Jaffa Clock Tower
building in Jaffa
The Jaffa Clock Tower (Hebrew: מגדל השעון יפו, Migdal haShaon Yafo, Arabic: برج الساعة في يافا, Turkish: Yafa Saat Kulesi) stands in the middle of the north end of Yefet Street in Jaffa, Tel Aviv.
The limestone tower was constructed in 1900 and initiated by Joseph Bey Moyal, a Jewish businessman from Jaffa, and was made possible with contributions from all communities of Jaffa, including Jews, Armenians, Maronites and Arabs. It was constructed to commemorate the silver jubilee of the reign of the Ottoman Sultan Abdul Hamid II. It also helped develop the center of the town, in a time when Jaffa was undergoing rapid modernization.
The tower, which incorporates two clocks, is one of seven clock towers built in Ottoman Palestine. The others are located in Safed, Acre, Nazareth, Haifa, Nablus. A plaque was later inserted to commemorate the Israelis killed in the battle for the town during the 1948 Arab–Israeli War.
History
The construction of the tower was initiated by Joseph Bey Moyal, a prominent Jewish businessman from Jaffa, who was also the mind behind the Jaffa–Jerusalem railway. The construction was made possible with contributions from all the communities of Jaffa, Arabs, Armenians, Maronites and Jews. The watch mechanism itself was done by Moritz Schoenberg, a Jewish clock-maker from Rishon LeZion who also built a few stores in the adjacent Negib Bustros St. (now Raziel St.).
“Jaffa Clock Tower” enters the record as building in Jaffa. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Jaffa, Clock and Tower can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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The strongest evidence will usually combine a dated visual record with documents produced by the authority responsible for the place. The source revision retrieved here is dated Mar 22, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q2919379. Authority coordinates are 32.055, 34.756. 2 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1900 and 1948.
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This entry incorporates text from “Jaffa Clock Tower” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.