Abulafia Bakery (אבו-לאפיה / أبو العافية)

Abulafia — also transliterated Abouelafia — has baked from the same corner of Yefet Street in Jaffa since 1879, run across generations by one Arab family and now stewarded by Said Abulafia. "When people hear that the bakery started in 1879, they think about history," he told Enviro Magazine in 2026, framing the shop's age as an obligation rather than a marketing point, and describing longevity as the sum of many small decisions rather than one big one.

The bakery bakes around the clock, open by multiple accounts 24 hours a day, turning out pita and sambusak — a folded pastry sold with fillings such as mashed potato, onion, mushroom and cheese, topped with sliced hardboiled egg and finished briefly on a grill. On how the shop handles change, Abulafia's own stated rule is blunt: "You have to modernize carefully."

Jaffa's mixed Jewish-Arab neighborhood has made the counter itself a small emblem of coexistence: staff have handed out shirts reading "Jews and Arabs refuse to be enemies" to visitors, and outlets from Mother Earth News to regional coexistence groups have documented residents and tourists of every background lining up at the same window at all hours. Almost 150 years on, it is still a family bakery first — Said Abulafia's own test for any change is whether regular customers can feel it, even if they can't explain it in technical terms.