A Street Divided: Stories From Jerusalem’s Alley of God Read online

  Note

  *Italicized quotes in the book are based on memories of one or more people who were part of the conversation.

  Two

  Father of the Bull

  In the beginning, there was a hillside. It rose steeply above the Old Testament’s accursed Valley of Slaughter, high enough to give people living there an enviable view of the Middle East city where G-d created Adam from the dust, Jesus Christ was crucified for our sins and the Prophet Muhammad ascended to Heaven.

  This hillside may have been the place where Judas cut a deal with Jerusalem’s high priest to betray Jesus Christ for 30 pieces of silver. It may be named after a Muslim warrior—but it’s not entirely clear which one. Some Israelis say it is named for a revered Jewish high priest who lived and died here.

  If you ask the head of the Greek Orthodox Church in Jerusalem, he might tell you this neighborhood on the hill, Abu Tor, isn’t named after a famed Muslim fighter general at all. It’s named after a Greek Orthodox saint known for healing the city’s animals. Some researchers say the hilltop actually draws its name from pagan worshippers who carved out stone caves where they paid homage to their gods 3,000 years ago.

  In Abu Tor, people tell different stories about the neighborhood’s name. So it’s not surprising that people can’t agree on what has actually happened here. Some researchers will stake their reputations on saying that Abu Tor is the place where Judas conspired with the Jewish high priest Caiaphas to bring down Jesus—a place known as the Hill of Evil Counsel.

  Abu Tor would have been a perfect place for plotting and scheming. From the open vista, it feels like you can almost jump over the valley and land inside the Old City’s walls. On quiet mornings, the sun rising over the Judean Desert casts the Old City in silhouettes of domes, minarets and steeples washed in a hazy indigo-apricot hue. The city’s crowded neighborhoods roll out below Abu Tor as the echoes of howling dogs and crunching tires ricochet through the streets. Winds the color of iodine sometimes slam into Abu Tor, battering the hillside with endless waves of desert sand. It feels like the kind of place where you might conspire to bring down a heretic who claimed to be the Son of God.

  Some tour guides and historians say the real Hill of Evil Counsel lies farther south, on the ridgeline used first by the British to rule post–World War I Palestine and then by the United Nations as it tried to keep the peace in the Middle East. Even if the UN Government House doesn’t actually sit on the Hill of Evil Counsel, it’s a good story for tour guides.

  The Tomb of Abu Tor

  In English, the Arabic name Abu Tor is usually translated as “Father of the Bull” or “Father of the Ox.” In this case, it is believed to have referred to a fierce Muslim general who fought alongside Saladin as his fearsome army rousted Christian Crusaders from Jerusalem in 1187.

  Depending on who you ask, the general’s full name might have been Ahmad Bin Jamal ad-Din or Sheikh Shehab ad-Din el Cudsi. In either case, he was given the name Abu Tor for riding a bull into battle with Islam’s most celebrated warrior. As a thank-you for his bravery, Saladin gave Abu Tor a small village on a hillside outside the Old City’s Jaffa Gate. Even after the war, the bull remained loyal to the general. When Abu Tor needed things from the market, he would tie a note around his faithful bull’s neck and send it lumbering toward town. Without fail, the bull returned to the hillside every time with all the things that Abu Tor needed.1

  Some longtime residents of Abu Tor say that both those stories are wrong, that the real Abu Tor is Abu al-‘Abas Ahmad ibn Jamal al-Din ‘Abdallah ibn Muhammad ibn ‘Abd al-Jabar al-Kudsi, who helped Islam’s second caliph, Umar ibn al-Khattab, conquer Jerusalem the first time, in 637.

  Little known to most people, even many of those living in the neighborhood, is that, whoever he is, Abu Tor is buried at the top of the hillside in a small stone crypt that has been transformed into a backyard storage shed.

  (Even this is sometimes disputed by the Greek Orthodox Church. The man buried there isn’t Muslim, the church leaders might argue. He’s a sixth-century Christian martyr.)

  Abu Tor’s final resting place is in the shadows of a broad fig tree, under a cement-and-stone block shed that’s used to store bikes and gardening tools, right next to a plastic garbage can.

