Returning to Zion (Part II)

The Ever-Dying City

According to the reports, Jerusalem is dying. To which the correct response is which Jerusalem. After all, the Old City remains full of holiness and haggling. Arab Jerusalem isn’t going anywhere. And Haredi Jerusalem is bursting at the seams, spilling out of its traditional neighborhoods. No, the Jerusalem whose eulogies are being prepared is secular Jerusalem, the Jerusalem of Yehuda Amichai, the Israel Museum and the Cinamateque. During the course of our trip, the refrain is repeated by secular Yerushalmis who have fled the city or plan to do so as soon as possible. There is a growing disconnect between the city’s ever-rising real estate prices and dismal job prospects. While welfare-yeshiva complex grows, draining far more resources than it provides in taxes, the city’s best and brightest, the next generation of the cultural elite, are moving to Tel Aviv.

We arrive in Jerusalem on Saturday night. For the remainder of the trip, we’ll be living out of rented flat in the German Colony. If the trip hadn’t felt like a extended family visit before, the fact the landlord is my mother-in-law’s college roommate completes the picture. The leafy German Colony, named for its early 20th century settlers, is firmly in sophisticated Jerusalem. In the past 20 years, it has been a magnet for the non-Haredi English speaking olim (immigrants). You can easily get by with little to no Hebrew.

I had stayed with my wife-to-be during her year in Israel in apartment on the main street, Emek Refaim. Back then, the strip had a tasteful cluster of cafes and restaurants – a refined alternative to the bustling (or formerly bustling) City Center. Stepping out to the street 9 years later, we have arrived at the world’s first kosher restaurant row. Spread along both sides were more than a dozen upscale kosher dining options, ranging from steakhouses to Latin to Asian fusion. These were supplemented with a cozy Yemenite restaurant, a burger joint, noodle bar, two bagel places and half-dozen cafes. The restaurants were not simply kosher, but “mehadrin” – literally translated as “beautified”, in practice more stringent than the Chief Rabbinate. But sprinkled in among this glatt hot stop were a few establishments for late-night Friday munchies or Saturday morning cappuccinos. If sophisticated Jerusalem was dying, Emek Refaim was clearly the last place to observe the trend. Knitted kippahs mixed seamlessly with leather boots. We repeatedly bumped in to old friends. We had flown half-way around the world only to arrive in the Upper West Side.

We had been warned that the City Center “looked like a war zone.” It was a particularly inapt description. On our last visit, Jerusalem was very much on the front lines of the 2nd Intifada. Ben Yehuda had been eerily empty – a shell of the vibrant strip that I roamed in the late 1990s. Compared to those lows, the midrachov had recovered nicely. The music store where I bought my first guitar, the Judaica shops with the endless selection of knitted kipot, the frozen yogurt bar that has welcomed generations of American teen tours were all still there. The Yemenite Step and the “Cadillac of shwarmas” were gone, but Max Brenner and a restaurant had filled the gaps.

Central Jerusalem did not in anyway look like the victim of war. It did however, bear more than a passing resemblance to Boston during the Big Dig. Jerusalem’s Big Dig is an ambitious light rail line designed to connect Pisgat Ze’ev in the far northeast to Har Herzl in the west. So far, it has primarily served to scar the entirely length of Jaffa Road with a massive ditch. As a result, traffic is hopelessly snarled and the stores that line the commercial boulevard turned construction site are empty. Jerusalem’s Big Dig even has its own spectacular cable bridge, the “Chords” bridge, designed to carry the light rail line over the frequently clogged road as the western gate to the city. With the train nowhere in site, it is currently the world’s most expensive pedestrian cross-over. The striking bridge feels grafted in from another city.

If the Light Rail is a testament to the failings of Israel’s once-proud public sector, the Mamilla Mall is concrete evidence that the private sector has no such problems.
Mamilla sits just west of Jaffa Gate, on the site of the pre-1948 shopping district which has languished as a dead zone ever since. The Mamilla complex fills in the gap between the Old City and City Center with a multi-tiered outdoor arcade and mall, somehow integrated organically into the topography of the valley and bedecked in Jerusalem stone. It filled with upscale shopping (and even a Gap) and galleries sharing space with trendy cafes and restaurants. The site is continuing to fill in and expand. It’s about as tasteful as a mecca to consumerism minutes away from the holiest sites of three faiths can be.

Jerusalem’s current mayor, hi-tech mogul Nir Barkat, seems to fit the city as naturally as the Chords Bridge. His election was the result of a grass-roots revolt over the Haredi-zation of the city and a fortuitous dissent in the Haredi ranks. Barkat’s efforts to transform the municipal government from a Haredi patronage machine have had mixed results. Hard-line Haredim have taken to repeated rioting over assorted provocations, such as Barkat’s decision to open a municipal parking garage for free on Shabbat, municipal social services intervention to protect a Haredi child from an abusive mother and Intel’s decision to open 7 days a week. To his credit, Barkat had held his ground.

In contrast to my friends who have given up on the city, there is Tara, an old friend who made aliyah and refuses to accept the death of secular Jerusalem. While most of her contemporaries have left, she has remained to fight the good fight. Yes, Tel Aviv is tempting, but its not why she made aliyah. Jerusalem is special. As Tara explains, the grass-roots movement that helped elect Barkat and serves as a counter to the Haredi riot squad is a result of a re-framing of the debate. The struggle is no longer for secular Jerusalem, but Zionist Jerusalem. Secular and religious Zionists have put aside their differences to preserve a vision of a city, which incubates Jewish cultural and intellectual curiosity. As a start, Tara is working to marshal the cultural resources of the city – its World-Class university, its art schools, its theater to come together a whole that is more than the sum of its parts.

As the statistics cited by Jerusalem’s undertakers note, the challenges the city faces are daunting. But as you walk the leafy streets of Rechavia, Katamon and the German Colony, the reflected glow of the Old City walls– you realize that the beauty of Jerusalem is resilient. It survived waves of suicide bombers, a Haredi mayoralty and a botched light rail line. There is no reason why the capital of the ever-dying people shouldn’t similarly shrug at the odds stacked against it.