Stories behind the signs

PETER BAILEY says he was prompted by love for the history of Israel to compile his new book taking a closer look at the personalities and events that shaped modern Israel and who are commemorated on the signs we pass every day.

Bailey made aliya from Johannesburg, South Africa, in 2013, with his wife Jeanne, joining his children and grandchildren already living in Israel.

The book was launched in March at a wine and cheese event hosted by Telfed, the South African Zionist Federation, in Ra’anana.

Who hasn’t passed streets in towns and cities in Israel and wondered at the stories behind the names on the signposts? Peter Bailey’s book, compiled from various sources, gives a brief biography of some of the people behind the names.

Practically every place of any size in Israel has a Herzl or Ben-Gurion and the stories behind the most famous names are generally well known. However, Bailey does venture into more obscure biographies, so that I was pleased to have the odd “I didn’t know that” moment.

This book will perhaps act pique the curiosity of passersby to look deeper into the backgrounds of the personalities behind the names of the streets we traverse daily or come across as we travel. I was personally spurred to look up Selma Lagerlof, a name I pass regularly on the bus and looked for eagerly but didn’t find in the book. For those interested, she was a Swedish author and winner of the Nobel Prize for literature.

Helpfully, the names are arranged alphabetically, with the places where streets are named listed at the end of each brief biography. Inevitably a few errors have crept in for which the compiler cannot be blamed, rather his sources.

Having lived for some years in Karmiel, I was aware of the policy, initiated I believe, by Karmiel’s first mayor, Baruch Venger, not to name streets after people but only natural objects such as plants, trees and flowers, making Karmiel unique among Israeli towns. So under the name Chen, which Bailey gives as an acronym of Chayim Nahman Bialik, while I cannot say about the other cities Bailey lists, I am sure the Rehov Chen in Karmiel is not named for the poet Bialik but means grace or charm.

At the end of the book there are some short explanations of street names commemorating places, events and organizations which should encourage people to delve further onto the history of the state.

However, there definitely is a Hapalmach Street in Jerusalem that has inexplicably been left off the list of places claiming this proud name, which commemorates not only the brave soldiers of the elite military wing of the Hagana, later the IDF, but also an Aliyah Bet immigrant ship seized by the British.

Readers may recall that the late Jerusalem Post writer, Helga Dudman, wrote a popular book titled “Street People” (1982), which was a compilation of a series of articles she had done on the stories of the prominent personalities after whom some of Israel’s roads were named.

Bailey’s book would have benefited from the steady hand and eye of an experienced editor and proofreader, but on the whole is a useful guide to the most common street names. And, hopefully, it will lead the reader into doing his or her own research, using the very useful list of source material at the end of the book, and also encourage us to make more in-depth investigations into the lives and times of people and events whose names are as familiar to us as often as our own addresses, but of whom we have only hazy knowledge.

The history behind the names of Israeli streets.