  The tomb’s location can be found in the UN archives on copies of the cease-fire map used by Dayan and Tell in 1948, where it is marked as that of “Sh. Ahmad et Turi,” Sheikh Ahmad of the Bull. Sometimes old Muslim men from the neighborhood down the hill will come to the narrow stone alley outside Abu Tor’s tomb and raise their hands in quiet prayer.

  Some locals say there is good reason to stay on Abu Tor’s good side: He will haunt the people who don’t look after his tomb. Bad things happen to those who don’t take good care of his final resting place. And so Abu Tor’s tomb remains. He has been buried alongside one of the neighborhood’s most captivating homes: a one-story stone house with a central domed roof and high ceilings that may have served as a mosque, a Greek Orthodox patriarch’s home, and a brothel.

  Others say the origins of the neighborhood’s name can be traced back much further than the seventh century. Some people say the name Abu Tor dates back thousands of years, to the time of Canaan, when pagans worshipped gods like Baal, a deity often depicted as a bull. As in the Valley of Slaughter below, some locals say, small cults used the Abu Tor hillside to honor their gods with fiery offerings and bloody sacrifices.

  One of the suspected sacrificial spots is near Eliyahu Goeli’s home, inside the walled compound that has been owned by the Greek Orthodox Church for centuries. For the Greeks, for all Christians, this spot holds special significance beyond its reputation as the Hill of Evil Counsel. Hidden beneath the sloping hilltop is a claustrophobic catacomb that once held the bones of some of Jerusalem’s important Christian pioneers, one of whom was beheaded in the fourth century when he refused to betray his faith.

  The small stone monastery is built above a beautiful, long mosaic floor that some people say is a clear sign that the hillside was an important spiritual center in days gone by. The monastery seems to be jammed into the hillside at an angle, like it’s been yanked around a few times. The building, with its short, narrow, arched stone entrance and its rusting crucifix hanging from the heavy iron front door, dates back to the seventh century when Saint Modestus restored Jerusalem’s decimated holy sites, including the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. Modestus wasn’t just a Christian hero: Church leaders say he protected and healed animals. For that, the Greek Orthodox Patriarch has said, Modestus was the one from this hillside known as the real, the original, Abu Tor.

  Of course, there are some modern-day residents of this neighborhood who say that the original name is actually Givat Hananya, the hill of Hananya, a Jewish priest from the city’s Second Temple era who had a summer home there. But most people, Arab and Jewish, simply know this place as Abu Tor: home of the stubborn-headed.

  The Gates of Hell

  Until the late nineteenth century, many people thought this hillside was too far from the Old City to be safe from marauders. Though only a half mile from the safety of the Old City walls, Abu Tor is on the far side of an ignominious valley with steep drops that make it difficult to quickly move through by foot, horse or car.

  The Old Testament refers to it as the Valley of Slaughter. On this the city’s Jews, Christians and Muslims can agree: This rough-stoned valley leads to the Gates of Hell. This is where the wicked will be held to account for their deeds.

  It is among the spotty grass and olive trees that Jewish kings are said to have once sacrificed their sons. The choking smoke that once rose from the darkened valley floor came from innocent children thrown by pagans into funeral pyres to honor their gods.

  It may be the valley where an inconsolable Judas hanged himself from a tree after realizing the result of his betrayal of Christ. It may be
where Judas bought a potter’s field and had a mysterious—and fatal—fall. It’s a place known in the New Testament as the Field of Blood.

  To the southeast of Abu Tor is the city’s Peace Forest, a plunging ridgeline filled with hundreds of acres of pine, eucalyptus and olive trees. The modern-day forest promenade has been the setting, depending on the level of tension, for everything from Jewish-Muslim musical performances to small-time criminal dognapping rings, from Palestinian kids’ malicious stone throwing to fatal Palestinian stabbing attacks on Israelis out for a walk in the park.

  In 1887 a German banker and two Jewish partners decided to build a block of affordable housing on a ridgeline in Abu Tor. They got halfway through the construction of Beit Yosef before they gave up. In the 1920s, about ten Jewish families were living in Beit Yosef when the city was hit by a wave of tension focused on restricted Jewish access to the Western Wall. Though local residents tried to protect the Jewish families in Beit Yosef, a bloody 1929 revolt sparked by the tensions made it clear that Jewish families were imperiled.2

  The Jewish families moved away from Abu Tor and a new Palestinian business class moved in. The neighborhood became a magnet for merchants from Hebron, who settled in Abu Tor and built many of the stone homes with arched windows, mosaic floors and high ceilings that still define its historic character.

