Welcome to the Avenue

Click the Play Button to Listen to the Text

The moshav of Kfar Yehoshua was established in 1927 by pioneers who arrived during the Third Aliyah, the third wave of immigration. Motivated by the spark of Zionist ideology, they chose a life of agricultural work in the Jezreel Valley. 

The moshav’s architecture was planned by Richard Kauffmann, who was the primary architect of the Zionist settlement movement. He followed the modern garden city movement, which introduced new concepts such as quality of life and leisure time. Garden cities included plenty of green public spaces, most of which were intended for cultural and community life, and some which were for agricultural use, such as vegetable gardens.

Kfar Yehoshua’s planning is characteristic of the European vision for a garden city in that a significant area in the center of the moshav was allocated for gardening, culture, and leisure purposes. According to the garden-city idea, there is a long, broad boulevard at the center of any perfect city, which leads to the “crown of the city” – in our case, the Beit Ha’am, where people gathered for all of their cultural and lifecycle events. Kfar Yehoshua was planned entirely on the north-to-south axis, like a Roman cardo, and the same is true of the main boulevard on which we are standing. The boulevard has two parallel lanes, with a garden between them, and it resembles boulevards found in many European cities.

During the first decades of the moshav, which were characterized by hard work and difficult economic conditions, the members of the moshav invested immense resources in building monuments bearing significant ideological and cultural value along the length of the boulevard. These structures reflect their strong pioneering spirit, optimism, and their dream of building a new local identity in the land.

Walking down the boulevard, we can see the influence of classical European culture on each monument. It is evident that despite the fact that the founders, originally from Eastern Europe, wanted to leave their history behind, their aesthetic memories of European culture were still a part of them.