Ein Hod

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Ein Hod is a village at the south of Mount Carmel, south-east of Haifa in north-Israel.

As a result of the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, Arab Palestinian inhabitants of the village were displaced, and since 1953 it has been an Israeli artist colony.

1 Early History
2 1949 and after
3 External Links
4 Reference
5 See also

[edit] Early History

The village, earlier called Ein Hawd, was one of the socalled al-Hija villages in what is now northern Israel, named after Emir Hussam al-Din Abu al-Hija.

Abu al-Hija (="the Daring") was commander of the Kurdish force that took part in (fellow Kurd) Sultan Saladin´s conquest (1187-93) of the Crusader Kingdom. He was renowned for his bravery, and commanded the garrison of Acre at the time of the Siege of Acre (1189-1192).

Abu al-Hija apparently returned to Iraq, but several members of his family remained in the country under orders from the Saladin, (a normal method of insuring loyalty from distant commanders), and these family members settled on spacious tracts of land that they were granted in the Carmel region, in the Lower, Eastern and Western Galilee, and in the Hebron Highlands. One of these land grants became the village of Ein Hawd. Other al-Hija villages was Hadatha and Sirin in the Lower Galilee, Ruweis and Kawkab in the Western Galilee. (Benvenisti 193-195)

[edit] 1949 and after

In 1949, after it's original Inhabitants moved to a nearby wady, the place was settled by Algerian immigrants, which later constructed the settlment Tzrufa.

In 1953 it was converted to an art community at the request of Marcel Janco, a known the Dada artist and an accolade of the Israel Prize 1967. Janco, which was appointed by the Keren Kayemet to find areas for the establishment of new national parks arrived at the Arab village of Ayn Hawd, who's residents fled during the war to a nearby shelter (and renamed the place by the same name). He managed to prevent the empty village from being demolished by the security forces and convinced the minister of internal affairs to give him the place.

The houses of Ein Hod were kept and some of them date back to the middle ages.

Ein Hod is characterized by its hillside setting, surrounded by olive groves, with a view of the Mediterranean Sea and of a twelfth-century Crusader fortress.

Ein Hod is today an Artists' village where several Isaeli and international artists have homes, studios, and galleries. Communal life is managed by a General Council, and by an elected administrative committee. The village has a wide range of cultural resources. The Ein Hod Art Gallery, the Janco-Dada Museum and the Artists' House, artists' studios and galleries are supplemented by other creative cultural activities throughout the village. The Gertrude Krause House sponsors biweekly chamber music concerts and guest lectures. During the summer months performances of popular music and light entertainment take place in a faux-Roman outdoor amphitheater.

Many of the Arab villagers of Ein Hod from before the 1948 Arab-Israeli War ended up on the West Bank and the village mosque was eventually converted into a restaurant and a bar, the "Bonanza".

[edit] External Links

[edit] Reference

Benvenisti, Meron (2000): Sacred Landscape: Buried History of the Holy Land Since 1948. University of California Press. ISBN 0-520-21154-5 (p. 169, 193-99, 291, 326, 338, Fig. 17)