Kiryat Tiv'on is a town in the Haifa District of Israel, in the hills between the Zvulun and Jezreel valleys. Kiryat Tiv'on is situated southeast of Haifa, on the main road to Nazareth. Kiryat Tiv'on is the result of the municipal merger of several older settlements, Tiv'on, Elro'i, Kiryat HaRoshet and Kiryat Amal. On the outskirts of Tiv'on is a Bedouintownship called Basmat Tab'un. In it had a population of.
History
Ottoman era
In 1859, the village of Tubaun was estimated to have a tillage of 22 feddans. In 1875, Victor Guérin found that the village had 200 inhabitants. In 1881, the PEF's Survey of Western Palestine described Tubaun as a small adobe village, on high ground, at the edge of the wood. A population list from about 1887 showed that Tuba'un had about 90 inhabitants; all Muslims.
British Mandate era
The 1922 census of Palestine showed that Tub'un had 151 inhabitants, all Muslim. In 1925 a Zionist organisation purchased 30 feddans in Kiskis and Tabon from the Sursuk family of Beirut. At the time, there were 36 families living there. In the 1931 censusTabun had a population of 239, still all Muslim, in a total of 48 houses. From 1931, and lasting several years, the Jewish Agency struggled to evict the tenant farmers from Tabaun, from the land which was to become Tivon. In the 1945 statistics, al Tivon had 370 Muslim and 320 Jewish inhabitants, with a total land area of 5,823 dunams. Of this, 141 dunams were used for plantations and irrigable land, 2,038 for cereals, while 3,644 dunams were classified as non-cultivable land.
State of Israel
Kiryat Tiv'on was established in 1958 merging three small villages Tiv'on, Kiryat Amal and Elro'i. Kiryat Haroshet, founded by a rabbi from Jablona, Poland who settled there with his followers in 1935, became part of Kiryat Tiv'on in 1979. Tiv'on was built on land owned by a British Jewish couple who bought the land in early 1945. It was later developed by the Jewish National Fund based on an urban plan drawn up by Alexander Klein, a Russian Jewish architect who was commissioned by the Jewish National Fund. The symbol of Kiryat Tiv'on is the cyclamen, a flower that grows between the rocks, reflecting the town's appreciation of nature and its efforts to preserve the landscape and safeguard the environment.
The town is best known for the national park, Beit She'arim, which borders it on the southwest. Beit Shearim was an important Jewish spiritual center and necropolis during the Roman period, and was once the seat of the Sanhedrin.
