 The land was purchased in the 1920s by the Salonika-Palestine Investment Company, founded in 1921 by Jews in Salonika to develop commercial relations with Jewish settlements in Palestine.After World War I , compounding the effects of the Great Thessaloniki Fire of 1917 in which the city's Jewish quarter was destroyed, along with 12,000 homes, leaving over 70,000 homeless people.In 1924, the Salonika-Palestine Company sent an envoy to Palestine to purchase land in Jaffa, south of Tel Aviv's Rehov Herzl, in an area bordering Neveh Tzedek and Ahuzat Bayit that was close to the Jaffa-Jerusalem railroad.