The Water Tower

The story

The water tower stands in the Old City of Beersheba, at 54 Rambam Street, about 250 meters southeast of the Turkish railway station. It was built in 1915, in parallel with the building of the station, and was designed by Heinrich August Meissner, a German engineer who specialized in the building of railways. The building is made of stone, elliptical in its form and of two floors: on the first floor were the pumps, and on the second stood the water tanks that projected above the roof. The water was carried to it from a well in the city. The tower was put up at the point where a side track branched off from the Turkish line to the south toward a depot and army stores, and this location made it possible to fill with water the steam locomotives that traveled north toward the center of the country and south toward Sinai. According to the source the tower was bombed several times from the air in the First World War and was not damaged, and it went on serving its purpose also after the British entered the city in 1917. When the station closed in 1927 it served the nearby veterinary station and further consumers, and in the first years of Israeli Beersheba it supplied water to the whole city. With the building of the water pool in Neighborhood Alef in 1950 the old system was abandoned and the tower went out of use; the water tanks that defined its form are no longer there. Today it stands in the heart of a residential neighborhood and beside it a playground.

• Ottoman
• Railway
• Water and wells
• Beersheba