  Finding Martin Buber in a War Zone

  In the run-up to the 1948 war, Abu Tor had little strategic value. It had served mostly as a staging ground for a few militant attacks along Hebron Road, the busy route on the edge of Abu Tor that connected the Old City with Bethlehem and Hebron to the south. It also connected the British Mandate headquarters, on the ridge some called the Hill of Evil Counsel, with central Jerusalem. Militants planted roadside bombs, hit the government printing press building on Hebron Road and launched small attacks on the railroad station right next door.3

  When Israel’s new army made its push to control Jerusalem’s Old City in 1948, it swept through Abu Tor with relative ease. The soldiers faced little resistance on the hillside as Jordanian fighters fell. Most of the families had fled. And it wasn’t a place where Arab forces could easily hold ground. Israeli soldiers held just enough of Abu Tor to protect the train station and government buildings on the western edge of the neighborhood along Hebron Road.

  As Israelis moved from house to house in Abu Tor looking for enemy soldiers trying to hide among the civilians, they ran into an unexpected resident: Martin Buber, the famed existentialist philosopher known for his wild, white beard, which sometimes made him look like a deranged, homeless prophet.4

  “He had a weird look,” said one Israeli soldier in a military report unearthed by Doron Oren, an Israeli researcher who wrote a dissertation on Abu Tor. When the Israelis asked Buber why he hadn’t sought safety somewhere else, he apparently told them he wasn’t worried.5

  “He was sure no one would hurt him,” the soldier said.6

  Buber moved away from the new border drawn by Dayan and Tell. The crown of Abu Tor became the eastern edge of Israel. The houses abandoned by the Palestinian merchants were given to dozens of low-level Israeli government clerks who had been forced to move from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem if they wanted to keep their jobs.

  Many of them weren’t happy to be moving from their more temperate coastal lives in Tel Aviv to abandoned homes on Israel’s new border with Jordan. The clerks filed complaint after complaint asking the new Israeli government to fix up their houses. When the government dragged its feet, the clerks banded together in protest.7

  They complained about being placed on the border; they said they couldn’t help noticing that other government workers, those with connections and more responsibility, had been given nicer homes away from the border in Katamon. The complaints and protests usually went nowhere.8

  As more and more people began moving to Israel, a country the Jewish people could finally call their own, its leaders struggled to find homes for them all. Abu Tor became the new neighborhood for scores of immigrants from the Middle East and North Africa. The new families came from Iran, Morocco and Tunisia. They began to take over homes right on the barbed wire border separating Israel from No Man’s Land and the Jordanian soldiers beyond.

  Waiting for Santa Claus

  Down the hillside, below the narrow stretch of Abu Tor No Man’s Land separating Israeli-controlled West Jerusalem and Jordanian-controlled East Jerusalem, Arab residents retained their connection to work and life in the Old City across the valley.

  Many took buses and walked to their jobs as cobblers, shopkeepers and sandwich makers. They all knew there was a new country at the top of the hill. It wasn’t clear how long it was going to stay. Arab leaders across the Middle East assured their citizens that Israel wasn’t going to last. Jordanian soldiers moved into the neighborhood and took over Palestinian homes to use as forward posts along the new border with Israel. They rolled out barbed wire to mark the western edge of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, a newly independent country that freed itself from British rule in 1946.

  Right beyond the barbed wire, as the hillside pitched up sharply, was No Man’s Land. Most of the homes there were empty. Loose metal shutters slammed against stone walls when storms swept across Abu Tor. For the kids living below the barbed wire, No Man’s Land was a No-Go Zone. It was dangerous. It could be deadly. They knew Israeli soldiers were keeping watch from positions hidden in the tree line above them, but they could rarely see them. They knew, as some say in Islam, that Allah was as close to them as their jugular vein.

