written in Hebrew on the blackboard behind them. A map of Israel can be seen on the wall.
The Kempler family were originally from Ukraine. After World War I the family moved to Berlin hoping for a better life. Hillel was born in Berlin in 1925. The Kempler family had a modern Orthodox lifestyle and lived in Scheunenviertel, a Jewish neighbourhood where both religious and modern Jews lived, many of whom were of Eastern European origin. When the Nazis came to power in 1933, life changed for the Kempler family. Hillel’s father narrowly missed being arrested by the Gestapo and fled to Israel. After wandering from Germany to Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Serbia, Turkey, and Lebanon, the rest of the family were finally smuggled into Israel, and they were reunited as a family in 1933.
In his interview to Centropa, Hillel Kempler explained that when he arrived in pre-State Israel in 1933, there was a shortage of schools due to the huge increase in immigrants coming from all over the world. He describes attending school in residential buildings instead of a proper school building. The schools had no space for playgrounds, so during the break, the students would walk around the streets of the neighbourhood. For the first two years of Kempler’s schooling in Tel Aviv, he attended a secular school where instruction was given in Hebrew and there were twenty students in a class. The teachers, like their students, came from all over the world, and they studied secular studies such as Hebrew language, arithmetic, reading, writing, and biology. Kempler recalls learning Hebrew very quickly. When Kempler’s father realised that the students in the Bialik School were not studying religious topics, he moved Hillel to a religious school. Even though the new school taught religious studies, Kempler noted that it was different and more modern than his religious cheder in Germany.
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The Fifth Aliyah – The Fifth Aliyah refers to the nearly 250,000 Jews who moved to Israel between the years 1929 and 1939 as a result of the Nazi party’s rise to power in Germany in 1933. As anti-Semitic laws were passed and life for Jews in Germany became unbearable, approximately half of all German Jews left the country. Most fled to the United States, but many went to other countries including Israel. It is estimated that 60,000 German Jews came to Israel during this period, along with 30,000 more who came from German-speaking countries such as Austria and Czechoslovakia.
Tel Aviv-Jaffa – Founded in 1909 by a small group of Jews on the outskirts of old Jaffa, Tel Aviv is now Israel’s second largest city and the cultural, financial, and technological centre of the country. It is located on the coast of the Mediterranean Sea in the heart of the Gush Dan Metropolitan area. The original founders of Tel Aviv were looking for a healthier environment outside of the crowded city of Jaffa. With the help of the Jewish National Fund, they purchased 12 acres of sand dunes and called their new city Tel Aviv (spring hill). “Tel Aviv” was the name given by Nahum Sokolow to his Hebrew translation of Theodor Herzl’s classic, Altneuland. Meir Dizengoff was the first mayor of Tel Aviv and served for 25 years. In 1917, the Ottoman rulers expelled most of the Jewish community from Tel Aviv. With the end of World War I and the start of British rule the following year, the Jews were invited back to Tel Aviv. Tel Aviv is sometimes called the “White City” due to the 4000 or more buildings built in the Bauhaus style. The mostly white Bauhaus buildings were built in the 1930s by German Jewish architects who immigrated to pre-state Israel during the British Mandate after the rise of the Nazis in Germany. Tel Aviv has the largest number of Bauhaus buildings of any city in the world. On May 14, 1948, the State of Israel was declared in the art museum that was located in Dizengoff House. By 1950, the city of Tel Aviv had grown and expanded, and it was renamed Tel Aviv-Jaffa to reflect the unified city and to preserve the historical name of Jaffa. Tel Aviv is the home of the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange and the financial capital of Israel. It is also the centre of high-tech and start-up companies and a major centre of culture and entertainment, known for its active nightlife and the variety and quality of its restaurants.
