HaPisga Garden (Abrasha Park)

The garden runs along the crown of the ridge above Jaffa Port, with Mifratz Shlomo Street on its western side and the sea walls promenade, Tayelet Homot HaYam, along its northern edge. Kedumim Square and St Peter's Church are across the road to the west, reached by the wooden Wishing Bridge, and the excavation area with the reconstructed Ramesses Gate is at the eastern end.

The planting is deliberate and is the reason the park works in August. Hebrew Wikipedia's account of Old Jaffa records that Karavan's gardens were planted with varied vegetation chosen to stand up to sea wind and salt, with fig and date trees on the summit and broad areas of grass. The trees are now mature, which makes this the only substantial shade in Old Jaffa outside a restaurant.

The one built structure that is not landscaping or sculpture is the amphitheatre, a stepped open-air seating bowl set into the garden and used for performances and film screenings. It has no published programme of its own: what runs there is booked by whoever is promoting the event, so a visitor arriving on a random Tuesday will find it empty and available to sit in.

Below the northern edge, at the foot of the slope on the sea walls promenade, stands the Sea Mosque, built in 1675 of kurkar and restored in 1997 and again in 2013. Muslim sailors prayed in it before voyages; by 1962 it was being used as a store, and it was returned to religious use after objections to converting it into a tourist attraction. It is not open to the public, and it is visible from the garden rather than part of it.

The open ground here has a specific and unpleasant origin. In June 1936, during the Arab revolt, British Mandate forces carried out what became known as Operation Anchor, blowing broad swathes through the dense lanes of Old Jaffa to open routes to the port. Hebrew Wikipedia's article on Old Jaffa puts the loss at 237 buildings; its article on HaShetach HaGadol says roughly two hundred houses were served with evacuation notices and residents were given about a week to get out, that the demolition took some two weeks, and that people sheltered in schools and on the beach. The Tel Aviv-Yafo municipality, on its own walking route, gives more than two hundred houses.

What was left acquired the name HaShetach HaGadol, the Great Open Space, because that is what it had become. After 1948 most of the remaining Arab population had gone, the surviving buildings decayed, and the area developed a reputation as a centre of crime and prostitution. From 1950 the authorities began clearing the remaining residents systematically. In 1953 the deputy mayor Moshe Aikhilov took charge of restoration work, and the archaeologist Jacob Kaplan began digging.

The garden is the end of that process rather than an ornament added to it. A 1956 plan designated HaPisga as a public garden. In 1961 the government and the Tel Aviv-Yafo municipality founded the Old Jaffa Development Company, which took on the rehabilitation of the whole area and, on its own account, established both HaPisga Garden and the Midron Garden on the slope. The municipal tourism service puts the design of Pisgah Park in the 1960s, as part of the overall plan to renovate Jaffa's old city. Ownership of the company passed wholly to the municipality in 2015.

None of this is marked on the ground. There is no plaque in the garden explaining that the lawn occupies the footprint of houses, and a visitor who does not go looking will read the space as ordinary parkland with a good view. It is worth knowing before deciding how long to stand at the parapet.

• June 1936: Operation Anchor demolishes the quarter; 237 buildings per Hebrew Wikipedia, more than 200 houses per the municipality
• From 1950: the remaining residents are cleared systematically
• 1953: Moshe Aikhilov oversees restoration; Jacob Kaplan begins excavating
• 1956: a plan designates the cleared summit as HaPisga Garden
• 1961: the Old Jaffa Development Company is founded by the government and the municipality
• 2015: full ownership of the company passes to the Tel Aviv-Yafo municipality

The best known object in the park is a freestanding stone gateway on the observation plaza at the summit: two uprights of four metres each carrying a lintel. It is called Sha'ar HaEmuna, the Gate of Faith, and it is by the sculptor Daniel Kafri, born in Czechoslovakia in 1945, brought to Israel in 1949 and trained at Bezalel in Jerusalem. He took the Jerusalem Prize for sculpture in 1976, made more than seven hundred works, and died on 20 March 2024.

Each of the three faces carries a biblical episode. The right-hand pillar has the binding of Isaac, with Abraham kneeling over the ram and lifting Isaac, and the promise of descendants as numerous as the stars of heaven. The left-hand pillar has Jacob's dream, the ladder with angels going up and down it, and the promise that the land on which he lies will be given to him. The lintel across the top has the fall of Jericho: on one side Israelites blowing shofars at the walls, on the other the Ark of the Covenant being carried.

