Sarona (colony)

Sarona (Hebrew: שָׁרוֹנָה) is a neighborhood of Tel Aviv, Israel[1] which started as a German Templer colony in Palestine in 1871.

In July 1941, the British Mandate authorities deported 188 residents of Sarona, who were considered ardent Nazi sympathizers.

The area is now a popular shopping district, as well as home to museums, cultural artifacts centering on its history, and IDF complexes.

Later, when Jewish wineries began to pose strong competition, the colonists of Sarona replanted their vineyards with citrus.

In November 1917, British troops occupied Sarona, turning the community house into a field hospital and commandeering other buildings for military use.

The 1931 census of Palestine lists Sarona's population as increased to 564 (272 Christians, 250 Muslims, and 41 Jews) in 104 houses.

[8] All Germans living in Mandatory Palestine were interned by the British in Sarona, Wilhelma, Bethlehem of Galilee and Waldheim.

Jewish underground organizations, concerned that the German Templers would be allowed to remain in Palestine, mounted a campaign to have them expelled.

On March 22, 1946, five members of the Palmach assassinated the mayor of Sarona, Gotthilf Wagner, on the orders of Yitzhak Sadeh.

[9] Wagner was ambushed and shot while driving with a police escort from the Wilhelma Detention Camp near the Lydda airport.

Jewish Palestinians objected to the reintegration of German Christian residents on the grounds that they actively sympathized with Nazi policies between 1933 and 1939 and openly voiced anti-Jewish sentiments.

A few months later, the Tel Aviv municipality purchased 4,236 dunams of land in Sarona from the British custodian.

[13] In 1962 the State of Israel paid 54 million Deutsche Marks in compensation to property owners whose assets were nationalized.

During the widening of Kaplan Street, Sarona's main thoroughfare, considerable effort was made to move the historic buildings intact.

In 2003, the Tel Aviv municipality began work on a historic conservation project in the Sarona compound.

In 1943, Irgun fighters planted a bomb near the building, lightly wounding six residents, one of them Gotthilf Wagner, the mayor of Sarona and a fervent Nazi activist.

A descendant of the Templers who was visiting Israel recognized the signature of the manufacturer, the Perrot Company of Calw, Germany.