Following the War of
Independence, Israelis faced economic hardship, Arab aggression, and life in a
divided capital — nevertheless the western sections of the city thrived and
developed.
On 30 June 1967, the
first Friday after the official reunification of Jerusalem, Muslim and
Christian Arabs — whom, respectively, Jordan had banned from the Dome of the
Rock and the Aksa Mosque, and the Church of the Holy Selpulchre — were
permitted to worship freely in the Old City for the first time in 19 years and mingle
with their coreligionists from the West Bank.
Meanwhile, hundreds of
thousands of Israeli Jews had been converging on the Western Wall in the
biggest pilgrimage since the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 A.D.
Gone, writes historian Sir
Martin Gilbert, were the STOP! DANGER! FRONTIER AHEAD! notices.
Gone, too, were
the 15-foot walls, barbed wire fencing, and mines that had blocked off through
streets.
It's now been 47 years
since the city was reunited — and memories of life during the 19 years when the
city was divided, between the end of the War of Independence in 1949 and the 1967
Six Day War, seem to have faded.
The armistice between
Israel and Jordan, signed on April 3, 1949, did not connote a political end to
the conflict or an agreement about borders. This tentativeness left the city in
limbo. Still, it didn't stop people from trying to carve out a sense of
normalcy.
Elections for the first
Knesset had taken place in January 1949, with the parliament's opening session
held on February 14 in the Jewish Agency building on King George Street. Soon thereafter
the Knesset moved a few blocks further north along King George to Froumine
House, a former bank.
Municipal elections were
also held in 1949. The city's first mayor was Shlomo Zalman Shragai, a
journalist with the Hebrew newspaper Hatsofeh, mouthpiece of the
Orthodox Zionist Mizrachi Party.
As a result of the
fighting, Jerusalem had hemorrhaged population. The number of Jews dropped to 69,000
with many people leaving for opportunities in Tel Aviv. Fewer than 1,000
Christians remained and virtually no Muslims.
As the epicenter of
Zionism, it was only fitting that, in August 1949, the remains of Binyamin
Ze'ev (Theodor) Herzl, the father of modern political Zionism, were reinterred at
the Jerusalem military cemetery that now bears his name. Herzl, who died in
1904 at age 44, had been buried in Vienna.
For ordinary
Jerusalemites life in the divided city was both thrilling and hardscrabble.
Just before ushering in
the Sabbath, on February 11, 1949, Moshe Sachs dashed off a letter to his
parents in the States. He thanked them "loads!" for their latest package
— canned milk, chicken, baby food, and bars of soap.
Sachs, an ordained
Conservative rabbi, had come to Jerusalem after serving in the U.S. Army during
WWII and wound up in the Haganah, the pre-state Jewish underground headed by Jewish
Agency leader and Israel’s first premier David Ben-Gurion.
Though he worked for the
semi-governmental Jewish Agency, Sachs’ salary didn't cover such
"luxuries" as a stove, refrigerator, and washing machine. His letters
home show how appreciative he was of the generosity of his parents who, bit-by-bit,
shipped the appliances from the United States.
In a letter dated March
29, 1949 he wrote: "Last Shabbat, we took a long walk through Julian's Way
[today King David Street]. It was the first time I'd been right in front of the
King David hotel and the Jerusalem YMCA. The area had been secured in the
fighting immediately after May 15, but civilians had been kept out until recent
weeks. Now the area is again humming — with immigrants and families that are
spreading out."
Water supplies were
erratic. By being thrifty and drawing water from a cistern under the porch, the
Sachs family had enough to meet most of its household and drinking needs.
"The electricity
question was resolved only three weeks after we moved in [May 14, 1949],"
he writes. Moshe found an electrician to wire his house and finally prevailed
on the electric company to link them to the main line. Electricity costs were so
dear that the family used kerosene for cooking and heating. People would line
up to buy kerosene which was sold out of the back of a truck. There was one
thing where they didn't stint on electricity: laundering the diapers in the
washing machine.
But there was no money
for furniture so the Sachs family ate off boxes and suitcases — and yet they regularly
entertained.
