Israelnow2017

ISRAEL NOW A SPECIAL ISSUE OF THE NEW JERSEY JEWISH NEWS | MAY 18, 2017

MIRACLE VICTORY, AND THE AFTERMATH 50 Years After the Six-Day War

Then…

American olim, drawn by the war, reflect on its costs.

Page 3 How the war played during the Summer of Love.

Page 8

Now… Since reunification, a changing cityscape in Jerusalem.

Pages 10, 12 Jews, Arabs chart a rocky road toward coexistence.

Pages 15

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Six Americans who made aliyah in the wake of the Six-Day War reflect on the complex feelings and the knotty politics, then and now.

Nathan Jeffay Contributing Editor

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erusalem — On Wednesday, when Israel marks 50 years since the unification of Jerusalem, Chana Henkin will be embracing the occasion, feeling that its positive impact has exceeded all expectations. But it will be a non-event for another American immigrant, Patricia Golan, who will be feeling that there’s nothing to celebrate anymore.

Her mood, she said, “180-degrees from how I was feeling when I came.”

The years after the Six-Day War were a peak time for aliyah from America, and most arrivals, even if not spurred to move by the victory, remember arriving to a state of euphoria. Today, interviews with half a dozen Americans who made aliyah after the war reveal a portrait of Israeli opinion in miniature and the fault lines that exist over the country’s settlement-building enterprise — a mix of pride, disappointment and complex emotions about the reality that has emerged from the momentous events of the summer of 1967.

Chicagoan-turned-kibbitznik Muki Telman recalls

American Olim

Striding into history: Gen. Uzi Narkiss, Moshe Dayan and Yitzchak Rabin march into Jerusalem in June 1967. WIKIMEDIA COMMONS being “swept up with the excitement of the time” at a youth movement camp in America, and upon his arrival in Israel seven years later, but now talks of his “mixed feelings” about what came out of the war.

Chicagoan-turned-kibbutznik Muki Telman: A bundle of contradictions.

COURTESY OF MUKI TELMAN

As a massive crowd is expected to march triumphantly in the city on May 24 to mark Jerusalem Day, Telman will attend a quiet ceremony on his kibbutz, but with a feeling that the legacy may be best undone.

About a month after the war, he reluctantly went to a labor Zionist Habonim camp in America, where he acquired a sense of awe for the “amazing victory” in the face of Israel’s “existential danger.” He says that “the feelings of the time certainly got me hooked” on Habonim and Zionism. Within seven years he was in Israel, ready to stay, and by 1977 he was pioneering a new community in the Negev, Kibbutz Grofit, where he lives today.

Telman is unusual among secular Israelis — he’s “very” non-religious — in attending a Jerusalem Day ceremony; the event has increasingly become the preserve of the religious right wing. “Jerusalem is Jerusalem, and there’s no question about its importance,” he explains. “But it’s the center of a national dispute and conflict, so I would be willing to make concessions.”

So as Telman, 62, prepares for a range of emotions over the Six-Day War anniversary, he is a tangle of contradictions. He’ll be marking Jerusalem’s reunification, but wondering if it should be undone with the city once again divided. He’ll be feeling positive that Israel controls more land than it did before the war, while criticizing the settlements built in the West Bank. And asked if any of his three sons live there, he says: “No, not in the territories, I’d disown them. OK, not disown them but be unhappy.”

All things considered, he doesn’t regret his excitement for the 1967 victory, but he has difficulty accepting what has followed. “I’m not disappointed with what happened after ’67,” says the normally upbeat electrician. “But I’m disappointed that it’s 2017 and it’s not getting better, and I don’t see it going in a positive direction.”

Chana Henkin, a New Yorker by birth, knows first-hand just how bitter the Israeli-Palestinian conflict can be. Her tears were some of the first in the current wave of violence, when in October 2015 one of her six children, Eitam, was killed along with his wife Naama Henkin in a terrorist shooting attack in the West Bank. Four of her grandchildren were in the back seat of the car in which they were driving.

To her, the importance in 1967 in the conflict, and the claim that peace has been elusive because the

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After 50 Years, A Tangle Of Emotions

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50 Years of Triumph and Struggle: A Jerusalem Timeline Compiled By Steve Lipman

1967 JUNE: Jerusalem is reunited following Israel’s stunning victory in the Six-Day War.

Yeshiva HaKotel, a prominent Zionist institution, is founded in the Old City.

1968 A terrorist bombing in the Mahane Yehuda open-air market kills 12 people and injures 52.

1969 Members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine terrorist organization bomb a Jerusalem supermarket; two Israelis are killed and 20 are injured.

The Al-Aqsa mosque on the Temple Mount is damaged by arson committed by a Protestant extremist from Australia.

1971 The Shalom Hartman Institute, a pluralistic research and education institute, is founded.

1972 Canadian singer-composer Leonard Cohen, during a concert at the Yad

Eliahu Sports Palace at the end of a world tour, has a meltdown on stage, walking off, then returning after a cigarette and quick shave.

1973 OCTOBER: Jerusalem is on high alert during the Yom Kippur War on the Syrian and Egyptian fronts.

The Jerusalem Cinematheque theater and film archive is founded.

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Americans In Israel

continued from previous page 1967 gains were mishandled, doesn’t hold water.

“The ’67 war did not hold back peace; exactly the opposite, it created the chance for peace,” she says.

“Never before ’67 were the Arabs ready to speak about peace, no Arab country recognized Israel, Egypt demanded that we cede the Negev to her and the PLO operated from Judea and Samaria into Israel. The war showed the Arab world that Israel is a fact and won’t disappear, and thus made peace into an option.” Henkin talked to me shortly after lighting one of the torches at the national ceremony in Jerusalem for Israel’s Independence Day, where the theme was the unification of Jerusalem. The war, she says, didn’t just fill her with pride, but in her opinion also paved the way for the whole area of Jewish life that she’s helped to pioneer.

“In 1967, the world of women’s Torah learning did not exist,” says Henkin, who made aliyah in 1972 and 10 years later moved to Jerusalem, where she established a prestigious religiousZionist seminary for women. “Today, women’s learning is a pulsating, vibrant world centered in Jerusalem and

energizing the entire Jewish world.”

Henkin, 70, was chosen to light the Independence Day torch because of her achievements at Nishmat, the Jeanie Schottenstein Center for Advanced Torah Study for Women, where she is dean. The institution encourages high-level Talmud study, often the preserve of men, and trains women to be halachic advisers on some matters.

She recalls: “In 1967, like the rest of the Jewish people, I was exhilarated at the unification of Jerusalem.

I was still in the U.S. on the eve of the Six-Day War, taking a final examination in Jewish history on the Wednesday of the war. I wrote, ‘Today is the most historic day I have lived through,’ and I left the room. I got [a grade of] 100 percent. The holy city was now free. But I would not have been able to predict that when I made aliyah, I would have a place in shaping the spiritual life of Jerusalem and as a result of the Jewish world.” ◆ or Patricia Golan the Six-Day War victory is a dream turned sour, and Jerusalem Day brings no joy. “It will be hard to ignore it, but I won’t be celebrating it,” says the Beersheba-based journalistturned-star of Israel’s amateur light opera circuit. “I would have celebrated it 10 years ago, maybe, but not now.”

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“The war showed the Arab world that Israel is a fact and won’t disappear,” Chana Henkin says.

WIKIMEDIA COMMONS

Now 74, she arrived in Israel from Milwaukee in 1969 with her daughter, after a messy divorce. Zionism had been her “teenage rebellion” that “enraged” her assimilated Jewish parents, and when she felt she needed to leave the country, she decided to take advantage of a free ticket that went along with making aliyah.

