[1] Mikveh Israel was founded in the Mutasarrifate of Jerusalem, Ottoman Empire in April 1870 by Charles Netter, an emissary of the French organization Alliance Israélite Universelle, aiming to be an educational institution where young Jews could learn agriculture and leave to establish villages and settlements all over the country and to make the desert blossom.

Netter, the first headmaster, introduced new methods of agricultural training, with Baron Edmond James de Rothschild contributing to the upkeep of the school.

There were only about 20,000[citation needed] Jews in the country at that time, mostly established in the traditional cities of Judaism: Jerusalem, Tiberias, Safed and Hebron.

Beginning in the early 1880's the school was used to train the first group of farm workers in order to ready an eventual self sustaining village in the area.

The project was mostly funded by the French Baron de Rothschild who would only purchase the land in loan, after the farmers had proven that they were properly trained.

The men were each established farm workers who were from the Russian village of Pavaluka, and on November 7, 1883 the ten chosen farmers had moved to Palestine and plowed the first rows of earth, at what was known as Rishon le-Zion, or first to Zion, in English.

Part of the only green space in Tel Aviv District, it has been used as an organizing point for the convoys and up to the Gulf War.

[citation needed] It is the Collège-Lycée franco-israélien Raymond Leven (Hebrew: בה"ס ישראלי-צרפתי ע"ש רמונד לאוון.