Knowing and unknowing

Employees at Kikar Safra are in the dark about their fate once an new tourism authority is created.

By PEGGY CIDOR
tourists temple 298 88aj (photo credit: Ariel Jerozolimski [file])
tourists temple 298 88aj
(photo credit: Ariel Jerozolimski [file])
One person's ceiling is another person's floor. In this complex world of ours, good news for one is often bad news for another. This is exactly what recently happened to the municipal culture department. As In Jerusalem revealed previously, almost everyone thinks that the decision "to create an authority for culture, tourism and external relations" is, in principle, a good one. In fact, the authority already exists, by virtue of legislation passed in the previous Knesset. The final launch is expected to take place in, at most, a few weeks. But there's a problem. The approximately 120 employees of the municipal culture department at Kikar Safra are getting very nervous. Nobody is talking to them, they complain, nobody has bothered to explain to them what their fate will be. Will they be employed by the new authority? Fired? Under what conditions? They simply don't know. They don't even know about a relatively simple decision, such as whether the municipal libraries will become part of the authority or remain part of the municipality. They're not the only ones who don't know. No one seems to know. And speaking of knowledge: Most would consider knowledge to be an advantage. After all, a judge's deep familiarity with a case brought before him, our readers might think, should serve him and the interests of justice. So they would think. But in our Holy City, things are very, very different. Here is the full story: As you, dear readers, probably remember, our mayor is determined to free himself from the municipal attorney, Yossi Havilio. Havilio - how should I say this delicately? - failed to see eye to eye with the mayor over several issues. And, heaven help us, he even actually disagreed with him openly on a few other issues. Havilio didn't get the broad hints that the administration lobbed his way and refused to resign. And so Mayor Lupolianski, on the advice of his close advisors, decided to launch a procedure to have him removed. A special committee appointed by the Interior Ministry said the mayor was wrong and Havilio appealed his dismissal. Over at the Labor Court, Judge Dita Projenin listened to both sides and issued an interim decision that Havilio could not be fired. This was the time of the hagim [holidays], when all of Israel, and certainly the Holy City, is on hiatus, so the People of Israel went about their holiday-time business and paid little attention. Now that everyone is back, the mayor has changed his tack: he is asking the judge to withdraw from the case because, he claims, she is "too knowledgeable about the case." It is as if the mayor were saying, "Dear Judge. I'm very disappointed in you. What were you thinking? You've studied the details of the case and you've heard all the witnesses. You know too much. Please step aside, and let another judge, who doesn't have a clue about the whole thing, make the final decision." No, he isn't kidding. However, far be it from this column to refrain from presenting our readers with good news, especially when we do have some. If you live in the Malha neighborhood, let's say on Rehov Kfir, you might have (or not) heard of the decision by the Names Commission to change the name (and to call it Rehov Haim Kubersky, if you really want to know). Not that the residents, or anyone else, have anything against the esteemed Mr. Kubersky, a former director-general of the Interior Ministry, who did much for the city of Jerusalem and for the State of Israel. But that doesn't mean that they want to change the name of their street. And they certainly didn't like the way the change was forced upon them: waking up one morning, quite out of the blue, they were told that Kfir, Shual and Namer streets would all be renamed. No one asked them - after all, they only live there. And pay a few thousand shekels in arnona every year which, they naively thought, should entitle them to have something to say about changes in the neighborhood. They may be naive but they're also determined. The Malha residents' committee refused to give up. They demanded that their representatives in the municipal council actually do something about this. In this week's city council meeting, Nir Barkat and his partner, Lydia Bilitzki (Jerusalem Will Succeed) presented a demand that the municipality could not arbitrarily change the names of streets and that, "from now on, every change or decision to name a street will take [the preferences] of the residents into account." Hmm...take the residents' opinion into account? Sounds good, doesn't it?