High asking prices in the Jewish Quarter limit the volume of trade.
By JOHN BENZAQUENJerusalem's Old City 521(photo credit: Marc Israel Sellem)
The Jewish Quarter of the Old City is only a tiny part of the capital and has only about 2,500 residents. Yet despite its size, it holds a central position in the Jewish ethos, and many see it as a link between the Jerusalem of old – the one that thrived before the destruction of the Temple – and the Jerusalem of today.Jews have been living in Jerusalem more or less continuously since the time of King David. At the start of the 20th century, and even before, those who could afford to bought land outside the city walls and built themselves houses so they could leave the crowded and unhealthy Old City. By the 1940s, most of the Old City’s Jewish residents were concentrated in what today is called the Jewish Quarter, in the south-central part of the neighborhood. It is one of the traditional four quarters of the Old City. The others are the Christian Quarter in the northwest, in the area around the Church of the Holy Sepulchre; the Armenian Quarter in the southwest, around the Cathedral of St. James; and the Muslim Quarter, which covers a large part of the eastern area.Today’s Jewish Quarter is sparsely populated compared to the approximately 19,000 people who lived there at the turn of the previous century, when it was much larger. The Jordanian Arab Legion captured the Old City in 1948, and much of the Jewish Quarter was destroyed in the aftermath of that war. In the 1960s, American city planners, together with the Jordanian authorities, planned to have the quarter transformed into a park. During the 19-year Arab administration, the Jordanians demolished a third of the Jewish Quarter’s buildings.When Israel recaptured the Old City in the Six Day War, it rebuilt the Jewish Quarter. In April 1968, the government expropriated 32 acres of land that had made up the quarter before 1948 and had mostly been owned by the Muslim Wakf. In 1969, the Construction and Housing Ministry established a government- owned company called the Jewish Quarter Development Company and took charge of rebuilding the Jewish Quarter. The endeavor involved reconstructing existing houses such as Batei Mahaseh, a compound built in the late 19th century to house Jewish families of very limited means (the name means “Houses of Refuge”). The interior of the compound was converted into luxury duplexes, and the façade restored to its former look.Other residential buildings were restored as well, and as such, many of the housed in the quarter are single-family homes with modern interiors and restored exteriors. Other large houses were subdivided into as many as four dwellings of two or three stories plus the roof, or into two ground-floor and two second-floor apartments. The Jewish Quarter Development Company also built new homes – both semidetached and apartment blocks – but they did so in the Arab Oriental architectural style common in the Old City. The properties are not sold freehold, so the “owners” acquire long-term leases from the Israel Lands Authority.Most of the apartments are four-room, 100-square-meter dwellings. The semidetached homes are a bit larger.Because of the quarter’s religious importance – many consider the area the cradle of Judaism, and it is adjacent to the Western Wall – it has a large number of yeshivot and synagogues. One of the most important is the Hurva Synagogue, a well-known Old City landmark. It was built in 1701, destroyed during the fighting in the 1948 war, and rebuilt and consecrated in 2010.In 1967, before massive reconstruction work began on the Jewish Quarter, an archeological team headed by the Hebrew University’s Nahman Avigad did extensive excavations. The finds are on display in museums and outdoor sites, many of which are two or three stories below street level.HOW DOES all this affect real estate? According to Rachel Klein, who is in charge of the Jewish Quarter at the Anglo-Saxon real-estate brokerage in Jerusalem, the high asking prices there limit the volume of trade.“There is much demand, and by that I mean people who want to buy property in the Jewish Quarter but are deterred by the very high and, in my opinion, unrealistic prices,” she tells In Jerusalem. “Since we are talking about an area of some 500-plus households, it stands to reason that the trade volumes are very limited. Most of those who want to live in the Jewish Quarter are religious, many of them Americans – either new immigrants or affluent religious US Jews who want a second home in what they perceive to be the center of Judaism.”A single-family, two-story house with a rooftop terrace and a total built-up area of 140 sq.m., in dire need of redecoration, is on offer for $1.7 million (about NIS 6.67m.).The four-room, 100-sq.m. dwellings built 40 years ago cost NIS 3.5m. on average, while an average three-room, 70-sq.m. duplex apartment in the Batei Mahaseh compound costs NIS 1.8m. A single-family, three-floor, 150-sq.m.restored house is on offer for $870,000 (NIS 3,416,000). The house is on high ground, and to get to the entranceway one must climb 40 steps.
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