Azor (Hebrew: אָזוֹר, Arabic: أزور) (also Yazur) is a local council in the Tel Aviv District of Israel, on the old Jaffa-Jerusalem road southeast of Tel Aviv. Established in 1948 on the site of the depopulated Palestinian village of Yazur, Azor was granted local council status in 1951. In 2022 it had a population of 13,593, and has a jurisdiction of 2,415 dunams (2.415 km; 0.932 sq mi).

Etymology

The earliest occurrence of the name is Babylonian A-zu-ru (in a Neo-Assyrian text from 701 B.C.E.) which is compatible with the Septuagint form Άζωρ. According to scholars, the name my derive from Semitic root ’-Z-R “to gird, encompass, equip”, but "this derivation is highly hypothetical as this root is so far not productive in the toponymy."

The council of the new village named it Mishmar HaShiv'a ('Guardian of the Seven') in honour of seven Jewish soldiers killed near there in 1948, but the government committee in charge of assigning names forced them to change it to Azor on the grounds that preserving Biblical names was more important. However, another new village nearby was later named Mishmar HaShiv'a.

History

the 16th century, Haseki sultan endowed the lands of Yazur to its Jerusalem soup kitchen. During the 18th and 19th centuries, the area belonged to the Nahiyeh (sub-district) of Lod that encompassed the area of the present-day city of Modi'in-Maccabim-Re'ut in the south to the present-day city of El'ad in the north, and from the foothills in the east, through the Lod Valley to the outskirts of Jaffa in the west. This area was home to thousands of inhabitants in about 20 villages, who had at their disposal tens of thousands of hectares of prime agricultural land.

For further information, see on the page of the preceding Palestinian village, Yazur.

Notable residents

• Shelly Krolitzky (born 1999), tennis player
• Matvey Natanzon, backgammon player
• Margalit Tzan'ani, singer and tv personality

Main sights

• Azor Museum [he], archaeological museum