The Ravnitsky House

Background

The Ravnitsky house was designed by the famous architect Joseph Berlin, and its construction was completed in 1929. Berlin designed the building at 80 Ahad Ha'am St. in Tel Aviv for his friend, the writer, editor and publisher, Yehoshua Hanna Ravnitsky, and it is owned by the Ravnitsky family to this day. Yehoshua Hanna, one of the first publishers who published works in Hebrew, is mostly known for being the first to publish Bialik's poem "El Hatzipor" (To the Bird), and the two enjoyed many years of fruitful cooperation in the fields of writing, editing and publishing since. Their best known enterprise is the publishing of Sefer Ha'Agada (The Book of Legends).

The family members occupied the house until the year 2000, while today one of the floors is used as an office for Ravnitsky's great-granddaughter, one of the two owners of the property, and the two other floors are leased to unprotected tenants. During Ravnitsky's life, the basement floor had been leased to well known figures from the literary scene such as the writer Bar Joseph, holocaust writer K. Tzetnik, the poet Maxim Ghilan and others. The house features a separate entrance into each floor. The top, residential, floor housed Naomi Ravnitsky and her husband Yitzhak Schapiro (the sellers' parents). The floor also contains the study where Ravnitsky and Bialik worked together on their literary projects, and in one of the only known recordings of Bialik on film, Ravnitsky and Bialik are both seen exiting the Ravnitsky building at 80 Ahad Ha'am St., Tel Aviv.

Architecturally, the building is designed with the Art-Deco style in mind, combining elements of clean construction using silicate bricks (a well known trade mark of Berlin), and there are precious few buildings like it in Tel Aviv. The Ravnitsky house is located at a central intersection at the heart of Tel Aviv's commercial, cultural and entertainment district.