The School for Bedouin Children

The story

The School for Bedouin Children lies in the west of the Old City of Beersheba, on Hativat HaNegev Street. The Ottoman government planned it as an agricultural school for the children of the Bedouin who lived in the surroundings, with the intention of turning them by means of education from nomads into tillers of the soil in permanent settlements; until then there was no organized school in the Negev region. The plan came up in the city's first years — in 1908 the pasha spoke about it before the sheikhs — but the construction began only in 1913 and was completed in 1914. Its structure is typical of the Ottoman public buildings in the city: a symmetrical two-story building with a tiled roof and a central entrance of three arches that opens into a large hall, and it also has a rear entrance with stairs going directly to the second floor. It was built in the form of a boarding school, in order to make things easier for distant tribes, but it did not open in its original purpose: with the outbreak of the First World War it was converted into a Red Crescent hospital, which took in mainly epidemic patients from the Ottoman army. In the winter of 1916 the mortality in it was so great that soldiers did all they could not to be hospitalized in it. In the Mandate period it returned to serve as an elementary school, for about thirty years: boys on the first floor and girls on the second floor. Its pupils were mainly the sons of the families of the officialdom and of the noble families among the tribes of the area, and hence the nickname the school for the sheikhs' children; most of the Bedouin children in the Negev did not study in it. In May 1948 the Egyptian army placed its headquarters in it. With the entry of the IDF into the city in October 1948 the building was damaged, was repaired, and in June 1949 the Soldiers' House was dedicated in it, which was housed in it until 1979. Since 2013 it has been part of the Carasso Science Park.

• Ottoman
• Bedouin
• British Mandate
• Education
• Beersheba