These days it's really hard to go back in time. The effects of globalisation and mass communications are such that you're never far from recogniseable fashion or a satellite dish.
But the one place you can feel like the clock has been wound back a hundred years or so, is Mea She'arim, the Jewish ultra orthodox neighbourhood, just a stone's throw away from our Arab one. Walking there, you could be in an Eastern European Jewish quarter in 1900. The district, built in 1874 to house people escaping the squalid conditions of the Old City, is now populated mostly by 'Hasidic' families who are characterised by their rejection of modern secular culture, and their antiquated dress codes. No internet is allowed and no contact with outsiders. It's a big thing for someone from these communities to start out alone - sometimes even leading to suicide.
Men, women and children are hatted. Black fedora style, yarmulke or kippa, headscarves, snoods, and wigs. Everyone has their head covered, and if you half close your eyes, the predominant shades are black, white and grey. Side-locks and the white chords, slung around mens' waists (in observance of some of the over 600 Jewish holy laws), dance as they walk. Shoulders are stooped, eye contact is avoided and you see no one touching. At a glance, it can seem like a gloomy place - buildings are sand coloured and shabby and posters in Yiddish (the ultra orthodox use Yiddish for speaking rather than Hebrew which is reserved for praying and worship) curl and peel off bill boards. You can tell it's a poor area, but there's still a sense of order. Scooters, bikes and other childrens' toys hailing back decades, are stacked at balconies. There are children everywhere. These guys don't hold back in the breeding department.
As we wander through the narrow streets and alleys in the dusk, our guide points out Yiddish posters calling for modest dressing and explains the meaning behind the ram's horns in the windows. These are 'shofar' used at the Rosh Hashanah festival - or Jewish New Year, and hooted to symbolise a wake up call, inviting believers to take stock and become better people.
Our guide is a tall blonde Dutch lady, married to an Israeli. She knows and loves the area well, as she does her adopted counry, and explains first and foremost that this is a population of people mistrusted and misunderstood - part of the reason why she does these tours. 'They look peculiar, so people mistrust them,' she explains, in the same breath distinguishing some of the 30 large Hasidic groups and their 100 odd subsections, noticeable sometimes by the mere angle of a hat, or a different coloured stripe on a gown. 'People think these people are settlers or responsible for violence, but they aren't. In the main they're just waiting for the coming of the Messiah and trying to be good people based on the laws they've been raised to adhere to.'
She tells us that some of the dress codes are there due to instructions in the Torah or Talmud, but others are there simply to avoid assimilation with non-Jews and to keep the race alive. For all the persecution that has happened over the centuries, this strict code is surely something that has saved them. But the tragedy being that this also made them easily distinguishable during times in history such as the holocaust, and therefore their Achilles heel.
She explains that people don't generally catch your eye, smile or stop to chat for the same reasons - to avoid an opening with outsiders and risk the beginning of a mixing process. But one man with a long grey beard did stop and ask us where we were from. 'Oh. Britain! Good.' And he shuffled off.
We stop for a cup of tea and a slice of cheese cake in a little cafe. The elderly woman in a black skirt and hairnet smiles warmly as she serves us. Everything is kosher in this district, and we spot a little falafel sign with side-locks, explaining exactly that. A useful bit of humour when you can't read Yiddish.
It's a fascinating insight into a subsection of a culture that can seem very opaque to an outsider. Indeed, our Arabic teacher who lives nearby has never even heard of this district, which is like not knowing Kentish Town when you live in Camden.
Over our tea we quiz our guide about the politics. Since she's married to an Israeli and has lived here over 20 years, though is non-Jewish, we know she'll have something interesting to say.
'My father in law was one of the founding members of the State of Israel, having left Hungary,' she says: 'He was part of the Zionist Communist movement here when they were building the state. And he admitted to me that they didn't have an eye for the other people here when they were busy re-building their promised land. He told me: 'Though the Jewish people desperately needed somewhere to go after the holocaust, were we, this damaged people badly in need of therapy, really the ones who should have been building a country back then?''
The light fades and we wander home back towards our Eastern quarter with a few more questions answered, and some new ones appearing in their wake, but with a lot less suspicion and little more understanding of our black hatted neighbours in this cultural fireworks display of a city.
But the one place you can feel like the clock has been wound back a hundred years or so, is Mea She'arim, the Jewish ultra orthodox neighbourhood, just a stone's throw away from our Arab one. Walking there, you could be in an Eastern European Jewish quarter in 1900. The district, built in 1874 to house people escaping the squalid conditions of the Old City, is now populated mostly by 'Hasidic' families who are characterised by their rejection of modern secular culture, and their antiquated dress codes. No internet is allowed and no contact with outsiders. It's a big thing for someone from these communities to start out alone - sometimes even leading to suicide.
