About Petach-Tikva: A 126 year old miracle
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Petach- Tikva was built in 1878 and now the town has over 155,000 citizens.
It all started from a ground with many swamps and mosquitoes that distributed malaria. Petach- Tikva was built by religious people that went-out of Jerusalem.
It was a great step and involved a lot of courage because Jerusalem was surrounded by a wall and everything outside of the wall was very dangerous.
The people who started to build Petach- Tikva were: Zerah Baranet, David Meir Gutman, Yoel Moshe Salomon, Yehuda Re'ev and Yehoshua Shtampper. They bought a horrible place that was a place with no hope to be a colony.
Everybody thought that these people were "crazy" but more and more people joined them and they began cleaning the ground, 
building houses and turning this place into a colony.
There was a problem. The Turkish that ruled Israel at that time didn't allow the building of houses because they didn't want Israel (Palestine) to be a Jewish country. There was a law that said that if there was a roof on the house they could not destroy it.
So at night, the Jews first built the roof and then the Turkish had to give-in and let the people build the rest of the house.
Petach-Tikva (known as Melabes in those days) began to develop and it was the first agricultural colony in Israel and because of that it is called the mother of the colonies till this day..
Petach-Tikva developed more and more. It was declared as a city in 1937. It had 7 mayors and now Izhak Ohayon is the mayor of Petach-Tikva. We are proud of Petach-Tikva and we all wish her the best. We want our city to remain beautiful and keep developing in the future..
By Avital