Discover Israel

The Boim family, originally from the city of Kaminitz in Lithuania, arrived in the Land of Israel in the 1830s. By the end of the century, they built a network of hotels named Kaminitz in Jerusalem, Hebron, and here in Jaffa. Their goal was to offer a hotel with European standards so Jewish visitors wouldn’t have to stay in non-Jewish hotels where food wasn’t served according to kosher laws.
In 1898, just one year after the First Zionist Congress in Basel, the leader of the Zionist movement, Dr. Theodor Herzl, visited the Land of Israel to meet with Kaiser Wilhelm II, who was attending the inauguration of the Lutheran Church of the Redeemer in Jerusalem. Herzl hoped to persuade the German Kaiser to support a request to the Ottoman Sultan Abdul Hamid II for permission to bring Jews from the diaspora to the Land of Israel. Not only did the request fail, but the famous photo of Herzl speaking with Kaiser Wilhelm II in Jerusalem also didn’t succeed—and had to be doctored. A second photo was taken of Herzl looking upward, as if toward the Kaiser on horseback. That photo was taken on the terrace of this hotel.