page_title: American–German Colony
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: American–German Colony / History
caption_attribution_description: עברית: לוחית זיכרון למושבה האמריקאית ביפו
context_page_description: The American–German Colony is a residential neighborhood in the southern part of Tel Aviv-Yafo, Israel. It is located between Eilat Street and HaRabbi MiBacherach Street and adjoins Neve Tzedek.
context_section_description: The American–German Colony  was founded in the 19th century by the American Protestant, Christian Restorationism movement, led by George J. Adams and Abraham McKenzie. They and more colonists from Maine had arrived on 22 September 1866 in Jaffa. They founded the American Colony, named Amelican (آمليكاث) in Arabic, or Adams City in English. They erected their wooden houses from prefabricated pieces, which they had brought with them. However, diseases, the climate, and the insecure and arbitrary treatment by the Ottoman authorities, made many colonists willing to remigrate to Maine.
  In 1867 and 1868 the German Peter Martin Metzler, then leading a Protestant mission in Jaffa for the Swiss St. Chrischona Pilgrims Mission, helped the American colonists to sell their real estate, also buying himself much of it. On 5 March 1869 Metzler sold many of the houses on to newly arriving settlers from Württemberg. In 1861 these settlers, led by Georg David Hardegg (*1812–1879*) and Christoph Hoffmann had founded their own Christian denomination, the Temple Society. According to their faith the Templers wished to redeem the Holy Land by an active industrious lifestyle, understood by the Templers to be the symbolic reconstruction of the Temple.
  However, in June 1874 the Temple denomination had undergone a schism. Temple leader Hardegg and about a third of the Templers seceded from the Temple Society, after personal and substantial quarrels with the other leader Christoph Hoffmann. In 1889 apostatised former Templers, Protestant Swiss and German expatriates, like Plato von Ustinov, and domestic and foreign proselytes gained earlier by Metzler constituted an Evangelical Protestant congregation. Most of its parishioners lived in the colony earning it the name German Colony or Deutsche Kolonie. In 1904 the congregation built its Immanuel Church in the colony. On 17 November 1917 British forces conquered Jaffa and the colony, and most of the male inhabitants of the colony, holding German citizenship, were deported with German prisoners of war to Sidi Bishr and other places in Egypt, later a part of them were sent in 1920 to Bad Mergentheim in Germany In July 1918 women, elderly and children were deported too for two years, under police supervision, to the "Al Hayat" Hotel-Sanatorium in Helwan in Egypt. Enemy alien property was taken into public custody under Edward Keith-Roach, the Public Custodian of Enemy Property. The men were released after the Treaty of Versailles became effective on 10 January 1920. After the Treaty of Lausanne, by which Turkey accepted the British mandate of Palestine, had been ratified on 5 August 1925, the public custody was lifted and the property restituted.
  After the start of World War II the German colonists were again interned by the British authorities as the citizens of an enemy state in May 1940, and, after internment in Wilhelma, re-settled in Germany and Australia between 1941 and 1948. Enemy alien property came again into public custody under Keith-Roach. The vacant Immanuel Church was subsequently used by the CMJ until the British retreat in 1947. After the foundation of Israel its government took over the enemy alien property in its own custody. In January 1950 the state of Israel expropriated secular German enemy alien property in its own favour in anticipation of a future agreement with Germany on compensations for claims of Israeli citizens against Germany. In the course of the Reparations Agreement between Israel and West Germany both states agreed on the compensation of the expropriated secular property of then German citizens (Property Agreement finally mediated on 1 June 1962 by Max Sørensen). Whereas the buildings of religious usage, like Immanuel Church and its rectory, had remained in public custody and had been handed over to the Lutheran World Federation in 1951 after an agreement of September of that year regulating Israel's compensation of expropriated Protestant religious property of secular purposes, such as schools, farms, factories etc., and the restitution of actual places of worship, 
caption: Memorial plaque to the American Colony, Jaffa in Charles Clore Park
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