The date is not settled, and it is worth saying so. Hebrew Wikipedia's article on the sculpture states that it was dedicated in 1977 and is made of Galilee stone; Zman Yisrael, the Hebrew edition of The Times of Israel, gives 1977 as well, in a 2020 piece by Aviva and Shmuel Bar-Am on sculptures drawn from biblical stories. A Wikimedia Commons file description, by contrast, dates the work to 1975 and calls the material limestone. Two sources agree on 1977 and one does not, which is where the matter currently rests.

Two things about the commission are usually left out. The first is why it is a gate: Jaffa was traditionally regarded as the gateway to the Land of Israel, so the form is a pun on the place rather than a generic monument. The second is that this was Kafri's first work after the 1973 Yom Kippur War and after his return to religious observance, which is the more interesting fact and the one that explains the subject matter.

There is a coincidence here that is genuinely odd and is documented rather than invented. Excavations a short distance south of the sculpture uncovered the remains of a real city gate of the thirteenth century BCE whose form closely resembled the sculpted one. Kafri built a symbolic gate on the hilltop; the archaeologists then dug up an actual one beside it.

Along the eastern side of the garden the ground is cut away into an open archaeological area, and this is where the confusion on walking tours starts. The municipality's route describes stones from a Canaanite wall of the fifteenth century BCE and an Egyptian gateway of roughly 3,300 years ago, known as the Ramesses Gate, whose reconstructed jambs carry three of the pharaoh Ramesses II's names with titles such as son of the god Horus. The word doing the work in that sentence is reconstructed: the standing gateway a visitor photographs is a rebuild, and the ancient material is the lower courses and the brickwork around it.

The archaeology itself is first rate and is published. Jacob Kaplan dug the gate area for the Jaffa Museum of Antiquities between 1955 and 1962. Half a century later the Jaffa Cultural Heritage Project reopened the fortress area, and the results appeared in the American Journal of Archaeology in 2017, in a field report by Aaron Burke, Martin Peilstöcker and thirteen colleagues covering the seasons from 2011 to 2014.

Their conclusions are the ones to carry up the hill. The Egyptian fortress at Jaffa operated from roughly 1460 to 1125 BCE. It is, on their account, the only Egyptian fortress excavated in Canaan. Two destructions in the second half of the twelfth century BCE were dated by radiocarbon, and the authors propose about 1125 BCE as a terminus post quem for the end of Egyptian rule in Canaan, reading the destructions as local Canaanite resistance mounted from centres on the coastal plain rather than as a single imperial collapse.

What survives to look at is modest against that: a few courses of stone, some mudbrick, the rebuilt jambs and a caption. The trench is open ground, fenced at its edges and readable from the path, with no attendant and no interpretation desk. Anyone who wants the fortress explained properly should read the 2017 report rather than expect the site to do it.

• 1955-1962: Jacob Kaplan excavates the gate area for the Jaffa Museum of Antiquities
• 2011-2014: the Jaffa Cultural Heritage Project reopens the fortress
• 2017: the field report is published in the American Journal of Archaeology, vol. 121 no. 1, pp. 85-133
• Egyptian fortress at Jaffa: roughly 1460 to 1125 BCE
• The upstanding gateway is a reconstruction, not an ancient survival

The reason most visitors come up is the view, and the municipality sets it out by compass point at station eight of its route: the Mediterranean to the west, St Peter's Church with its red brick and its tower nearby, the city of Tel Aviv to the north, and Jaffa to the east, where the orange groves that once surrounded the town stood. The northward view along the beach to the Tel Aviv towers is the one that sells the postcards, and it is best in the hour before sunset when the low sun is behind the photographer rather than in the frame.

The Wishing Bridge is the wooden footbridge from the garden across Mifratz Shlomo Street to Kedumim Square. Its rails carry plaques of the twelve signs of the zodiac, and a mosaic of the zodiac wheel is set nearby. The custom, as the municipality itself relates it, is to stand on the bridge holding your own sign and look out to sea, and the wish comes true. The bridge is short and popular, and a queue forms at it in the evening.

The signs are not folklore. When the emptied quarter was rebuilt for artists and craftspeople in the 1960s the lanes below the square were repaved and named after the signs of the zodiac, and the plaques on the bridge take their cue from those street names, which is what makes them a symbol of the renewed old town rather than an astrological ornament. Mazal Dagim and Mazal Aryeh are ordinary street addresses on the map.

The garden has more than one edge and they show different things. The western parapet above Kedumim Square gives the church and the old town roofs; the northern edge, along the sea walls promenade, gives the beach, the breakwater and the Tel Aviv skyline; the eastern side, above the excavation, gives the flea market quarter and the clock tower. Walking all three takes about ten minutes and most people only do one.