Old Gesher, Heritage site in Northern District, Israel

Old Gesher is a heritage site in the Jordan Valley in northern Israel, near the border with Jordan, featuring three bridges from different periods, an ancient caravanserai, and a British-era police building. The site sits directly on the Jordan River and shows how this crossing point was used across centuries.

The lands around the Jordan crossing were bought by the Jewish Colonization Association from the Sursock family in the early 20th century, but Turkish authorities expropriated parts for railways and stations until the British Mandate annulled the seizures. In 1920 a group of pioneers called Bashkirim settled in a ruined Mamluk khan by the bridges and held out four years; a Jerusalem group followed in 1923 and left in 1934. In 1939 a nucleus of HaNoar HaOved and a Youth Aliyah group from Germany founded Kibbutz Gesher here. In the 1948 war the members, reinforced, halted Jordanian Legion and Iraqi expeditionary attacks, though heavy shelling destroyed most buildings above ground; the kibbutz then moved to higher ground near Giv'at Gamal.

The name Gesher, Hebrew for 'bridge', comes from the three old Jordan crossings beside the site: Jisr al-Majami, the Ottoman Jezreel Valley railway bridge of 1904 and the British Mandate road bridge of 1930. The restored bakery now runs bread-baking workshops, and the old dining hall, the only building to survive the shelling, is open to visitors.

The site is accessible from Route 90 between Tiberias and Beit Shean, and parking is available on the grounds. Guided tours in several languages are on offer and help make sense of the buildings and their stories.

Near the site once stood the Naharayim power station, one of the earliest electricity plants in the region, which in the 1930s supplied power across borders to both Mandatory Palestine and Transjordan. It was a privately run project that connected two territories at a time when such cooperation was far from common.