Arad

The story

Arad is a city in the Southern District, built on the Kidod ridge in the south of the Judean Desert, at a height of about six hundred meters above sea level, about forty-five kilometers east of Beersheba and about twenty-three kilometers west of the Dead Sea. Its municipal area is one hundred twenty-five thousand six hundred and ten dunams, and it was declared a city in 1995. It is the first planned city in Israel. The planning of the Arad region began in 1960 on the initiative of Lova Eliav, who headed the founding team; the architect Alexander Sher was appointed chief engineer, and Ilana Bernzon Elrod joined the team after she returned from Brazil, where she was a member of the planning team of Brasília under the direction of Lúcio Costa and Oscar Niemeyer. In 1961 Yitzhak Pundak replaced Eliav, and in 1962, after Sher and Elrod left, Yona Pitelson was appointed head of the planning team. The members of the team were later the basis for the engineering department of the local council. With the locating of the ground the planning team was moved to the site itself, to a forward camp with an administration building, a dining hall and living quarters in huts, in order to study the climate at close range. That same camp later served as the offices of the council and afterwards as the offices of the municipality. The first settlers arrived in 1962: the official date of the beginning of the settlement was set for 21 November, and the first family settled here already in October. The government planned that the residents of the place would work in gas and oil drilling, in the mineral works of the Dead Sea and of Mishor Rotem, and in health tourism based on the dry and cool air. The geological survey conducted before the founding was stopped before it was completed, and only in the 1970s did it become clear that the city sits on a deposit of phosphates. In 1967 the first elections to the council were held, after a revolt of residents who demanded elections instead of appointment; Avraham Beiga Shochat was elected head of the council and served until 1989.

• Development towns
• Architecture and planning
• Arad