“I went straight from the divorce court to the aliyah office,” she says, remembering how impressed she was with Israel. “I remember a euphoria that I had come to the Garden of Eden. A truck was impressive, and I would say, ‘Look at these cows.’ It was like a super-reality.” For Golan, the excitement of victorious post-’67 Israel was combined with the sense of adventure and the feeling of having wrapped up her “scary” divorce.

Like many immigrants of this era, it was the general excitement of the victory and Israel’s escape from annihilation that enthused her; she didn’t have strong feelings about the specifics of a reunified Jerusalem and expanded territory. When she voted in the 1973 election, she didn’t cast

Ruth Sernoff in her Ein Hod studio: Sad over growing materialism in Israel.

COURTESY OF RUTH SERNOFF

“I went straight from the divorce court to the aliyah office,” in 1969, says Patricia Golan.

COURTESY OF PATRICIA GOLAN

her ballot to advance a view on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict but just on local issues, which she recalls raised some eyebrows on her kibbutz. “My political awareness came much later,” she says, adding: “My political leanings in Israel could be called left wing today; it wasn’t the case then.”

She became politicized in the late-’70s and says that in the last decade this has “just hardened because of political intransigence.” Asked if she can muster joy at the thought of Israel’s 1967 victory, Golan says: “I can’t think in those terms anymore; I can’t get excited. It doesn’t make me any less of a Zionist, but it’s not the way I see the world today.” ◆ uki Telman got to Israel “hooked” on Zionism, Chana Henkin arrived full of faith, Patricia Golan arrived fleeing divorce and Ruth Sernoff, who lives in the quaint artists’ village of Ein Hod in the Carmel Mountains, came for a very different reason — to escape “bourgeois” life.

Sernoff and her then-husband Ed were American artists, Quaker and Jewish respectively, who found themselves in search of a home, disappointed with Spain, where they found themselves when Israel seemed like the right choice. “We were looking for another country, and we decided Spain was too Catholic,” Sernoff said.

She explains: “We were looking desperately for a place to take the children away from the United States with all the riots and general issues — we thought the children were very bourgeois.” They didn’t know much about Israel, but “we read about the kibbutzim and the attitudes and the dancing.”

She converted to Judaism and they moved to Israel in 1969, setting up

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Americans In Israel

continued from page 4 home two years later in Ein Hod, where they both live today with new partners.

They led a “strange life,” working round the clock in their jewelry factory and then “on the weekend would sing and dance at night; sometimes we would watch the sun come up.”

Despite their desire for an alternative non-materialistic life — and deep disappointment when “bourgeois” values arrived in Israel “when the American movies came” — her attitude towards the territory gained in 1967 was close to the views of the right. “We were happy because we felt it brought Israel back together,” she says. “We thought that was part of Israel. In 1947 we wanted to have peace, but they fought us.” She adds: “We looked at it as fair because they started so many wars with us.”

Looking back now, Sernoff, 80, maintains that Israel took the right course of action after the Six-Day War — with one exception. “I think they did the right thing at the time — the only thing I’m sorry about is that they gave back Gaza, because this

brought so many problems.”

But Sernoff’s broad satisfaction with Israeli policy regarding the conflict doesn’t translate to satisfaction with life in Israel. “When I arrived, I was looking at everything with starry eyes; now I’m looking at things with more tired eyes,” she says. Sernoff thinks that Israel has become materialistic and “corrupt,” and said that if all of her four children were happy to emigrate, she would leave Israel. “If we could take our family out and leave and they’d be happy, I’d be happy, because I don’t like the government, and I don’t like the religious element and the materialism, and there isn’t the dancing anymore.” ◆ ome of the immigrants who were most excited

by Israel’s post-’67 reality were those who had been to the country before the war and stared at borders that stopped them from going to the Kotel.

Paula Edelstein, 77, recalls: “When we were here in 1959, there was a laboratory building that you could go to the top of to see inside the [old] city. That was then very exciting.” Scaling heights to see the Jewish sites of Jerusalem had been

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“It’s obvious that the most important element of the last 50 years has been the push for [settlement building] from below,” says former New Yorker Yisrael Medad. commonplace. Another American immigrant, Yisrael Medad of New York, remembers: “We would attend a melave malke on Mount Zion and after some schnapps and herring, we would climb a minaret and see if we could see the Kotel.” Medad was actually in Israel when the change came about — he spent most of the war in a foxhole in Moshav Amatzia near Kiryat Gat along with the rest of his gap-year program participants.

Edelstein and Medad’s stories have many similarities — the two American Jews, religiously committed albeit Reform and Orthodox respectively, both wanted to see Jerusalem’s Jewish sites before ’67 and felt elation when they could; both made aliyah shortly after the Six-Day War, feel glad they did and that they have Israeli children and grandchildren. They arrived in the ’70s as young couples and are still married to their spouses — Edelstein to Don, whom she met on the boat to Israel in 1959, and Medad to Batya, whom he married in 1970 just a few weeks before immigrating. The couples live just 30 miles apart.

But they relate to the war very differently today.

Edelstein traveled from her native Minnesota to Jerusalem in 1959 for a short study program, and returned to the city an immigrant. “It was very different than the city in 1959,” she says. “The fact was that you could go anywhere, including the Old City, to the West Bank, to Ramallah, through the winding hills to Bethlehem — this was very exciting.”

Medad, a settler who directs educationl programming at the Menachem Begin Heritage Center in Jerusalem, considers Jerusalem Day a festival. The

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Not in 1939, atop Mount Scopus, when Hadassah opened the first teaching hospital and medical center in Palestine. And not in 1948, when an armored ambulance was ambushed en route to Hadassah Hospital Mount Scopus, killing 75 medical personnel.

Hadassah evacuated the hospital, which would remain closed for 19 years, until Jerusalem’s reunification in 1967. But we opened other doors, creating the Hadassah Medical Organization (HMO), bringing together Israel’s first schools of medicine, nursing, dentistry, public health and occupational therapy.

Ever since, our medical teams have met Jerusalem’s health needs. During the

Six-Day War, for example, 92 physicians at Ein Kerem performed over 400 major operations in just 4 days.

With the reunification of Jerusalem in 1967, Hadassah President Charlotte Jacobson received the keys back to Hadassah Mount Scopus, pledging to renovate the hospital. It opened its new doors in 1975.

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COURTESY OF THE EDELSTEINS

Edelsteins will be steering clear of public events, unlike when they first arrived. They have “very ambivalent feelings — more ambivalent now than they were then,” says Edelstein.

Edelstein, who worked in public health, still feels relief at the Israeli victory but thinks that the “results of the Six-Day War were very unfortunate,” referring to what she considers a mistaken policy in the West Bank and the “hardening of positions on the left as well as the right.” She feels satisfaction at the unification of the city but thinks that it “should have been handled differently,” including through “giving Arab residents of the city some sense that it’s their city too with some sense of self-rule.”

In the years after her aliyah, she started to hope that the new territory would serve Israel’s interests by becoming a bargaining chip for peace. “Our son was six weeks in the army when the first intifada broke out, and it wasn’t within our expectation that his daughter would now be in the army,” she says.

Edelstein’s reservations about how the 1967 gains were handled go beyond the Israeli-Arab conflict. The iconic moment of Israel’s Six-Day War campaign was the recapture of the Kotel. She is disappointed about how control of this site has turned out, and supports the “battle” by feminist activists and the Reform and Conservative movements for dedicated space for egalitarian prayer. It is a cause she tried to promote through leadership roles — which she took on after her career in public health — in Arzenu, the umbrella organization of Reform and Progressive Religious Zionists and in the Religious Action Center of the Reform movement.

The Kotel conflict is one of many bones of contention that have gradually made Edelstein question her choice of where to live. “In Jerusalem you have political conflict and conflict between Orthodox and Reform and secular, and it all bubbles up in one place,” she says. “If I were choosing again, I’m not sure I would choose Jerusalem.” She may have been more likely to choose somewhere in the Tel Aviv area, where both her sons live.

