Lotte Cohn immi­grat­ed from Berlin to Pales­tine under the British Man­date in 1921, and became the first female archi­tect in the coun­try. In 1935 she described the phe­nom­e­non of women archi­tects in Eretz Yis­rael in an arti­cle pub­lished in the dai­ly news­pa­per Doar Hay­om enti­tled The Eretz Yis­rael Woman in Tech­ni­cal Fields:

Eretz Yis­rael is a coun­try not bound by the strong bonds of tra­di­tion. It is open to inno­va­tion and is always will­ing to fol­low a new spir­it. This phe­nom­e­non espe­cial­ly stands out in the tech­ni­cal pro­fes­sions. The Euro­pean world is slow to accept women in tech­ni­cal fields. In Eretz Yis­rael, women have already been rec­og­nized as engi­neers, archi­tects, and agri­cul­tur­al work­ers. When a woman appears on a scaf­fold­ing or in a con­struc­tion office, when she wears over­alls on a con­struc­tion site and joins men doing floor­ing or car­pen­try work, when she sits in an office at the draw­ing table, or when she fights for a build­ing per­mit at City Hall – these sit­u­a­tions are no longer con­sid­ered unusu­al, and no one belit­tles them.

I first became aware of the work of female archi­tects in Eretz Yis­rael in the ear­ly 2000s while research­ing the Lev­ant Fair, an inter­na­tion­al trade exhi­bi­tion held in Tel Aviv in 1934. The finest local mod­ern archi­tects of the time designed superb per­ma­nent build­ings for the exhi­bi­tion. Two of them were female archi­tects: Genia Aver­buch and Elsa Gidoni Man­del­stamm. Togeth­er, they designed Café Gali­na, which is con­sid­ered an out­stand­ing exam­ple of mod­ernist Euro­pean archi­tec­ture in Pre-State Israel and a mile­stone in the devel­op­ment of local architecture. 

Aver­buch is known for her design of the cen­tral square of Tel Aviv, the Zina Dizen­goff Square, but I found almost noth­ing about Gidoni Man­del­stamm. The lack of infor­ma­tion drove me to embark on a fas­ci­nat­ing decade-long jour­ney filled with sur­pris­ing dis­cov­er­ies. My search for mate­ri­als ulti­mate­ly uncov­ered many addi­tion­al female archi­tects who were among the first female archi­tec­ture stu­dents in Euro­pean uni­ver­si­ties and the first to prac­tice in Manda­to­ry Pales­tine. I col­lect­ed his­tor­i­cal doc­u­ments from forty archives, in Israel and around the world, and locat­ed the build­ings these female archi­tects designed through­out the coun­try. I also gath­ered infor­ma­tion about these women by inter­view­ing their remain­ing fam­i­ly mem­bers, friends, and employ­ees in their archi­tec­tur­al firms. The jour­ney cul­mi­nat­ed in a doc­tor­al dis­ser­ta­tion on the work of female archi­tects in Eretz Yis­rael, from which my book was born. I received the Gold­berg Award for an out­stand­ing first man­u­script by the Open Uni­ver­si­ty of Israel, and in 2020 it was pub­lished in Hebrew. The Eng­lish edi­tion –Mod­ern Archi­tec­ture and Gen­der in Pre-State Israel – is now avail­able, bring­ing the less­er-known sto­ries of female archi­tects to a new audience.

I dis­cov­ered that Lotte Cohn, Elsa Gidoni Man­del­stamm, and Genia Aver­buch designed all the insti­tu­tions of four promi­nent Zion­ist women’s orga­ni­za­tions dur­ing the 1930s and 1940s: WIZO (Women’s Inter­na­tion­al Zion­ist Orga­ni­za­tion), Moet­zet Hapoalot (The Gen­er­al Coun­cil of Women Work­ers in Eretz Yis­rael), Women’s League for Pales­tine (WLI), and Mizrachi Women’s Orga­ni­za­tion of Amer­i­ca (MWOA). These orga­ni­za­tions found­ed new social insti­tu­tions for Jew­ish women in Eretz Yis­rael. They estab­lished edu­ca­tion­al, social, and health­care insti­tu­tions to sup­port women — whether new immi­grants or long-time res­i­dents, work­ers or bour­geois home­mak­ers — in the kib­butz­im, vil­lages, and cities, cre­at­ing a sup­port­ive female com­mu­ni­ty. These orga­ni­za­tions pro­vid­ed pro­fes­sion­al train­ing, sup­port for moth­ers, and afford­able hous­ing for sin­gle women. After World War II, these orga­ni­za­tions broad­ened their goals of instill­ing mod­ernist ideas of progress into the field of edu­ca­tion for chil­dren and youth. 

