Comments (0)Theme Park Israel
October 9, 2009Stuart Schoffman
Special to the Jewish Times
One of Jerusalem’s more interesting streets is the one named for Gershon Agron, founding editor of the Jerusalem Post and mayor in the late 1950s.
At the top is a Conservative synagogue that was once a church. Next door is the Convent of the Sisters of the Rosary. Then comes the American Consulate, formerly the Arab-style home of a 19th-century Lutheran missionary. Next, a former monastery, now an annex to the Consulate. Across the street is Independence Park, which merges with a Muslim cemetery. At the bottom of the hill, at the corner of Agron and King David Street, is the chic new Mamilla Mall, which leads straight to the Old City’s Jaffa Gate, and the David Citadel Hotel, which used to be the Hilton.
In 1929, on the southwest corner across from the cemetery, the Supreme Muslim Council, led by the mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, built a luxury hotel called the Palace. It was an architectural gem, designed by a Turk and built by three contractors: one Arab and two Jews. Its elaborate, eclectic exterior was studded with arches, balconies and stone carvings, and its lobby boasted marble columns and Persian rugs. It soon went out of business and was turned into offices of the British Mandate.
Today, it’s an enormous shell, its eviscerated facade presiding over a vast hole in the ground. Construction is under way for its next incarnation as the Waldorf Astoria, a luxury hotel aimed at wealthy Orthodox and Haredi tourists.
But visitors and residents seldom notice two tiny streets that lead from Agron to Moses Hess, a well-traveled street near the King David Hotel and across from Hebrew Union College. Hess was a 19th-century German Jewish socialist, a friend of Karl Marx and author of “Rome and Jerusalem” (1862), an early and influential Zionist manifesto.
One of the two tiny streets is named for Ludwik Zamenhof, the Polish Jewish ophthalmologist who invented Esperanto, the universal language. The other is Rehov HaMa’arivim, the Street of the Westerners — meaning the immigrants from northwest Africa: Moghrabim, Moroccans, who made aliyah in the 1860s with their leader, Rabbi David Ben-Shimon (1826-1879), whose acronym is Tzuf Devash, the name of a book he authored and Hebrew for “honeydew.”
The sweet acronym was doubly appropriate just before Rosh Hashanah, when the historic Moghrabi neighborhood — also known as Mahaneh Yisrael — brimmed with visitors enjoying the city’s third annual architectural festival, “Houses from Within.”
I visited a modest two-story residence on Rehov HaMa’aravim. In the downstairs apartment sat an elderly woman and her daughter, residents there since arriving from Turkey in 1949. The place looked a bit grim, not much changed since then. The upstairs flat was a model of stylish renovation, original stone flooring and an airy modern kitchen with a ringside view of the future Waldorf.
Rich Americans, declared the young guide, are buying up historic properties, raising values, pricing locals out of the market. I defensively pointed out that it’s not just the Americans: British and French Jews and even well-to-do Israelis are also guilty. The young guide apologized, duly chastened. But I shared his frustration.
At the same time, I want American Jews to be deeply invested in Israel, even if for some we are like a theme park.
Down the block on Rehov HaMa’aravim was the home of an older couple, a house built by Moroccan Jewish settlers in 1868. It was a model of loving preservation, with a domed ceiling and original ceramic tiles, and a wooden plow from time immemorial mounted on the wall.
In Jerusalem, the wheel turns and turns. Old and new incessantly collide. Jewish becomes Arab becomes Jewish. This is a mixed city: always has been, always will be. It is a special place that requires special treatment.
In fact, the huge Western Wall plaza you see today was once an Arab neighborhood — known as the Moghrabi Quarter — where Muslims, some of them originally from Morocco, dwelt for centuries. Immediately after Israel’s euphoric victory in the Six Day War, the residents were evicted and their rundown dwellings razed. This, too, is part of our shared history, and worth remembering.
Stuart Schoffman, a senior fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute and editor of Havruta: A Journal of Jewish Conversation, writes monthly for the BALTIMORE JEWISH TIMES. A longer version of this essay is at jewishtimes.com . Click “opinion” on the left.