Medad has no regrets about his choice of home.

During his first years in Israel he lived in Jerusalem, including the Old City, and then 11 years after aliyah he moved to the West Bank settlement of Shilo, founded three years earlier, as one of 10 families settling a new hillside.

His settlement is today the center of the “bloc,” where the first new government-ordered settlement since the Oslo peace process is to be built. When he moved to the area there were only 300 Israelis there; now there are thousands. “This is normalization of our life out here,” he says of the plans for the new settlement, which were announced in late March.

Medad has started a dynasty of settlers, with several of his five children and six grandchildren

He directed the Betar Students’ Hostel and tried bravely to learn Arabic, giving up after several attempts in a Palestinian-run language class. It was a time when the Jewish Quarter was being renovated after decay and destruction under the Jordanians and, to Medad’s joy, the settlement movement in the West Bank was beginning. But not everything went his way, and he, like Edelstein, has a gripe about how Israeli leadership of the 1960s handled its newfound control over holy sites.

He feels that he can’t fully celebrate Israeli rule over Jerusalem when the holiest site in Judaism, the Temple Mount, is overseen by an Islamic trust — the Waqf — and the number of Jewish visitors is restricted and they are banned from praying. “I should have tried harder at that time with my friends,” he said, referring to the campaigns by right-wing activists for Israel to keep full control of the site.

Will this temper his enjoyment of Jerusalem Day? “It reduces my joy every day.”

Nevertheless, Medad has no doubt that the 1967 victory has taken Israel in the right direction. “Israel, Jews and Zionism keep moving upwards and onwards,” he says. “That’s the significance.”

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Paula and Don Edelstein with their eldest granddaughter at the Jerusalem YMCA. The unification of the city “should have been handled differently,” Paula says.

living in the West Bank. “There are three generations of Medads beyond the Green Line and that gives a great deal of satisfaction for me,” he said.

After all, in his opinion, what made the 1967 gains real was settlers like him. “It’s obvious that the most important element of the last 50 years has been the push [for settlement building] from below.

For me, looking back shows that if we don’t put our own bodies in the line to commit ourselves [to the settlements], then nothing can be done.”

Medad remembers feeling “euphoric and exuberant” after he emerged from the foxhole at the end of the Six-Day War. He was on his gap year with a small group from the rightist Betar movement, and most of the other members of the youth movement they had studied with in previous months were centrist or leftist. He felt that his ideology was vindicated, and that Israel was moving in the direction that Betar had been hoping for. At the end of his gap year he returned home, finished his studies, tied the knot and went to live in the neighborhood he had looked longingly at when he climbed the minaret tanked up on “schnapps” — the Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem’s Old City.

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Once There Was A War Following the fighting, with flowers in your hair.

Jonathan Mark Associate Editor

T

he killers were at the gate. On the morning of June 5, 1967, in our yeshiva high school, there was no Talmud class so we could say Tehillim — the desperation of deathbed Psalms.

Egyptian troops were moving against the Negev in the south, bombing Tel Aviv in the north, shooting down 42 Israeli planes, said Cairo Radio. (That morning, who knew what was true?) Egypt, we were told, roused its troops, “Oh, Arab soldiers … your time has come. Attack, destroy and liberate Palestine and launch yourselves against Tel Aviv!”

Their war aims were simple. Egypt’s President Nasser declared, “our main objective will be the destruction of Israel.”

The Six-Day War in Pop Culture Rabbi Pesach Levovitz, of the Rabbinical Council of America, wondered about a “third world war.” Parents, teachers and kids (with our second-hand, handme-down memories) remembered the last world war, Holocaust and all. It was only 22 years before. In the last days of May, Israelis were digging mass graves, knowing how quickly mass graves could fill.

Israel’s allies in the 1956 war, Great Britain and France, were now neutral. The Soviet Union warned that “Zionist aggression” would bring the Soviet superpower into the war against Israel.

Egypt and her allies — Syria, Jordan, Iraq, Sudan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Yemen, Tunisia and Morocco — had four times as many planes, almost five times as many tanks as did Israel. Although Jordan’s ethnic cleansing of 1948 left the West Bank Judenrein, the Palestine Liberation Organization announced plans “to step up terrorist attacks on Israeli soil.” Another ethnic cleansing was in the offing. Arab military orders in 1967 called for the “physical destruction of the civilian population of any [Israeli] town which 1974 Archbishop Hilarion Capucci, head of the Greek Catholic Church in Jerusalem, is arrested and charged with using his Mercedes sedan to smuggle arms to Palestinian terrorists.

1975 A terrorist bomb in Zion Square kills 15 people.

Rock of ages: A poster advertising the iconic Monterey Pop Festival, which kicked off the Summer of Love. WIKIMEDIA COMMONS the invading armies may conquer.”

The State Department said the United States was “neutral in thought, word and deed.” Thanks, pal. But we kids understood. Why would America back Israel, which might not last the afternoon? Plenty of New Yorkers were against Israel. The New York Times reported, “Communists and other leftists sided with the Arabs … while moderates deferred to Israel.”

In the days before the war, The New York Times reported that children in Cairo came home from school singing, “Palestine… we are your fighters. We have sworn to drive the hated enemy from your soil.” It was time, said the Egyptian song, to return with an army “to liberate the homeland.” Nasser brushed off calls for peace, “Does peace mean we should ignore the rights of the Palestinian people?” Jewish kids were suddenly getting an education about words like “occupation,” “liberation,” “homeland,” and what the Arabs were prepared to do for it — “it” being the entirety of Israel.

We brought transistor radios to school, standing on the sidewalk, listening to war news on 1010 WINS, the only all-news station on radio or television. On 77 WABC, the new Beatles album, “Sgt. Pepper,” was getting airplay. The Rascals’ “Groovin’” was No. 1. The “Pick Hit

Jerusalem is struck for the first time by missiles, a pair of Czech-made Katyusha rockets fired by Arab terrorists, landing 500 yards from the Knesset.

1977 NOVEMBER: Egyptian President Anwar Sadat makes a historic visit to Israel, addressing the Knesset, where he calls for Israeli withdrawal from “occupied” Arab land and the estab-

of the Week” was Scott McKenzie’s “If You’re Going To San Francisco (Wear Flowers in Your Hair),” a messianic end of the world fantasy if ever there was one. In less than two weeks, McKenzie, along with the Mamas and the Papas, Canned Heat, Al Kooper, Laura Nyro, Jefferson Airplane, Buffalo Springfield, the Grateful Dead and Jimi Hendrix were set to play the Monterey Pop Festival, kicking off the “Summer of Love.”

Love? We were the wallflowers of summer. I felt like the lame boy in Robert Browning’s “The Pied Piper of Hamelin,” when all the children were led by the Piper to “a wondrous portal” that opened wide, “and when all were in to the very last, the door in the mountainside shut fast,” leaving only the one who “could not dance the whole of the way.”

Another song that was making the rounds in Jewish circles, Naomi Shemer’s “Jerusalem of Gold” (“Yerushalayim Shel Zahav”), had been introduced just two weeks earlier. It was hardly a war song, gentle as a lullaby: “The mountain air is clear as wine, the scent of pines is carried by the afternoon wind with the sound of bells... [Jerusalem] lies deserted, and in its heart a wall.” Jordanians did not allow Jews into the Old City. Shemer was writing from a 19-year memory.

Something was in the air. When was the last time a Jewish song even mentioned the Old City? In Yeshivat Mercaz HaRav, Rabbi Zvi Yehuda Kook made an off-the-cuff speech as melancholy as Shemer’s song: “Where is our Hebron? Are we forgetting it?

And where is our Shechem? Are we forgetting it?