Few people had
telephones. When back in the US, Moshe's father had a heart attack he tried to keep
up to date by relying on ham radio operators.
"Most people have
no money for a telephone. A phone is a real luxury in Jerusalem; we do not have
one," he wrote his folks. "Phones are scarce in Israel, so to keep
down the demand there is a neat system which requires a non-refundable payment
of a fair amount of money to have one… if you do scrape together the money for
a phone, your monthly bill is relatively high."
There were not many stay-at-home
moms in Jerusalem in those days. Women worked to help make ends meet though
even then many folks were in the red. Workers could never count on getting paid
on time. Luckily, corner grocery stores and butchers shops operated on credit
for months on end.
Yet the atmosphere was
far from glum.
Here, as conveyed in Sir
Martin Gilbert's Jerusalem in the 20th Century, is how
Benjamin Ferencz, a Hungarian-born American lawyer and a former prosecutor at
the Nuremberg war crimes trials, found Jerusalem in 1950:
"Everyone seemed so
full of hope and enthusiasm… that a new era was dawning for them. And the
children were all so beautiful and the source of so much pride to all and not
merely to the parents. The Jews I knew back home were all lawyers, doctors or
businessmen, and here I saw workers in the streets, cleaning and digging
ditches, and Jews from Yemen and other faraway places that had no connection to
Brooklyn or the Bronx."
Gilbert also recounts
the experiences of Mary Clawson, a Californian whose husband was an adviser to the
Israeli government. She evokes the ambiance of the city in a 1953 letter home:
"Almost everyone
looked poor; I did not see a single woman wearing hose, and the men wore no
neckties; I must say I think the lack of hose and neckties were both excellent
ideas. There seemed to be an astounding number of good bookstores around.
"We have no ration cards
yet. So no coffee, eggs, meat, margarine, sugar, soap, etc. The neighbors have
been unbelievably helpful and friendly and given or loaned us precious rationed
things to eke out our meals, though I have been eating a huge amount of plentiful
bread. I have never met so many people I like in so brief a time."
Food was indeed a
problem for the entire country.
About half the city's
food supply needed to be trucked over rudimentary roads up to the capital.
In January 1954, having now resided in
Jerusalem for seven months, Mary Clawson wrote home describing how hard it was
to make ends meet:
"There is no money
for a car; the food budget needs constant watching and scrimping, and no dining
out; there is not enough money for clothes; there is money for very few gifts;
few, if any face creams, and hand lotions; no smoking or drinking and not much
money for charity. There is no money… for household furniture and repairs; no
items for upkeep of a garden, if you like to garden; much less is there any
money left for the hobbies many Americans especially at this [her husband's] job
level, consider in the category of essentials."
If anything, life in the
Arab sector of divided Jerusalem was even harsher.
Other than demolishing
the Jewish Quarter and dozens of synagogues in the Old City, desecrating Jewish
graves on the Mount of Olives, and formally annexing east Jerusalem in December
1948, the Hashemite Kingdom made little constructive investment in the
city.
On July 27, 1953, King
Hussein announced that Jerusalem would be his "alternative capital"
though he remained in Amman most of the time.
Israelis responded to Arab
rejectionism and intimidation by carrying on with their lives and by building
the area of Jerusalem they did control.
Unable to use its
historic Mount Scopus campus because it was encircled by Jordanian-controlled
territory, the church-owned Terra Sancta compound in central Jerusalem became the
main Hebrew University site, with classes also held at dozens of locations around
the city until, in 1958, the new Hebrew University campus in Givat Ram was inaugurated.
Hadassah Hospital on
Mount Scopus was similarly off limits, so a new hospital was constructed on the
hills overlooking Ein Kerem and opened in 1961. The hospital became a reality
thanks to the generosity of thousands of American Jewish "Hadassah
ladies" who helped raise the funds for its construction.
