Ramat Pincas Colony

Ramat Pincas is a neighborhood located within the municipal boundaries of Or Yehuda. Before being named Ramat Pincas, the neighborhood was known as Giv'at Hamed and Giv'at Mordechai. The neighborhood was established in 1952 on the lands of the depopulated Palestinian village of al-Khayriyya, Jaffa district, as a settlement for immigrants from Libya and Iraq, originating from Maburout, Kafr 'Ana, Saqiya, and Huriyya, on lands under the Development Authority. By the end of 1954, the Settlement Committee announced the expansion and construction of single-family homes with auxiliary farms, through the Rassco Company. The settlement consisted of approximately 150 housing units and was named after David Tzvi Pincas, one of the Mizrahi leaders and the second Minister of Transportation. In 1955, the neighborhood was connected to the electricity grid. Until the early 1970s, the settlement was recognized as a religious settlement, and entry was prohibited on Sabbaths and holidays. This situation has since changed, and today the neighborhood is home to a diverse population. In early 1996, a structural plan was approved to allow doubling the settlement toward the west, although this expansion has not yet been realized. The settlement faced financial difficulties in 1969, after which a proposal was made to annex the settlement to Or Yehuda; however, this proposal did not succeed at the time. In 1971, Hezekiel Kazaz proposed establishing a union of towns to jointly handle some municipal services in Or Yehuda, Ramat Pincas, Neve Monson, and Yehud, but this proposal also did not materialize. In 2003, the Local Authorities Unification Committee recommended annexing the settlement to the neighboring Or Yehuda, but the settlement residents opposed this, and the recommendation was not implemented. In early 2008, the Avel Regional Council was dissolved, and Ramat Pincas was incorporated into Or Yehuda along with all council areas south of Highway 461. In July 2019, during the wave of fires in Israel, five homes in the neighborhood were burned. Sources: Due to the scarcity of Arabic sources, we used “Hebrew” sources: the settlement’s Hebrew website / Israeli Central Bureau of Statistics. The village of al-Khayriyya from the Palestine Remembered website.