If you’re the type of person who peers through the front windows of expensively renovated apartments and fantasizes about an opportunity to see inside, this weekend in Tel Aviv is for you. For the second or third (I can’t remember which) year in a row, the municipality is hosting Houses from Within – organized tours or open houses for various architectural landmarks and hidden gems, ranging from private homes to industrial warehouses.  The full list in English, with photos, descriptions and locations, is here; for some reason, though, the Tel Aviv municipality decided it didn’t need a native speaker to write the texts. (Why, Tel Aviv?! Why?). Some tours require advance registration.

I am particularly interested in seeing Number 59, on page 2 – Idan Razin’s fabulous penthouse apartment at 17 Feierberg Street. Veteran readers might remember that last year Idan hosted a very, very loud party to celebrate Independence Day, keeping up the entire neighbourhood and driving me into a 5 a.m. temper tantrum. I’ve sort of grudgingly forgiven Idan since then, but I’d still like an opportunity to see his three-story glam pad with the huge wrap-around balcony.

Much to my sorrow, the Pagoda House isn’t on the list this year. Last year I mixed up the time slots, and didn’t get to see it.

The Pagoda House on King Albert Square. It’s now the private residence of a single family that lives abroad, spending only a few weeks a year in Israel. The house includes a swimming pool and an elevator.

While both the Hebrew and English Wikipedia pages for the Pagoda House credit Alexander Levy as the architect, only the Hebrew Wikipedia has a page about him. So I read it, and discovered a fascinating but sad story.

Levy was born in 1883, in Berlin, to a wealthy family that owned a textile factory. An early and committed Zionist, he arrived in Palestine in 1912, where he established his architecture firm in Jaffa in 1920. But he never really managed to assimilate. In the wake of professional disagreements and a lack of work, he returned in 1927 to Berlin, where he joined a large architecture firm. With the 1932 rise to power of the Nazis he emigrated to Paris, continuing to work in his profession and to be active in Zionist activities. When the German army invaded in 1940, he was rounded up by the French authorities and imprisoned in a camp for enemy aliens – as a German citizen, regardless of the fact that he was a Jew. Levy submitted a request for a visa to the United States, but was turned down. After the Nazis conquered France, he stopped being a German to the French and became a Jew to the Germans, who took the keys to the prison camp from the French authorities and deported the Jewish inmates to the death camps. Levy died in Auschwitz in 1942.

But the house he built on King Albert Square remains one of Tel Aviv’s most beautiful landmarks.