And where is our Jericho?” Listening to him was a student, Hanan Porat, who later told an Israeli paper, “He was really like a man crying over the dead. …

In those days, no one spoke of the complete Land of Israel; the concepts ‘Hebron’ and ‘Nablus’ did not exist.” Two weeks later Porat was in uniform, kissing the Wall, hearing the shofar on the Temple Mount.

On June 7, with Israel more than holding its own, the United States sent the Intrepid aircraft carrier (now a museum docked in the Hudson), carrying 60-70 bombers, into the eastern Mediterranean.

Many New York Jews rallied to Israel. One professor divested himself of all he owned, giving the money to the United Jewish Appeal’s Israel Emergency Fund. People cashed in their insurance policies. In the street, passersby tossed cash and pocket change into Israeli flags, held like a hammock by young Jews. The International Ladies Garment Workers Union purchased a million dollars’ worth of Israel Bonds, as did 30 other unions.

Suddenly, on the seventh day, God and Israel rested. Life magazine, then the closest thing to America’s heartbeat, published a cover image featuring a tousle-haired Israeli soldier wading in the Suez Canal, a broad smile on his face, an automatic weapon held high. “Wrap-Up Of The Astounding War,” the headline read. The hot poster was of a Jew

lishment of a Palestinian state.

1979 The Hebrew University returns to its rebuilt pre-1948 campus on Mount Scopus.

The Eurovision Song Contest is held in Jerusalem. The Milk and Honey singing group wins with “Hallelujah.”

1980 The International Christian Embassy is founded by evangelical Christians to express their support for Israel and the Jewish people.

The Knesset passes the “Basic Law: Jerusalem, Capital of Israel,” which declares that the city will remain unified in the borders that the Israeli government determined following the

s . e t y t h

ritories seized from the Arabs in June,” specifically “the Etzion bloc.” The Times reported that the Jordanians had destroyed a kibbutz there, with almost every Jewish civilian expelled or murdered, and no burials allowed. Rabbi Yitz Greenberg, spiritual leader of the Riverdale Jewish Center, spoke on Shabbat morning about the 1948 orphans of Etzion (now with children of their own), returning and needing $10,000 for a Quonset Hut to serve as their new school. Rabbi Greenberg asked for $50 donations. The appeal took less than 10 minutes.

The United States government sent thousands of tents to the Jordanians to house Arabs who fled the West Bank, as the Arabs feared the Jews would do to them what the Arabs did to the Jews in 1948.

Well, Arab tents were traditionally woven from dark goat hair and decorated with quotes from Mohammed. The American tents, from Sears, were bright blue, green and yellow with a quote from Ted Williams: “For my money, a tent’s got to be easy

to get up and easier to take down. I like a tent that provides lots of fresh air and light.” The Jordanians were grateful for “the tents of Ted Williams.”

In New York, we learned the new verse to “Jerusalem of Gold”: “A ram’s horn calls us from the Temple Mount in the Old City / And in the mountain caves thousands of suns are shining / Once again, to Jericho we will descend via the Dead Sea.” Once there was a war. A war as improbable as the opening and closing of the Red Sea. Fifty years later, the United Nations still doesn’t recognize Israel’s rights to Gush Etzion or the Old City, where the shofar blew in that long-ago June.

“They will condemn us,” said cabinet member Yigal Alon in 1967. “And we will survive.” jonathan@jewishweek.org

HAPPY BIRTHDAY,

ISRAEL!

LET’S CELEBRATE!

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l o e c Baptism of fire: The face of victory in the Sixg Day War, on the cover of Life magazine. w WIKIMEDIA COMMONS Six-Day War. 1981 Some 6,000 people attend The World Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors.

1982 An Israeli soldier with an automatic rifle shoots his way into the Dome of the Rock on the Temple Mount, spraying the inside of the mosque with gunfire, killing at least two Arabs and wounding nine.

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ein a phone booth, changing into Superman. Rabbi rHaskel Lookstein said Jews who were walking yaround with the postures of a question mark, were ,now strutting like an exclamation mark. , Messianism was aromatic, in the air. Going to nSan Francisco with flowers in your hair? Jewish kids dwere going to Jerusalem, most for the first time. Reb yShlomo Carlebach, who flew to Israel to sing for the ”troops, had a peace plan: “Give me 5,000 seats on tEl Al to bring the holy hippies from San Francisco,” dwhere he had his shul, the House of Love and Prayer. y“We will give flowers to every Arab in the country, ,telling them we want to be brothers and sisters.” The eplan worked as well as any other. o The rock band Sam the Sham & the Pharaohs (with hits “Wooly Bully” and “Little Red Riding -Hood”) decided to change its name. The Pharaohs, ”formed in 1961, had admired Yul Brynner’s meandcool in “The Ten Commandments.” But in 1967, after ethe “Israelites” turned the tables on the Egyptians yet eagain, the Pharaohs became the Sam the Sham Revue. h Folks joked that President Johnson ought to hire nMoshe Dayan, Israel’s eye-patched hero, to lead us in eVietnam so we could end it by Sunday. Anti-war activists .such as Sen. George McGovern made it clear that they eliked Israel’s war. Two weeks after the Six-Day War, -when there was already a demand for Israel to withdraw efrom Arab territories, even without a single Arab concesssion, Sen. McGovern said Israel should “not give up a ?foot of ground” until her borders were secure. ? On Sept. 24, 1967, The New York Times reaported that Israel “made the first announcement ,tonight of concrete plans for the settlement of ter… f t g

NJ Jewish News ■ ISRAEL NOW ■ 2017

10

High-(Rise) Anxiety In A Gentrifying City The mixed blessing of urban renewal, Jerusalem style.

Michele Chabin Contributing Editor

J

erusalem — As a present-day resident of Jerusalem it’s difficult for me to imagine that the city was once considered a pathetic little backwater of a place. When Mark Twain visited here in 1867, the writer noted that “a fast walker could go outside the walls of Jerusalem and walk entirely around the city in an hour. I do not know how else to make one understand how small it is.”

I suppose Twain had envisioned Jerusalem as a grand city based on the number of pilgrims who traveled thousands of miles to visit it, and not a downtrodden little town. When I drive up to Jerusalem I sometimes wonder what Twain and Zionist leaders like Theodor Herzl and David Ben-Gurion would think of today’s Jerusalem, which now has 800,000 residents, 150,000 more than Boston, for example.

A Changing Jerusalem

Would they marvel at the new high-rises that dot the creamy stone skyline, the sparkling malls and the trendy new restaurants in the suddenly hip Mahane Yehuda market? Or would they frown at the urban sprawl and the huge gap between those who live in squalor and those who spend $2 million or more for a flat they occupy only twice a year, on Passover and Sukkot.

What would they think of the municipality’s efforts to transform the western, Jewish side of the city into a metropolis while (unofficially) refusing to enlarge and develop the eastern Arab neighborhoods?

“No political entity will admit it’s doing anything deliberate to prevent development in east Jerusalem,” says Elan Ezrachi, an educational consultant and author of “Awakened Dream: 50 Years of Complex Unification of Jerusalem” (currently only in Hebrew). But the lack of municipal plans for Arab Jerusalem and the refusal to issue building permits in the Arab sector “is a vicious cycle,” he says.

In the Jewish sector, by contrast, officials are actively encouraging the creation of tens of thousands 1983 Bob (Zimmerman) Dylan visits the Western Wall on the day of his son’s bar mitzvah.

The Midrachov pedestrian mall is established downtown, at the corners of Jaffa Road, King George Street and Zion Square.

1984 A terrorist kills two students at the

Above: A shoddy Jewish building constructed decades ago in Baka to house Jewish refugees is getting a facelift. Below: A just completed building in the Bustan Baka complex provides luxury housing that most native Jerusalem residents canno afford. PHOTOS BY MICHELE CHABIN/JW

of apartments to stem the annual exodus of mostly young Jerusalemites eager to purchase homes but unable to afford Jerusalem’s high prices.