Men, women and children are hatted. Black fedora style, yarmulke or kippa, headscarves, snoods, and wigs. Everyone has their head covered, and if you half close your eyes, the predominant shades are black, white and grey. Side-locks and the white chords, slung around mens' waists (in observance of some of the over 600 Jewish holy laws), dance as they walk. Shoulders are stooped, eye contact is avoided and you see no one touching. At a glance, it can seem like a gloomy place - buildings are sand coloured and shabby and posters in Yiddish (the ultra orthodox use Yiddish for speaking rather than Hebrew which is reserved for praying and worship) curl and peel off bill boards. You can tell it's a poor area, but there's still a sense of order. Scooters, bikes and other childrens' toys hailing back decades, are stacked at balconies. There are children everywhere. These guys don't hold back in the breeding department.
As we wander through the narrow streets and alleys in the dusk, our guide points out Yiddish posters calling for modest dressing and explains the meaning behind the ram's horns in the windows. These are 'shofar' used at the Rosh Hashanah festival - or Jewish New Year, and hooted to symbolise a wake up call, inviting believers to take stock and become better people.
Our guide is a tall blonde Dutch lady, married to an Israeli. She knows and loves the area well, as she does her adopted counry, and explains first and foremost that this is a population of people mistrusted and misunderstood - part of the reason why she does these tours. 'They look peculiar, so people mistrust them,' she explains, in the same breath distinguishing some of the 30 large Hasidic groups and their 100 odd subsections, noticeable sometimes by the mere angle of a hat, or a different coloured stripe on a gown. 'People think these people are settlers or responsible for violence, but they aren't. In the main they're just waiting for the coming of the Messiah and trying to be good people based on the laws they've been raised to adhere to.'
She tells us that some of the dress codes are there due to instructions in the Torah or Talmud, but others are there simply to avoid assimilation with non-Jews and to keep the race alive. For all the persecution that has happened over the centuries, this strict code is surely something that has saved them. But the tragedy being that this also made them easily distinguishable during times in history such as the holocaust, and therefore their Achilles heel.
She explains that people don't generally catch your eye, smile or stop to chat for the same reasons - to avoid an opening with outsiders and risk the beginning of a mixing process. But one man with a long grey beard did stop and ask us where we were from. 'Oh. Britain! Good.' And he shuffled off.
We stop for a cup of tea and a slice of cheese cake in a little cafe. The elderly woman in a black skirt and hairnet smiles warmly as she serves us. Everything is kosher in this district, and we spot a little falafel sign with side-locks, explaining exactly that. A useful bit of humour when you can't read Yiddish.
It's a fascinating insight into a subsection of a culture that can seem very opaque to an outsider. Indeed, our Arabic teacher who lives nearby has never even heard of this district, which is like not knowing Kentish Town when you live in Camden.
Over our tea we quiz our guide about the politics. Since she's married to an Israeli and has lived here over 20 years, though is non-Jewish, we know she'll have something interesting to say.
'My father in law was one of the founding members of the State of Israel, having left Hungary,' she says: 'He was part of the Zionist Communist movement here when they were building the state. And he admitted to me that they didn't have an eye for the other people here when they were busy re-building their promised land. He told me: 'Though the Jewish people desperately needed somewhere to go after the holocaust, were we, this damaged people badly in need of therapy, really the ones who should have been building a country back then?''
The light fades and we wander home back towards our Eastern quarter with a few more questions answered, and some new ones appearing in their wake, but with a lot less suspicion and little more understanding of our black hatted neighbours in this cultural fireworks display of a city.
Your Arabic teacher probably never heard of the Kiryat Yovel or Bet Hakerem neighborhoods in Jerusalem as well.
ReplyDeleteThe fact is that most of the Arabs in east Jerusalem knew very little of the Jewish areas and neighborhoods in Jerusalem - including the city center, certainly until two or three years ago - before the light rail started to operate and before this massive change in the city started - when the Arabs started to come visit/work/study in west or Jewish Jerusalem.
Nowadays many Arabs also use Egged buses and are exposed to the Jewish parts of town which most knew nothing about only up until a few years ago.
The Jews who started with the great project of building a state for the Jews in Palestine were not Holocaust survivors. The Holocaust survivors joined the Zionist Jews that came, or that their parents came to Palestine long before the Holocaust - roughly from the 1880's onward.
People like Yitzhak Rabin, Ariel Sharon, Ezer Weizman, Moshe Dayan were maybe the protoptype of the "Sabra", the "new Jew". Contrary to the weak, gentle, pale, scared ultra-orthodox Jew of Europe who was good in studying the Torah but passive and helpless and not physically strong, the "Sabra" Jews who were born in Tel Aviv or Kibbutzim or Moshavim (agricultural settlements), usually to parents from eastern Europe, were physically strong, fearless, confident, did a physical kind of work like agriculture etc.
These "Sabra" jews were free of the fears and traumas or mental damage that haunted the Jews in the diaspora not only after Holocaust but for millenia of living as a persected minority in the diaspora. They and their parents before them put the infrastructure to the state army, political system, economy, education, cultural life of the Zionist communities in Palestine from which Israel developed. Of course the Jews who came from Europe or elsewhere afterwards, among them the Holocaust survivors, made a huge contribution to building the state, but they joined an already existing effort whose guidlines were already outlined by the pioneers who came before them.