Let me tell you about Old Katamon, a neighborhood that embodies perhaps more intensely than any other in Jerusalem the layered complexity of history, displacement, and transformation that defines this contested city. Old Katamon, or Katamon Tet Vav as it’s sometimes called in Hebrew, sits just south of the main Katamon area, extending toward the neighborhoods of Talpiot and Arnona, and walking through its streets is like reading the palimpsest of Jerusalem’s twentieth-century history written in stone and absence, in architectural grandeur and human loss, in what remains and what has been erased.

North Tel Aviv represents a different proposition entirely from the more concentrated Anglo enclave of the Old North, spreading across a broader swath of the city’s northern reaches and encompassing multiple neighborhoods with varying characters, price points, and demographics. When Israelis or real estate agents talk about North Tel Aviv, they’re generally referring to everything from the Yarkon River northward to the Tel Aviv-Ramat Aviv border, a zone that includes some of the city’s most desirable and expensive real estate alongside pockets that remain relatively more accessible. For English-speaking immigrants, North Tel Aviv offers a dispersed but growing community of professionals and academics who have chosen this part of the city for its quality of life, green spaces, and proximity to both the beach and major employment centers.

North Netanya doesn’t announce itself with a single dramatic skyline or a unified architectural vision. It’s not a neighborhood in the traditional sense, with clear borders and a defined identity that everyone agrees upon. Instead, North Netanya represents something more dynamic and evolving: a collection of areas in the northern part of the city that have become focal points for new development, growing communities, and particularly, increasing numbers of English-speaking immigrants seeking affordable coastal living. When real estate agents and community organizers talk about North Netanya, they’re describing a phenomenon as much as a place, a recognition that something significant is happening in these northern areas that makes them worth paying attention to if you’re considering making Netanya your home.

In the early 2000s, when real estate developers committed to building a line of elegant townhouses along the north side of a not-yet-paved road across a steep hill in Beit Shemesh, they were creating something that would become far more than just another housing development. They named the road Rehov Hasitvanit, after a local wildflower called the sitvanit or autumn crocus, and they called the neighborhood Nofei Hashemesh, meaning “Sunscape” or “Landscape of the Sun,” echoing the name of the city itself, Beit Shemesh, “House of the Sun.” What they couldn’t have predicted was that this neighborhood would pioneer a revolutionary model for building Anglo communities in Israel, one centered not around shared ethnicity or economic class but around inspired rabbinic leadership and the American synagogue model transplanted to Israeli soil.

In 1996, when construction workers were just beginning to lay the foundations for what would become one of Beit Shemesh’s most successful Anglo neighborhoods, few could have imagined that this small community of semi-attached cottages would serve as a model for Modern Orthodox aliyah that would influence community building across Israel for decades to come. Nofei Aviv, whose name means “Spring Landscape” in Hebrew, was established in that year as part of the wave of Anglo development in Beit Shemesh that had begun with Sheinfeld in 1991 and would continue with Migdal Hamayim, Nofei Hashemesh, and eventually Ramat Beit Shemesh itself. What made Nofei Aviv distinct from the beginning was its focus on creating not just housing but a genuine kehilla, a community built around a central synagogue and shared values, where families making aliyah from English-speaking countries could maintain their religious and cultural identity while integrating into Israeli life.