Fleur Hassen-Nahoum, who leads the opposition in the Jerusalem City Council, says the rush to build more homes is pitting the need to address the housing shortage against the desire to preserve the city’s unique architecture and character. “The city is in the midst of an urban renewal process in certain parts,” she notes. “There isn’t enough supply for demand. Young couples miss out and leave the city. In polls, housing is always one of the top reasons they leave.”

One cause of the housing shortage is the lack of land to build on. Much of the city’s land is owned by various Christian churches, and in some parts of the city residents can’t sell their apartments because they were built on church land, where leasing arrangements will expire within 30 years. With so little land, new buildings are going vertical rather than horizontal, and that’s transforming the skyline.

For the past several years Mayor Nir Barkat has been permitting developers to build several high-rises in downtown Jerusalem; recently approved plans to tear down decades-old “shikunim” — shoddy buildings built in the 1950s and ’60s to house Jewish im-

Cremisan Monastery in Jerusalem.

1985 The Jerusalem Botanical Gardens opens.

1986 John Demjanjuk, an accused Nazi war criminal (aka Ivan the Terrible) living in Cleveland, is deported to Israel, going on trial at the Jerusalem District Court.

migrants living in ma’abarot — tent-and-shed cities.

In south and west Jerusalem, along the light rail train tracks slated for these neighborhoods, several of these buildings will be demolished and new buildings (with more upscale apartments to suit the current tenants) could reach 40 stories, HassenNahoum says. Similar projects are slated for the western part of the city.

Ezrachi thinks high-rise construction will be a good way to bring relatively affordable housing back to Jerusalem. “It’s good because it allows the municipality to demolish old, inadequate housing projects, and will allow tenants to return to their homes for the long-term.” The down side, Ezrachi says, is that the longtime residents, who tend to be poor, may no longer be able to afford the upkeep of a building with several elevators, gardens and other amenities.

“It pushes them out of the neighborhood softly,” he acknowledges.

Hassen-Nahoum agrees that gentrification via urban renewal is a mixed blessing.

“Gentrification is taking place in neighborhoods that up until now were working-class. Young couples move in because they can afford homes. It’s happening now in Armon HaNatziv,” an east Jerusalem Jewish neighborhood, “and it happened 30 years ago in Baka,” a south Jerusalem neighborhood that was upscale until the Arabs who owned the homes fled in 1948 and the Israeli government housed Jewish refugees in the abandoned

Refusenik Natan Sharansky, released after spending seven years in the Soviet Gulag system, arrives in Israel, receiving a hero’s welcome at the Western Wall.

1987 DECEMBER: The first Palestinian intifada uprising starts at the Jabalia refugee camp in Gaza and spreads to the West Bank and Jerusalem.

1988 The Women of the Wall hold their first prayer service — disrupted, as in later years, by charedi Jews — at the Western Wall.

The Brigham Young University Jerusalem Center for Near Eastern Studies (often referred to as the BYU Jerusalem Center) opens on the Mount of Olives.

11

Plant an Olive Tree

to Seed Desert Research Plant an olive tree in Wadi Mashash, the experimental farm of Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, and support invaluable agricultural research that could mean the difference between starvation and sustenance for men, women and children who live in drylands and deserts.

Planting a tree for research in honor or in memory of a loved one, or to commemorate a milestone occasion, is a great way to show you care, while also helping to make the Negev desert bloom.

To make your 100 percent tax-deductible contribution, go to www.aabgu.org/olivetrees

Urban renewal is taking place in Jerusalem through Tama 38 a national program that strengthens buildings against earthquakes and allows developers to build and sell new apartments built on the roof. homes or hastily built shikunim.

Today, Baka’s shikunim are being spruced up via a national program called Tama 38, which allows developers to build additional floors onto the roof of a building without having to pay for land. In return the developers strengthen old buildings against earthquakes, enlarge the existing apartments, build elevators and reface the buildings with attractive Jerusalem stone.

John Demjanjuk is found “unhesitatingly and with utter conviction” guilty of all charges, and is sentenced to death.

Michel Sabbah is consecrated as Roman Catholic Bishop of Jerusalem, becoming the first Palestinian Arab to hold this position.

1990 Cable TV arrives in Israel.

means that the demand will always far outstrip the supply.

The only real affordable housing on the horizon may be in the form of student rental housing — studio apartments for university students and possibly other young people who want to remain in the city but can’t afford $1,000 and up in monthly rent.

Despite the challenges facing Jerusalem, Hassen-Nahoum remains hopeful. “Jerusalem will be very different in 10 to 20 years,” she said optimistically.

Let’s hope different means better.

The Temple Mount riots, Arabs protesting Jewish worship, result in the death of more than 20 Palestinians and the injury of 150.

1993 Teddy Kollek, Jerusalem’s mayor since 1965, loses a race for re-election.

A new City Hall, located in the Safra Square, opens.

646-452-3693 I newjersey@aabgu.org I www.aabgu.org

NJ Jewish News ■ ISRAEL NOW ■ 2017

While Tama 38 usually doubles or even triples the value of the properties, there is no law requiring developers to pay owners’ rent during the one-and-ahalf to two years it takes to complete construction, and many owners have no choice but to live in a construction site.

On the positive side, Hassen-Nahoum says, a neighborhood’s gentrification can be a wonderful thing for older, financially struggling owners who can finally sell their homes at a huge profit and move closer to their grown children.

Whether my children, who are teenagers, will be able to afford to live in Jerusalem when they’re older remains to be seen.

Although the increase in the number of apartments should, in theory, bring down prices, the high birthrate in Jerusalem, where even many secular families may have four children,

NJ Jewish News ■ ISRAEL NOW ■ 2017

12

An Alliance’ Of Creative Types Alliance House, home to artists, dancers and designers, offers a collaborative model to strengthen downtown Jerusalem.

Michele Chabin Contributing Editor

J

erusalem — Unlike many young Jerusalem artists and performers, Adi Yair isn’t planning her escape to Tel Aviv, which most Israelis consider the cultural capital of Israel.

“My dream is to stay in Jerusalem and spread my art all over the world,” said Yair, a native Jerusalemite who graduated from the city’s prestigious Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design. “I grew up

A Changing Jerusalem

here. I like the spirit, the people. You know everyone. Jerusalem is like a big family.”

For the next couple of years at least, Yair, who creates sophisticated women’s apparel, much of it made from fabric she has woven, has an enviable place to work in downtown Jerusalem, thanks to a collaboration between a real estate developer, the Jerusalem municipality and New Spirit, a nonprofit organization launched in 2003 to bring about social change to the city.

Last year real estate developer Amir Biram bought Alliance House, a former school built in 1881 next to what soon became the Mahane Yehuda shuk, with plans to turn it into a hotel. He is loaning the building to New Spirit to house artists, dancers, designers and others until the municipality approves his building plans. That should take two to five years.

Before artists could move into the abandoned three-story stone building, however, it had to be cleared of debris and its interior modernized.

During a tour of the building she provided to The Malha Mall, the country’s biggest indoor shopping center, opens in the city’s southwestern corner.

The Tisch Family Zoological Gardens, better-known as the Jerusalem Biblical Zoo, opens in the Malha neighborhood.

The Israeli Supreme Court overturns John Demjanjuk’s convictions.

Top: The courtyard of the Alliance House arts center in the heart of Jerusalem hosts large parties. Above: A studio at the center. Right: Celia Tawil shares her studio at the Alliance House with five other female charedi artists. Her current series of paintings depict IDF soldiers. PHOTOS BY MICHELE CHABIN/JW The Jewish Week, Casey Girard, New Spirit’s director of resource development, recalled that the building was “derelict and rundown. There were junkies’ needles and a lot of pigeon droppings.”

