Navi Square

The story

Navi Square is the metropolitan transport complex of Beersheba, joining the central bus station with the Merkaz railway station. It was inaugurated in a ceremony on 27 October 2014, with the participation of the mayor Ruvik Danilovich and hundreds of invited guests, and in 2015 a fountain was set up in it in memory of the man whose name it bears. Eliyahu Navi was the third mayor of Beersheba since the founding of the state, and served from 1963 until August 1986 — the longest term at the head of this city. In those twenty-three years the population of the city grew threefold. He was born in Basra in Iraq on 22 June 1920, immigrated to the country in his childhood in the year 1926, and grew up in Jerusalem. He was an orientalist, an expert in Arab life, and in the year 1947 he was invited to present a radio program in Arabic on the Kol HaHaganah station. Unlike most of the programs, which were broadcast in literary Arabic, he spoke in spoken Arabic, under the assumed name Daoud al-Natour — David the watchman — and talked of the affairs of the day in popular language, in parables and proverbs from Arab culture. The broadcasts continued also after the founding of the state, on Kol Israel in Arabic, until 1957, when he was appointed a judge. He was a founding member of the executive committee and of the board of trustees of Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, and chairman of the prime minister's committee for the immigration of the Jews of Ethiopia. He died on 16 November 2012, and was buried in the plot of the mayors of Beersheba in the old cemetery in the city. In January 2017 the name of the greater part of Derech Hevron, a section of Route 60 within the city, was changed to Derech Eliyahu Navi — from the Hativat HaNegev interchange until the meeting of Sderot Shazar with Derech Hevron.

• Commemoration
• Municipality
• People
• Beersheba