This is a municipality notice issued by the Tel Aviv authorities in 1925 informing residents of Lord Balfour’s imminent visit. The visit was clearly a subject of great excitement, and the municipality was anxious to ensure its smooth running.
The poster requests the public to show due respect to the important visitor and to decorate their homes and maintain order during the visit. At the bottom of the notice is the schedule of Balfour’s visit through the streets and important places in Tel Aviv. According to the notice, at 4.25 Balfour was to inaugurate a street named in his honour.
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Lord Balfour's Visit to Israel - The Israeli film researcher Yaakov Gross recently located a film of Lord Balfour’s visit to Palestine, which was made by Kamil Suago for the French-Jewish banker Albert Kahan. The film allows us to view many different aspects of Balfour’s visit. It shows him visiting the Herzliya Hebrew Gymnasium in Tel Aviv, the country’s first Hebrew high school, on March 26, 1925. Thousands of people filled the streets, photographs of Balfour were hanging from the balconies and lampposts, and a gate of honour was erected on Allenby Street with the words “Baruch haba” (welcome) in gold lettering. When Balfour arrived, accompanied by the Zionist leaders Nahum Sokolow and Chaim Weizmann, Meir Dizengoff, Tel Aviv’s first mayor, proclaimed: “Fortunate are you, to be privileged to draw close to the fulfilment of the ideals.”
Tel Aviv - Tel Aviv was founded in 1909 by sixty families who moved from Jaffa to establish the first new Jewish city for hundreds of years. The city’s growth, however, was arrested by the Ottoman authorities who expelled the residents of Jaffa and Tel Aviv in 1917. Under the British Mandate the Jews were free to return to their homes in Tel Aviv and, by the time of Balfour’s visit, there were approximately 34,000 residents in the city, which had become the first city in Israel to be connected to electricity two years earlier.