After Biram, who was on New Spirit’s board, of-

fered the organization the building on a temporary basis, it took just three months to make it habitable, though renovation is still a work-in-progress.

The Alliance House boasts a large inner courtyard where events, including large parties, are

1994 Palestinian terrorists armed with automatic rifles and grenades open fire in the Nahalat Shiva neighborhood, killing an Israeli soldier and an Israeli Arab and wounding at least 13 others.

the Old City walls.

and 178 injured.

Palestinians throw stones and bottles at police to protest the opening of a controversial tunnel in the Old City that links the Western Wall and the Via Dolorosa.

1999 The Eurovision Song Contest is held in Jerusalem.

1996 A Jerusalem 3000 celebration marks the “trimillennium” of the capital, centered in the City of David outside

1997 Hamas terrorists carry out two suicide bombings in the Mahane Yehuda market. Sixteen people are killed

The Kraft Family Stadium opens in the center of Jerusalem as a venue for immigrants to play their U.S.-brand of football.

Teddy Stadium, named for Teddy

13

Adi Yair, a women’s clothing designer, says sharing space at the Alliance House fosters creative partnerships with other artists.

held in good weather. It has high ceilings and an abundance of tall windows. The ground-floor features the studio Adi Yair shares with other artists, as well as a larger space. The top floor contains N e w S p i r i t ’s offices and several art studios and performance rooms.

The middle floor will soon house the offices of Mass Challenge, a social incubator for startups.

The renovations, which were funded by government agencies,

foundations and private donations (including one from Biram), cost about $190,000 — very modest for such a large, old building.

“Beit Alliance [Alliance House] is an essential part of our strategy to strengthen downtown Jerusalem,” a municipal spokesperson told The Jewish Week. It is “a perfect example of the rich, diverse renaissance happening in our city.”

Fifty years ago, when Jerusalem was reunited, the Mahane Yehuda neighborhood was a bustling place bordered by Jaffa Road, with small stone houses and the fruit-andvegetable market. Today, those old houses have been gentrified, rents are sky-high and the market now boasts many trendy restaurants, allnight bars and chic shops alongside the stalls of produce vendors. The refurbished Alliance House, with its

Kollek, opens in south Jerusalem as a site for soccer games and concerts.

praying at the Western Wall.

2000 SEPTEMBER: Likud Party leader Ariel Sharon makes a highly visible visit to the Temple Mount, to demonstrate Jewish sovereignty. The PLO uses it as a pretense to start the second intifada uprising.

Pope John Paul II visits Jerusalem,

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The Belz Great Synagogue, the largest Jewish house of worship in the country, opens in the Kiryat Belz neighborhood.

2001 The Versailles wedding hall collapse kills 23 and injures 200, Israel’s worst-ever civil disaster.

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14

‘Alliance’

continued from previous page young colony of artists, fits right in.

Biram told Haaretz that “it is possible to make an agreement with a familiar nonprofit organization, and everyone benefits.

Suddenly you hear music booming, young people coming and going. Passersby enter the building and are amazed at its beauty, including those who studied here in the past, like my mother.”

Indeed, during a recent spring night, young people in their teens and 20s prepared for an all-night party of up to 1,000 of their peers in the building’s courtyard and sprawling parking lot, which is far enough away from resi-

dential buildings to permit a lot of noise.

Seated on a narrow wooden bench in the courtyard with some friends as the party was getting started, Noam Bogot, who recently completed his army service, said parties at Alliance House “attract quality people. Jerusalem isn’t a party city, and I think that’s a good thing, but young people need to have a safe place to drink a beer, to dance.”

Most of the time, though, the building is bustling with more creative pursuits.

A plaque by the entrance lists the many grassroots organizations utilizing the space: a dance troupe, a theater troupe, art studios — including one for female charedi artists. There are spoken Arabic lessons and yoga. Writers, journalists and academics are encouraged to

hang out together in a room called the Lounge while Jerusalem residents who are no longer charedi come together for social events.

On the evening of the mega-party a group of former charedim, women and men, sat in a large comfortable room in chairs arranged in a circle as one of the members strummed a guitar. Others stood around schmoozing.

“People like the atmosphere here,” said Meir Viner, who left the charedi world several years ago. “There’s so much culture here for everyone, secular and religious.”

In the colorful charedi women’s art studio, where the paintings, drawings and sculptures of six artists can be seen, side-by-side, in varying states of readiness, artist Celia Tawil explained why the studio at Alliance House is so important to her work.

“As far as I know, this is the first charedi art studio in the world,” said Tawil, who has recently been inspired to paint images of Israeli soldiers because “we are all soldiers of Hashem.”

Tawil said there are art programs for charedim in Israel and abroad, but not studios.

“Were it not for this space, I would be working at home. Being here gives me a sense of community.”

Adi Yair agrees.

Seated at her loom in the studio she shares with a leather designer, a jewelry designer and a menswear designer, Yair said creating and selling what she calls “wearable art” at Alliance House “has afforded me a huge opportunity to work together with other artists.

I feel inspired by them when we meet in the kitchen or our respective workspaces. There is already cooperation.”

Yair excitedly related how, when the head of the dance troupe saw her designs, she asked Yair to create some of the costumes.

In another instance, a painter asked Yair to supply some solid-colored clothes that the artist intends to paint.

“A lot of clothing designers move to Tel Aviv,” Yair noted before explaining that “there aren’t enough people in Jerusalem who appreciate fashionable clothes,” to keep most designers in business.

The drawback of working in Tel Aviv, she said, is that “it’s hard to be individualistic.

I’ve heard it said that Jerusalem is the kitchen and Tel Aviv is the dining room. In my opinion, most creative work is cooked here, in Jerusalem.” ing in downtown Jerusalem kills 15 people and injures 130.

2002 Jerusalem’s first gay pride parade takes place.

Israel begins building its security fence.

Highway 50, officially called Begin Boulevard, opens, linking the city’s northern and southern areas.

15 NJ Jewish News ■ ISRAEL NOW ■ 2017

Reaching Across The Seam Line

In Abu Tor, a rare ‘Good Neighbors’ partnership is forging new relationships at the border between east and west Jerusalem.

Joshua Mitnick Contributing Editor

J

erusalem — Running through the heart of Jerusalem’s Abu Tor neighborhood, Asael Street used to be divided by barbed wire that marked the no-man’s-land between Israeli west Jerusalem and Jordanian east Jerusalem in the decades before 1967.

Today, the casual visitor to the neighborhood would be hard-pressed to find any remnants of the barrier.

Israelis, expatriate foreigners and Palestinians residents walk the road freely and exchange pleasantries in Arabic and Hebrew.

There are — however — other clues of the enduring divide in an area Israel captured a half-century ago during the Six-Day War: On the west-

Along Asael Street ern Israeli side of the street, address signs on newly renovated buildings are in Hebrew; and on the eastern Palestinian side, the houses are adorned by colorful stenciled images of the Dome of the Rock alongside Arabiclanguage graffiti.

Indeed, even though Abu Tor’s Israeli and Palestinian halves have long since been unified governmentally, for decades the neighborhood’s two populations have lived separately. Relations across the old dividing line have been few and far between.

Decades of political tension and occasional waves of Palestinian uprisings against Israel have left Jewish residents anxious about venturing down the slope where the Palestinian section of the neighborhood begins.

Many Palestinians have kept away

from Jewish neighborhoods.

In the last two years, however, a group of Palestinian and Israeli residents of Abu Tor have reached across that divide to get to know one another and improve life in the neighborhood.

Dubbed “Good Neighbors,” the rare Jerusalem partnership is still in its

infancy but has yielded a series of joint projects; there are Arabic- and Hebrew-language courses, several Arab-Jewish social gatherings and a children’s soccer team that draws players from both sides of the neighborhood.

