Why Joseph Hotel TLV offers comfort, community, great value - review

If you’re looking for a nice hotel in Tel Aviv that won’t break the bank, consider the Joseph Hotel TLV, just steps from the Bloomfield Stadium light rail station.

Cross the street, take the elevator up one floor, and you’ll find 19 clean, comfortable rooms. The floor is black marble, and the walls are painted green, giving an interesting color contrast. There is coffee and fruit available all day and a nice breakfast that even includes lox (my standard for a good hotel breakfast).

The hotel is just on the edge of Jaffa, with easy access to an “unofficial” beach across the street that had very few people on a weekday morning. It is very close to “shuk hapishpeshim” (the flea market) and the Jaffa clock tower.

The hotel opened just before the pandemic and was forced to close soon afterward. Then October 7 happened, and for two and a half years, they housed evacuees from Kiryat Shmona.

“We went through all the life-cycle events here – everything from a newborn baby’s first smile to engagements and, sadly, even deaths. We became like family. We’re still in touch today, and we’ve even gone up to Kiryat Shmona to visit them,” Tzvi Dahan, one of the owners of the hotel, told The Jerusalem Post.

That family feeling

Living in a hotel while their home was being attacked wasn’t easy, he said. While the government was giving them compensation for not being able to work, many of them wanted to work and feel productive.

“One became our night clerk,” Dahan said. “Another liked to cook, so he would make the breakfasts, and another became the security guard. It really became like a family.”

Dahan saw that on Friday nights, the hotel provided catered meals. But he saw that guests were just picking up the meals and eating in their rooms. So he started bringing his family to the hotel for Shabbat, helping to create a suitable atmosphere. In fact, the hotel won a special award for its work with evacuees.

Even after the evacuees returned home, several decided to move permanently to Tel Aviv and continued working at the hotel. In the past, about half of the clientele were tourists and the other half Israelis, who still come on weekends. But tourist numbers are down, and the hotel is often almost empty during the week.

Dahan said that, as the hotel is small, they try to keep that family feeling.

“These days, even though we’re back to operating purely as a hotel, we wanted to keep some of that same warmth and closeness with our guests,” he said. “We hear it quite a lot – people tell us they feel at home here, that they feel genuinely welcome.”

Best of all is the price. Rooms start at under NIS 600 a night during the week, and kids are free.