Beit Romano
Building in Hebron bought by Chabad in 1909
Beit Romano (Hebrew: בית רומנו) is a building in the old city of Hebron, in the occupied West Bank. It was bought by the Chabad-Lubavitch movement in 1909, housed the Chabad yeshiva Torat Emet from 1912, and since 1980 has been home to the settler yeshiva Yeshivat Shavei Hevron.[1]
Ottoman and British periods
The Jewish Community of Hebron says the house was built in 1879 by the Turkish merchant Haim Yisrael Romano and was later the home of Rabbi Haim Hezekiah Medini. After Medini's death in 1904 it was bought by the fifth Lubavitcher Rebbe, Shalom Dovber Schneersohn, for 22,000 silver roubles, 10,000 of them paid down.[2] Lubavitch.com dates the purchase to January 1909, and says an adjacent lot was added for 3,100 silver roubles at the end of 1909. Because foreign citizens could not own property under Ottoman law, it says, the ownership was recognised only in 1913, in the names of Shalom Dovber and his son Yosef Yitzchak Schneersohn.[1]
The yeshiva Torat Emet opened in the building in 1912, according to Lubavitch.com and the historian Hillel Cohen.[1][3] In 1914 the Ottoman authorities, then at war with Russia, seized the building, expelled the Russian-born students and teachers and made it a police station and courthouse; after the First World War the British used it as a government headquarters and police station. After the 1929 Hebron massacre the British moved the Chabad community, with the rest of Hebron's Jews, to Jerusalem.[1]
Jordanian period and after 1967
Under Jordanian rule from 1948 the building housed an Arab girls' school, and a bus station was built on the land.[1] The Jewish Community of Hebron likewise says it was a school with a bus depot in the courtyard.[2] Lubavitch.com says that in 1980, after an attack nearby in which a yeshiva student was killed, the Israeli government "returned the building and its surrounding land to Jewish hands"; Yeshivat Shavei Hevron moved in, an Israeli army base was built on the land, and during renovations in the late 1990s two more floors were added, giving five storeys.[1]
B'Tselem says the army base, known as Plugat Hamitkanim, stands on land that is now planned for a new settler neighbourhood, "known as the Hezekiah Quarter or the Chabad Quarter". According to B'Tselem, a planning subcommittee of the Civil Administration decided in October 2017 that Palestinians had no protected rights in the area and authorised 31 housing units, and the government decided in October 2018 to fund works on the base towards the new quarter. B'Tselem also says that Shavei Hevron has about 300 students and that a ten-storey dormitory was added in 2013, "right next to the Palestinian market in Hebron's Old City, where shop doors have been welded shut by the military".[4] Lubavitch.com says the 99,000-square-foot lot of the new neighbourhood "was part of a parcel of land purchased by Chabad in 1909".[1]
See also
Notes
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 1.6 Chabad-Lubavitch World Headquarters, Site of New Hebron Neighborhood Was Purchased by Chabad in 1909 Lubavitch.com, 17 October 2018, accessed 23 October 2026.
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 The Jewish Community of Hebron, The History of Chabad in Hebron hebron.org.il, 1 January 2019, accessed 23 October 2026.
- ↑ Hillel Cohen, Year Zero of the Arab-Israeli Conflict 1929, Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2015.
- ↑ B'Tselem, Playing the Security Card: Israeli Policy in Hebron as a Means to Effect Forcible Transfer of Local Palestinians btselem.org, September 2019, pp. 8–9, accessed 25 October 2026.