Bet Eliyahu, Historical building in Tel Aviv-Yafo, Israel.
Bet Eliyahu is a house on Rothschild Boulevard built in the early 1920s to a design by architect Yosef Berlin in the eclectic style, with painted floor tiles, stone carpets and decorated walls. It was the home of Eliyahu Golomb, the Haganah's uncrowned commander, and now houses the Haganah Museum across three floors, including two preserved rooms from the original house.
The house was built in the early 1920s by Zeev (Volodya) Shartok, a wealthy merchant, on a plot belonging to his brother Yaakov, to a design by architect Yosef Berlin in the eclectic style. In the 1930s Zeev went bankrupt and sold it, while the Shartok and Golomb families stayed on as tenants. It served as Haganah headquarters, where the leadership met on the front balcony, and in 1954 Golda Meir helped prevent its demolition; it opened as a museum on 5 April 1961.
The house is named for Eliyahu Golomb, the Haganah's "uncrowned commander", who lived on the first floor from the late 1920s. Its front balcony, open to Rothschild Boulevard, hosted leadership meetings that ran late into the night; the British never searched there. Two preserved rooms recreate the family flat, and a memorial for Golomb was held here annually.
The museum is at 23 Rothschild Boulevard and is spread over three floors, with two reconstructed rooms of the Golomb flat on the ground floor and temporary exhibitions there as well. A 100-seat auditorium and a smaller 40-seat audio-visual room host lectures and seminars. The archive and secretariat occupy the fourth floor.
The front balcony served as the meeting place of the Haganah command, chosen because the British would not think to search for a secret headquarters on an open balcony facing the street. There the leadership decided on the Tower and Stockade settlement operation, the illegal immigration operations and the founding of the Palmach.
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