Przystanek Palestyna. Działalność architektów Żydów wykształconych w środowisku warszawskim
Palestine Stopover. The Activity of Jewish Architects Educated in Warsaw Milieu

Summary/Abstract: The modern buildings of Tel Aviv (and to a lesser extent also of the new quarters of Jerusalem) came under scrutiny of Israeli and German researchers. The scholars drew attention to the structure of Tel Aviv’s architectural community. In the years 1918-1948, at least 595 architects worked in Palestine, and 117 of them came from Poland. The biggest tide of arrivals from Poland came in the years 1933-1936. Sixteen of them—as well as seven architects born in other countries—were educated in Poland. Other architects who came from Poland learned their skills in Technion (more than 30), in German (14) as well as Austrian, Czechoslovak and Russian universities. The biggest group of architects from Poland were those who were born on Polish lands but emigrated to Palestine together with their parents at a young age. The second group were Jews born and raised in Polish lands, who studied and worked in Europe and only made the decision to go to Palestine when they already made a name for themselves on the market. The ties with Polish architectural milieux were stronger among those architects who upon graduation returned to their home towns and chose to emigrate to Palestine already as mature designers. Warsaw University of Technology graduates included Wadris Goldman and Reoven Mitelman, who got their degrees in the late 1920s. Another duo of architects trained in the Warsaw school were Abraham Markusfeld and L. Karnovsky, of whose first name only the initial is known. Markusfeld returned to Łódź after graduation, emigrated to Palestine in 1935 but returned to Łódź in 1937 and was murdered during World War II. Lucjan Korngold, a graduate of the Warsaw University of Technology, went from Poland to Palestine in 1993, but returned to Poland in the following year and successfully worked until the outbreak of WWII. In 1940 he went to Brazil, where he spent the rest of his life, designing buildings erected in Sao Paulo in the first place. The houses designed by Warsaw University of Technology graduates blend superbly with the modern architecture of Tel Aviv 1930s, influenced predominantly by Bauhaus graduates. The best building designed by Warsaw graduates (Korngold or the Goldman & Mitelman partnership) is Rubinsky’s house, one of the first buildings in Tel Aviv to implement Le Corbusier’s principles of spatial opening of the ground floor and basing the solid of the building on rows of slender pillars called pilotis.

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