In the doc­u­ments that con­tain dis­cus­sions of the build­ings’ archi­tec­ture, the lead­ers of the women’s orga­ni­za­tions were pleased to select a female archi­tect and praised the work of female archi­tects in gen­er­al. After Gidoni won an archi­tec­tur­al com­pe­ti­tion, a spokesper­son for WLI remarked: ​“We, too, were quite thrilled with the idea that the erec­tion of this Home for girls, spon­sored by a women’s orga­ni­za­tion, will be erect­ed by a woman archi­tect.” Gidoni Man­del­stamm, who was already com­mis­sioned by WIZO to design its Domes­tic Sci­ence and Agri­cul­ture School, was also pleased: ​“My next project — which already makes me hap­py — is the Women Pio­neer House in Tel Aviv. Like the WIZO build­ing, this build­ing, too, will require care­ful atten­tion. How­ev­er, such respon­si­bil­i­ty encour­ages an archi­tect — espe­cial­ly a woman architect.”

As my archival research pro­gressed, an increas­ing num­ber of build­ings designed by women archi­tects came to light in Eretz Yis­rael, reveal­ing a sub­stan­tial and pre­vi­ous­ly under­rec­og­nized body of work by prac­ti­tion­ers who led their own pri­vate offices. Pro­fes­sion­al suc­cess exact­ed a high cost; many of the women archi­tects did not have chil­dren, which affect­ed the bur­nish­ing of their lega­cies. There were usu­al­ly no descen­dants to doc­u­ment and pre­serve the archi­tects’ work, such as cat­a­loging their projects and pre­serv­ing archi­tec­tur­al plans and photographs.

My work has opened up a rich, unex­am­ined field of research regard­ing the role of female archi­tects in devel­op­ing mod­ern archi­tec­ture in Israel. This body of work has been over­looked by the his­to­ri­ogra­phies of mod­ern archi­tec­ture as well as the his­to­ri­o­graph­ic record of the Jew­ish com­mu­ni­ty (the Yishuv) and remains out­side the Israeli his­tor­i­cal dis­course. The book elab­o­rates on these orga­ni­za­tions’ activ­i­ties and their col­lab­o­ra­tions with these female architects.

By using gen­der as my main approach to the research of mod­ern archi­tec­ture dur­ing the Man­date peri­od, our under­stand­ing of its devel­op­ment changes. This study has revealed a more detailed and accu­rate pic­ture of mod­ern archi­tec­ture in Israel by trac­ing its process­es and achieve­ments and doc­u­ment­ing the work of women archi­tects as cen­tral part­ners in its devel­op­ment. It has also pro­vid­ed new insights into wom­en’s roles as pro­fes­sion­als, lead­ers, pio­neers, and labor­ers, and their con­tri­bu­tion to the social and cul­tur­al fab­ric. My study joins a grow­ing body of knowl­edge world­wide regard­ing mod­ern women archi­tects and design­ers at the begin­ning of the twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry. In recent decades, an increas­ing num­ber of stud­ies have been pub­lished on over­looked mod­ern women archi­tects and design­ers whose work has been for­got­ten. The his­tor­i­cal record is grad­u­al­ly being cor­rect­ed. The time has come to do the same for the first women archi­tects of Israel.

Dig deep­er into Mod­ern Archi­tec­ture and Gen­der in Pre-State Israel here! Check out a video from Sigal Davi­di about her reser­ach and work here.