“There was a virtual wall in our

neighborhood,” said David MaeirEpstein, a resident of Asael Street who has spearheaded the cooperation initiative with his wife Alisa. “People would have second and third thoughts before going to the other side.”

The cooperation effort, he said,

IDT Global Israel, which provides “business process outsourcing solutions,” opens in Jerusalem.

Nobel Prize in economics.

The Jerusalem Malha terminus of Israel Railways opens.

2009 Pope Benedict XVI visits Israel.

2003 Uri Lupolianski is elected Jerusalem’s first charedi mayor.

2006 Dr. Roger Kornberg, visiting professor at Hebrew University, wins to Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

2008 An Arab resident of east Jerusalem carries out a bulldozer a t t a c k o n J a ff a R o a d , k i l l i n g three people and wounding at least 30.

2005 Dr. Robert Aumann, emeritus professor at Hebrew University, wins the

David Maeir-Epstein on Asael Street. “There was a virtual wall in our neighborhood.”

PHOTOS BY JOSHUA MITNICK/JW

2007 Teddy Kollek dies at 95.

At Mahane Yehuda, a Guinness record in hummus consumption is set, from a plate with a 3.8-yards diameter.

continued on following page

UNESCO and the Arab League sponsor an Al-Quds Arab Capital of Culture program to promote Arab culture and encourage cooperation in the Arab world.

2011 The first Jerusalem Marathon takes place.

NJ Jewish News ■ ISRAEL NOW ■ 2017

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Abu Tor

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is bearing fruit because it steers away from political dialogue and airing competing narratives between Palestinians and Israelis in regard to the long-running conflict. Instead, the residents have focused on areas of common interest: garbage pails, speed bumps, green spaces, community centers and resisting a luxury building project slated for the Stewart is asking you toDonate. help Donate. neighborhood.

Hadassah do what we do best: Save lives and get closer to a The project is about “my hope, my environment, cure for cancer. my concerns and my neighborhood,” said MaeirDonate.

Epstein, a community organizer originally from Bethlehem, Pa. He noted that the next dimension of the joint project involves a plan to boost Abu hadassah.org/Melanoma hadassah.org/Melanoma Tor’s retail and service providers by encouraging Financial and other information about Hadassah may be obtained, without cost, by writing the Finance Department at Hadassah, 40 Wall Street, New York, NY 10005, or by calling 212.355.7900. ©2017 Hadassah, The Women’s Zionist Organization of America, Inc. Hadassah, the H logo, and Hadassah the Power of residents to patronize local businesses.

Women Who Do are registered trademarks of Hadassah, The Women’s Zionist Organization of America, Inc. The seeds of the partnership were planted in hadassah.org/Melanoma 2014 and 2015, when Jerusalem was awash in violence and riots surrounding tensions over the Temple Mount in the Old City. There were stabbings, car ramming attacks and daily vandalism by Palestinians against the city’s light rail line. Large detachments of riot police were deployed as young Palestinian kids set dumpsters aflame and threw rocks at police. Several residents of the neighborhood found their cars torched.

For the first time, the police set up a series of roadblocks along the seam line between east and west in Jerusalem. Abu Tor was not spared: streets in the Palestinian half were littered with rocks and burned-out dumpsters, while residents were blocked from driving their cars into the Israeli half of the city.

A Center of Jewish Life Despite the tension and reservations, residents in and around Asael Street were able organize a series Millburn, NJ of evening meetings over coffee. This was no small www.cbi-nj.org feat, said people involved in the project.

“We are one neighborhood, but there are people who were afraid at the beginning,” said Khaled Rishek, who also facilitates a Jewish-Arab youth leadership group at the Jerusalem YMCA. “A lot of people on our side and the Jewish side were opposed to getting to know each other. The hardest

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other information about Hadassah may be obtained, without cost, bythe writing theDepartment Finance Department at Hadassah, 40 WallNew Street, New NYor10005, or by calling 212.355.7900.

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©2017 Hadassah, TheZionist Women’s Zionist Organization America, Inc. Hadassah, logo, and the Hadassah Power of Women Who Do are registered of Hadassah, TheZionist Women’s Zionist Organization America, Inc. ©2017 Hadassah, The Women’s Organization of America,ofInc. Hadassah, the H logo,the andH Hadassah Power the of Women Who Do are registered trademarkstrademarks of Hadassah, The Women’s Organization of America,ofInc.

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al and other information about Hadassah may be obtained, without cost, by writing the Finance Department at Hadassah, 40 Wall Street, New York, NY 10005, or by calling 212.355.7900.

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Through neighborhood common ground, Maier-Epstein says, “We want to take back the center.” thing is the first step, but we’ve succeeded in getting past it.”

Haj Ghaleb Abu Nimjeh, the head of the neighborhood in the Palestinian half of Abu Tor and a resident of Asael Street, remembers playing soccer as a child along barbed wire and asking Jewish kids to return balls that had been kicked over the border fence. In the decades after the 1967 war, relations in the neighborhood have experienced several ups and downs.

He said that when the Good Neighbors project first got off the ground, there was pressure from Palestinian politicians from outside of Abu Tor to pull back.“I told them this isn’t about politics,” Abu Nimjeh said. “We are doing something for the neighborhood.”

Since the advent of the project, the situation in the neighborhood has improved, he said.

“We realize that we need to be good neighbors to help each other. If we are separate, and don’t help each other, we won’t achieve anything,” he said.

For years, the Jewish half of the neighborhood, with its leafy streets and old stone buildings and loVideos of an alleged UFO in the skies above Jerusalem take the Internet by storm. The hoax purportedly depicts a glowing, unidentified object that slowly descends from the sky and hovers directly above the Dome of the Rock.

2013 The site of Jerusalem’s former railroad station reopens as HaTakhana HaRishona (“The First Station”), a culture and entertainment venue.

2014 Pope Francis visits Israel.

Two Palestinian terrorists enter Kehilat Bnei Torah synagogue in the Har Nof neighborhood, attacking congregants with axes, knives, and a gun. They kill four dual-nationality worshippers, and critically

17

“I’m not saying this is going to bring peace in the Middle East,” he said. “But if it builds up a sense of trust and pride that ‘we did it together,’ that can create a community that can look beyond our religious and political differences.”

Still, with Jerusalem’s divide still deep, such joint partnerships take time to build, he acknowledged.

“This is apolitical, but if it succeeds and builds a model, it makes an important political statement that strengthens the center. In Israel, the extremists on both sides want to say, ‘You can’t live together,’” he continued. “If we can make this a community that lives together, and has a common vision, we are saying that we want to take back the center.”

Discover the iconic moments of modern Jewish history cation on the seam of Jerusalem, has drawn foreign journalists and diplomats — a trend that has helped spur a wave of renovation. In the Palestinian area of the neighborhood, however, residents face numerous demolition orders for buildings that the municipality says are unauthorized.

Despite that disparity, the Jewish and Arab residents of Abu Tor are also trying to team up to oppose a plan to build a trio of luxury seven-story buildings on the historic neighborhood bluff — considered a holy site by many — looking out to the Old City. Residents are also concerned that the new development project will bring with it traffic and parking problems for residents of Asael Street.

“We all fear that land might be expropriated to widen the road at the expense of the Arab side,” wrote Sue Serkes, a neighborhood resident and activist, in an email. “This kind of working together in Jerusalem is unheard of — especially at this time.”

Abu Tor’s Arab-Jewish soccer team just finished its first year competing in a city youth soccer league, reaching the semifinals in its age group.

Shimon Dolan, a 69-year-old lawyer who helped pay for the team’s uniforms, said the young playwound a responding Druze Israeli police officer, who later dies of his wounds.

