Yosef Eliyahu Chelouche

Yosef Eliyahu Chelouche (Hebrew pronunciation: [ʃluʃ], Hebrew: יוסף אליהו שלוש‎‎, 1870 – 23 July 1934) was one of the founders of Tel Aviv, an entrepreneur, businessman and industrialist.

Yosef Eliyahu Chelouche was born in Jaffa. His father, Aharon Chelouche, one of the prominent figures of the local North African Jewish community, was a goldsmith, money changer and land dealer. He was educated in a Jewish Talmud Torah and in the Tifereth Israel Jewish school in Beirut. His marriage at the age of 17 had put an end to his formal education, and he turned to the field of trade. During the early 1890s he opened in Jaffa, together with his elder brother Avraham Haim Chelouche, a store for building materials under the name of Chelouche Frères. The same name was used some years later also for a factory for cement-based prefabricated building products founded by the brothers, which operated until the end of the 1920s.

His business in the field of construction and the land trades of his father made Chelouche involved in the actual process of building. He started working also as a building contractor, a framework in which he got to build different kinds of buildings in northern Jaffa and later in Tel Aviv, the most significant of them were the Feingold Houses in Yefeh Nof (Bella Vista) neighborhood, the Girls School and the Alliance School in Neve Tzedek, 32 of the first dwellings of Ahuzat Bait neighborhood (later to be Tel Aviv) and the edifice of the Herzliya Hebrew Gymnasium. During the same time he also occupied himself – single-handedly or cooperating with others - in the business of land purchase in the environs of Tel Aviv and also in other parts of the country. Besides his private business, Chelouche dedicated much of his time for public matters. Above all was his concern for the development of the two cities he had spent his life in – Jaffa and Tel Aviv – and for its inhabitants welfare. Along with his wife, Freha Simha Chelouche (née Moyal), he was among the first founders of Tel Aviv. After World War I he was a member of the town's first local council. During the 1920s he was also a member of Jaffa's city council. In his public activities he initiated and conceived many ideas for the improvement and enhancement of the city, ideas which not once were carried out by others.

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