Yefet Street

Yefet Street Review

Think of Yefet as a sort of thread between eras: beneath it is the old market area, while all around you stand the Christian and Western schools and churches of the 19th and 20th centuries. Numbers 21, 23, and 25 deserve mention. The first is the Tabitha School, established by the Presbyterian Church of Scotland in 1863. Behind the school is a small cemetery where some fairly prominent figures are buried, including Dr. Thomas Hodgkin, the personal physician to Sir Moses Montefiore and the first to define Hodgkin's disease; he died in Jaffa in 1866. Number 23 was a French Catholic school (it still carries the sign "collège des frères") from 1882 but has long since been used by the French Embassy for administrative purposes. And next door, the neo-Tudor, fortresslike Urim School, with its round tower, was set up as a girls' school in 1882 by nuns of the same order that built the St. Louis French Hospital. It's now a local school. Farther down Yefet, Jaffa's working-class neighborhood begins, where you'll find a few fish restaurants and coffee shops the locals love.