  Saliba Sarsar was born in East Jerusalem seven years after the city was split by Dayan and Tell. Saliba grew up on the lower slope of Abu Tor, where he would sometimes sneak into the deep, wide fields and forests in the more lightly guarded No Man’s Land to the south of Abu Tor, out where the United Nations had its headquarters. But Saliba and his friends steered clear of the dangerous gash of No Man’s Land that ran above their neighborhood.

  “We heard all kinds of horror stories about people being shot in No Man’s Land and we never ventured in there,” Saliba said.

  Jordanian Legionnaires kept close watch on Abu Tor and got to know the families living in the neighborhood. They were suspicious of everything, even candy innocently tossed over the barbed wire.

  One day in Abu Tor, Saliba said, a pack of gum came sailing over the barbed wire along No Man’s Land and landed in the dirt. A man living nearby walked over to pick it up. The gum caught the attention of a Jordanian soldier, who came over to interrogate the man and make sure that the packet of gum didn’t contain any secret messages.

  The Sarsars were one of the families split by the 1948 war. When the shooting started, Saliba’s grandfather, Jani Korfiatis, was living with his wife in Jerusalem’s largely Arab neighborhood of Katamon. When the gunfire stopped, Jani was on one side of the border and the rest of his family was on the other. The son of Greek pilgrims didn’t see the need to leave his Katamon home when Israel was established. But his decision cut him off from the rest of his family living in Abu Tor. Like others living in Jerusalem in 1948, Jani had no clear idea what dividing the city was really going to mean.

  “It was their home,” Saliba said, “so they just stayed where they were.”

  When the barbed wire went up, Jani went down to see the Jordanian Legionnaires in charge of the neighborhood: “Take good care of my daughter,” he told them. “Take good care of my family.”

  Every year at Christmas, Israel and Jordan allowed a few thousand Christian pilgrims to cross from West to East Jerusalem, through Mandelbaum Gate, so they could see family and visit Christ’s biblical birthplace in Bethlehem. Saliba’s grandfather was one of the few living on the west side of the city who got the yearly pass to visit. Each year, Saliba and his siblings counted the days until they could see their grandfather. Jani always brought them sweets from Israel and other gifts that they couldn’t get in
East Jerusalem.

  “We waited each year for Santa Claus, and Santa Claus was none other than my grandfather,” Saliba said.

  The visiting permits were always short—usually a few days. Then Saliba’s grandfather would cross back through Mandelbaum Gate and disappear again for another year.

  Beatnik Abu Tor

  There was something about living on the edge of a new country that attracted eclectic characters to Jerusalem. On the Israeli side, as the country dug in, artists established a small bohemian outpost in Abu Tor. Abandoned Palestinian houses in Abu Tor filled with young, adventurous Israeli poets, writers, television directors and sculptors who wanted to live—spiritually, psychologically and physically—on the edge. Director Tom Shoval, who produced a short documentary about the artistic life of Abu Tor, described the neighborhood in the 1950s and 1960s as “an international center of Beatnik life.”9

  “People, artists made pilgrimage to the area,” he said. “There was a unique spirit here.”10

  The London-born poet Dennis Silk, known for filling his place with hand puppets and wind-up toys, moved into a house next to the Goeli family. He practiced his marionette plays at his house. Yehuda Amichai, one of Israel’s most celebrated poets, came to Abu Tor to live, as he put it in one poem, “inside the silence.” So did poet Arieh Sachs and Micah Shagrir, a pioneer of Israeli film and television.

  The neighborhood represented the frontier of the young country, the place where artists felt like they could stew in Israeli angst. Living in Abu Tor meant simmering in the idea of what it meant to be Israeli. The artists gathered at each other’s homes for parties and poetry readings. American writers and British poets came to drink wine along the border and scribble down anguished ideas about life on a precipice.

  The artists who lived in Abu Tor ruminated on what it meant to live in homes abandoned by Palestinians and what they would say to the old owners if they ever came back. On one visit to see Arieh, British poet Elaine Feinstein marveled at the Israeli poet’s elegant, curved Arab ceilings, a compliment that appeared to sober him up during a long night of drinking. Arieh smiled bitterly and told Elaine that he had recently seen Palestinians burning tires in the road nearby. “I got the message,” he said.