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NJ Jewish News ■ ISRAEL NOW ■ 2017

ers communicate in a mix of Arabic, Hebrew and English. Though they barely speak each other’s languages, the game helps bridge the gaps. “There is a lot of motivation. There is anticipation for the games and the practices. They like coming,” Dolan said.

However, it is difficult to deepen the kids’ familiarity with one another beyond soccer, he concedes. That requires additional time from parents and kids.

“I would like to see more connection between Jews and Arabs beyond the game, but that’s hard,” he said.

Maeir-Epstein said that he believes the framework of Arab-Jewish community cooperation in Abu Tor can be replicated in other areas straddling the border in Jerusalem.

18 NJ Jewish News ■ ISRAEL NOW ■ 2017

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Why American Jews Aren’t Cheering Anymore Fifty years later, do too many of us still see Israel as an ideological theme park?

ligious forces that dominate their government. But the vast majority is still happy about Jerusalem’s unification and Jews being able to reconnect with their holy places. Moreover, there also seems to be a solid centrist consensus that believes the obstacle to peace remains Palestinian intransigence rather than Israeli policies.

But for an American Jewry that remains as solidly liberal in its outlook as it was in 1967, the cheers for the Six-Day War victory haven’t just faded. An air of indifference or even outright opposition to Israel’s cause has replaced them for growing num-

bers of Jews. Rather than evidence of the Israeli courage that seemed so inspiring a half-century ago, the legacy of 1967 is now seen by many as proof that the Jewish state is undeserving of the backing of enlightened liberals.

While uncomplicated joy over a military victory may seem naïve today, the self-conscious moralizing that has replaced it among American Jewish elites is just as, if not more, absurd.

The disconnect between the reality of Israel’s difficult security choices and the angst of American Jewry about its connection to a country falsely accused of being an oppressor tells us a lot more about the shallow virtue signaling of the latter than it does about the shortcomings of the former.

The dichotomy between Israeli and American Jewish attitudes is summarized by a remark I’ve often heard when speaking about these issues.

When confronted with evidence that points to a consensus about the peace process that stretches from the centerleft to the center-right in the Jewish state, liberal critics of Israel tend to change the subject. They have little interest in thinking about the events of the last quarter century of peace negotiations in which Palestinian rejectionism and terrorism has destroyed support for the peace process inside Israel. But rather than seek to understand Israeli public opinion, many liberal Jews simply tell me that the current situation makes them “feel bad.”

Indeed, what many of those thinking about the issue generally miss is that attitudes toward Israel aren’t rooted so much in analysis of a complex situation with few, if any, good options, but in

ister, dies.

nistic culture held sway here.

Donald Trump, Republican candidate for president, pledges that, if elected, he will move the U.S. embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.

2017 Elected president, Donald Trump appears to backtrack — or delay — the moving of the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem. Trump’s envoy to the Middle East, Jason Greenblatt, begins shuttle diplomacy to Israel, trying to jumpstart the stalled Israeli-Palestinian peace process.

Jonathan S. Tobin

Special To The Jewish Week

F

ifty years ago, the events of May and June 1967 produced an emotional reaction from American Jewry that spurred a groundswell of financial and political support for the state of Israel. But what many observers missed about the reaction was the way the war made Jews around the world feel proud, whether they were Zionist or indifferent to Israel, religious or completely secular.

Five decades after the euphoria of 1967, Israelis are divided about some of the byproducts of victory, such as the value of West Bank settlements and the rise of the more nationalist and re-

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Archaeologists uncover the remnants of an impressive fort built more than 2,000 years ago by Greeks in the center of old Jerusalem. The ruins are the first solid evidence of an era in which Helle-

An Israeli Arab drives a truck into a group of soldiers in the East Talpiot neighborhood, killing four and injuring 15.

‘If Israelis have no appetite to trade land for terror rather than peace, that is seen as a moral failing to be shunned rather than understood.’

Lebanon War, Israel was no longer the all-purpose morale booster for American Jews. During the first intifada in 1987, a simplistic and misleading narrative about the conflict developed in which Jews were seen as the Goliaths oppressing the stone-throwing Palestinian Arab Davids; again, Israel became a drag on Jewish identity. Rather than make everyone feel good about being linked to the plucky Jewish underdogs, much of the overwhelmingly liberal American Jewish community began to view it as a complicated and often deeply unattractive “occupier” nation that deserved criticism if not censure rather than uncomplicated adulation.

Just as the Israel of the Uris novels was misleading and told us more about the needs of diaspora Jewry than the reality of the early years of the Jewish state, so, too, is the opposite stereotype of its leftist critics that falsely claim it to be an apartheid state led by hardline leaders and religious fanatics who oppose peace and “steal” the land of Palestinians. The real question is not so much why Jews can’t recapture the uncritical spirit of 1967 or to assert that Israel’s cause is no less just today than it was 50 years ago. Rather it is why American Jewish perceptions of the conflict in 2017 are so out of

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touch with Israeli attitudes.

Part of the problem is the way intersectionality — the linking of all causes of minority groups — leads many on the left to buy into lies about Israel being an “apartheid” state. If you see the Jewish state as primarily a moral paradigm that must be all good or all bad, the hard choices Israelis must deal with are set aside in favor of a desire to stand in judgment upon a country that has supposedly lost its soul. That’s why many Jews choose to distance themselves from Zionism rather than to stand with embattled Israel.

Despite the debate about settlements, the obstacle to peace today is the same Arab refusal to recognize the legitimacy of a Jewish state — no matter where its borders might be drawn — that led to the Six-Day War. But what also hasn’t changed is that American Jews still regard Israel’s tough choices as a reflection upon themselves as much as anything else. For them Israel remains an ideological theme park. If Israelis have no appetite to trade land for terror rather than peace, that is seen as a moral failing to be shunned rather than understood.

While Benjamin Netanyahu and the Jewish right may be reasonably critiqued, all too many liberal American Jews still seem primarily focused on how events in the Middle East reflect upon their own place in the world. If they are disappointed that Israelis prefer to protect their security rather than adopt policies that bolster their self-image, they shouldn’t be surprised to discover how out of touch they are with opinion in the Jewish state.

Jonathan S. Tobin is opinion editor of JNS.org and a Contributing Writer for National Review. Follow him on Twitter at: @jonathans_tobin.

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19 NJ Jewish News ■ ISRAEL NOW ■ 2017

the way American Jews act as if it was all about them.

Though 50 years ago most American Jews’ knowledge of Israel was mostly a mix of Zionist slogans and Leon Uris novels, the notion of a Jewish state winning battles against long odds made the vast majority of them feel better about their own identity and place in the world. In an era where organized Jewish life was increasingly centered on pride and concern for Israel and efforts to memorialize the Holocaust, June 1967 was a moment in which all those concerns came together to reinforce the notion that Israel represented everything Jews aspired to and admired.

The seemingly improbable victory of 1967 had, like the emergence of independent Israel in 1948, changed the image of Jews. Instead of the cowering victim of the Holocaust or the countless pogroms and persecutions that had preceded it in the previous two millennia, Israeli Jews were winners.

Like the character played by actor Paul Newman in the film version of “Exodus,” Israeli Jews were heroes and heartthrobs, not nebbishes or the villainous stereotypes into which much of Western literature had pigeonholed Jews. While not everyone could be an Ari Ben Canaan, his fictional celebrity was a reflection of the way a new Jew had emerged in Israel to sweep away the baggage of countless generations of persecution and Americans basked in the reflected glory.

Events like the 1976 Entebbe rescue could still stir the Jewish imagination, but the following decades revealed the other side of the equation by which Jews lived vicariously through Israeli achievements. As the country’s ruling Labor Party was replaced by the more nationalist Likud led by Menachem Begin in 1977 and the Jewish state received its first massive bout of negative press coverage during the 1982

NJ Jewish News ■ 2017

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