Terra Sancta
Large-scale manufacturing
never took root in Jerusalem though small industry did find a niche in such outlying
neighborhoods as Givat Shaul. The Binyanei Ha'uma (People’s Congress)
convention center, begun in 1950, was fully completed in 1963. And in 1958,
Heichal Shlomo was completed to be the seat of the two chief rabbis. Ben-Yehuda
Street became the heart of the business district, and nearby Mahane Yehuda
continued to thrive as the city’s fresh produce market.
Tourism became an
important element in the city's economy and a number of new hotels were
constructed.
Some tourists passed
through west Jerusalem on their way to the Arab side. In 1958, Rev. John
Keppel, his wife Mildred and their two children Daniel and Mark visited the
Holy Land. Rev. Keppel was on his way to his new congregation in Indianapolis
after three years of missionary work for the Disciples of Christ in Falkirk
Scotland.
The family flew to Lod
Airport outside Tel Aviv via Athens. Dan was about 10 at the time. The Keppels
would have crossed the Mandelbaum Gate checkpoint into the Jordanian side. From
there they toured the Old City, the River Jordan, and the Dead Sea before
heading to visit an orphanage in Jordanian-held Bethlehem.
Dan, now a financial
consultant in New Jersey, showed me some of the slides his parents took of the
visit. There is a forlorn photograph of the Western Wall and a striking
interior shot of the Temple Mount or the Dome of the Rock.
Back on the Jewish side
of town, another journalist, Gershom Agron, the founder of the English-language
Palestine Post — later the Jerusalem Post — became mayor in 1955. Agron was a Labor Party stalwart
and the newspaper was its English-language mouthpiece. Even as mayor, Agron
insisted on reviewing the Post's daily editorial before the newspaper
went to press, according to Jerusalem Post veteran staffer Alexander
Zveilli. When Agron died in office in 1959 another laborite, Mordechai
Ish-Shalom, led the city until 1965.
All the while, the
menace of Arab snipers and infiltrators was never far away.
Jerusalem was surrounded
on the north, east, and south by enemy territory — with a narrow makeshift
corridor to the west that connected the city to Tel Aviv and the coastal
plain.
Refugee camps known as ma'abarot
housed Jews from Morocco, Libya, Iraq, and Yemen who had come to Israel with
practically nothing. In Jerusalem, the camps were often situated just within
the Israeli side of the armistice line, along Hebron Road in the outlying Talpiot
neighborhood and other places. These areas usually took the brunt of random Arab
violence.
Most often, the snipers
took up positions at Arab Abu Tor and fired at Jewish Abu Tor and on the
Jordanian-held Old City walls, aiming at Musrara. Arabs in Jabel Mukaber also
directed their fire at Kibbutz Ramat Rachel, situated east of Talpiot on the
southern edge of Jerusalem’s armistice line and overlooking Bethlehem. In 1956,
for instance, five people attending an archeological conference at Ramat
Rachel, were killed by Arab marksmen. Among the killed was a dentist, Rudolph
Rudberg, who'd reached Palestine in 1938 from Germany and had become president
of the Israel Dental Association.
Arab infiltrators all
too often crossed from the Jordanian-held territories to rape or kill. Many
victims were children or teenagers.
And still, the Jews kept
building. The Van Leer Institute, a combination of think tank and foundation
was established in 1959. Nearby, the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities
opened up shop in 1961. The Beit Ha'am cultural center went up and served as
the improvised venue for the trial of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann in 1961.
A foreign ministry
building never got built and instead its offices were housed — and remained so
until relatively recently — in a warren of prefabricated one-story huts near
the entrance of town. But the Israel Museum — home of the Shrine of the Book
which houses the Dead Sea Scrolls — was established in 1965 thanks to a grant
by the Anglo-Jewish Rothschild family. Reform Judaism built a branch of Hebrew
Union College overlooking the inaccessible Old City. And the
Knesset, finally, convened in its own building at Givat Ram on August 30, 1966.
The divided city lacked
the vibrancy of today's united Jerusalem. There were few restaurants and not
much to do at night, but there were sidewalk cafes. Mercifully, the orchestra
came to town; so did the theatre. In fact, the cornerstone for the Jerusalem
Theater was laid in 1964. Plans to construct an official residence for the
president of Israel went forward.
The legendary Teddy
Kollek, who had been Labor Party prime minister David Ben-Gurion's right-hand
man became mayor in 1965. His City Hall office was
just 150 yards from the armistice line.
The right man, in the
right place, at the right time, Kollek's mayoralty saw the reunification of the
city. His tenure would span 28 years and he would help build many of the
amenities that we Jerusalemites nowadays take for granted in a city that's
history-rich but remains cash-poor.
Kollek had a knack for
raising money from abroad. He created the Jerusalem Foundation and identified
donors who were as generous as they were wealthy to fund parks, museums, and
promenades in the new united Jerusalem.
The 1967 Six Day War in
Jerusalem lasted from Monday morning
June 5, 1967 to Wednesday afternoon. On June 28, 1967 the Knesset
amended the law of 1950, which proclaimed Jerusalem as Israel's capital, to
reflect the newly defined municipal boundaries. Nevertheless, from that
Wednesday afternoon when the IDF recaptured the Old City, there have been those
who have begrudged the Jews their unified Jerusalem.
During the recent 2014
summer disturbances, a key target of Arab rioters was the light rail station and
line in the Shu'afat Arab neighborhood in north Jerusalem. Though Arab
residents of Shu'afat and Beit Hanina have benefited greatly from the state-of-the-art
light rail service, to the rioters the tracks and stations symbolized the unity
of the city — and, moreover, the possibility of Jewish-Arab coexistence under
Jewish sovereignty.
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I Remember When...
Rivka Reiner, 70
The Jerusalem I grew up
in was a small town. The running joke when I was in college was that the best
thing about Jerusalem was the bus to Tel Aviv.
There were few outlying
neighborhoods. Everything was pretty concentrated. Bus services were provided
by the now-defunct Hamekasher company which went out of business in 1967.
My Jerusalem was an
intimate place. My father was a rabbinical scholar, a dean at a Talmudic
academy near where we lived. Mother was a housewife. We were two girls and
three boys. Life was simple. No one told us not to speak with strangers.
Strangers could be counted on to help. People lived modestly in the late 1950s
and through the 1960s. There really wasn't much choice.
I attended the Horev
Girls School on Strauss Street. When the weather was bad we'd take a bus. But
that was an extravagance. I remember we always had the same driver. He actually
got to know us by name.
Naturally, my parents
could not afford a car. Very few people owned automobiles.
We had no telephone. In
the event of an emergency one of our neighbors who was a physician — actually
it was Prof. Ehrenfeld who taught at the medical school — had a telephone. My
parents were on a waiting list for a phone and only got one after I was married
at age 24.
The hardest economic
times were during the 1950s. Though even in the 1960s life had few frills. We
ate plenty of vegetables but seldom had any fruit. My father once went on a
fundraising trip to London. When he came home he brought an apple which was
served on the plane. We were thrilled and the entire family shared it.
Chocolate was also rare.
I remember that when my
youngest brother was born, my parents got a washing machine which meant my
mother didn't have to wash the diapers by hand. Of course, it was very
expensive. I also remember that much earlier we got a refrigerator that was
Israeli made.
Mom baked in an aluminum
wonder pot – a si’ir peh-leh
in Hebrew – on the stove top. We didn't have an oven.
When I was in high
school there was a choice of five movie theatres — I liked the Smadar and the
nearby café on the same block.
There were lots of cafes
— and they were not expensive. Different cafes for different types. Atara on
Ben Yehuda was for the movers and shakers.
My father never went to any café,
firstly because he was strictly Orthodox and it seemed frivolous and also
because it just wasn't his lifestyle.
Of course, we had no
television. There wasn't any.
I began working as a
secretary at the medical school in Ein Kerem where the new Hadassah Hospital
campus was located. To get there, I'd take a bus from near my house to a
hitchhiking post and wait for someone driving to the campus. People would
routinely stop and give others a lift which for some reason was called a 'tramp'.
Most people got to work by tramp.
This piece was first published in Israel My Glory
