It may not be demons and ghosts of the spiritual variety, but a plot of land in the center of Jerusalem carries with it a history of conflict and diplomacy between nations.
By DAVID STROMBERGThe old hospital in the Russian Compound.(photo credit: Courtesy)
Jerusalem doesn’t exactly have ghosts like other places. Instead of ominous warnings, we have sudden violence.Instead of fear – terrorism. Instead of spirits – spirituality.There’s plenty of death, but in the desert climate, bodies don’t decay slowly and come back to life as zombies.They’re placed in burial caves and turn quickly into dust, leaving bones that are collected and stored in ossuaries. It’s not that the memory and legacy of the dead aren’t part of our lives. It’s simply that the dead don’t spend their time haunting houses or hovering through the city.Instead, they imbue our days with living dread.One of the most tangible examples of how these demons affect our lives and history is found in the legacy of the Russian Compound. It was built mainly between 1860 and 1864 in Ottoman-controlled Palestine, with several later buildings added, along with a surrounding wall and gates at the north and south, giving it the title “compound.”It was erected on a hill overlooking the Old City which for millennia had been a staging ground for military attempts to conquer Jerusalem. This concentration of violence may have made this area different from others in the city. But it’s also possible that the real disturbance emanated directly from Russia and – reverberating with the spirits of ancient foreign armies looking to claim ownership of the Holy Land – set forth a series of events that caused disarray.The Russian Compound was created to serve Russian pilgrims visiting the Holy Land as well as to emphasize Russia’s presence in Orthodox Christianity.It originally included the Holy Trinity Cathedral, the Russian Spiritual Mission, a hospital, the Russian Consulate, the Elizabeth Men’s Hospice, and the Marianskaya Women’s Hospice.The Sergej Imperial Courtyard (or Sergei Courtyard), which served as a hospice for aristocrats, was completed in 1890, and was commissioned by the Grand Duke Sergei, the governor of Moscow who, among many other controversies, oversaw the expulsion of the city’s 20,000 Jews. The Nikolai Pilgrims’ Hospice, which could hold up to 1,200 people, was added in 1903. Yet it seems that demons originating in Russia doomed the entire enterprise, echoing the larger chaos unfolding throughout Russia, Europe and the Middle East.Like many, French writer Albert Camus located the source of modern terrorism in 19th century Russia, where radical activists used political killings to destabilize government and bring about revolution.The modern use of the word “terrorism” is often traced back to Sergei Nechaev, a self-proclaimed “terrorist” discussed in Camus’s long essay The Rebel (1951), who also served as one of the inspirations for Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Demons (1872), a novel considered prophetic in its ability to describe and foresee the nihilistic ethos of Russian terrorism and totalitarianism.Camus was himself so preoccupied by these issues that he wrote a play based on true events called The Just Assassins (1949).It told the story of a small group of Russian revolutionaries executing a political assassination in Moscow on the morning of February 17, 1905, when Ivan Kalyayev placed a nitroglycerin bomb in the carriage of the city’s former mayor. The Grand Duke Sergei was blown to bits. His wife, hearing the explosion, came running to collect whatever scraps she could find scattered on the snow. Kalyayev was found near the mangled carriage and arrested. He was hanged two months later, but not before testifying that he’d expected to die in the explosion. It would have made him one of the earliest modern suicide bombers.The Socialist-Revolutionaries assassinated many high-ranking officials, but their killing the Grand Duke Sergei created a ripple effect that played out in the Russian Compound in recent years.After the grand duke’s death, his wife, the Grand Duchess Elizabeth Feodorovna, retired from the world and founded the Mary and Martha Russian Orthodox Convent, taking care of the poor.She and Sergei had a childless marriage and the status of their material belongings was unclear. This was further compounded when Elizabeth was herself murdered by Russian revolutionaries in 1918. Her body was smuggled to Jerusalem via China, and she was buried at the Church of Mary Magdalene on the Mount of Olives. But her death left uncertain the legal status of the building that her husband had commissioned – which had meanwhile, toward the end of the First World War, come under the jurisdiction of the British Mandate.THE BRITISH entered Jerusalem while the newly formed Soviet Union, which was formally against religion, no longer supported Russian pilgrims traveling to Jerusalem.The British took over all the buildings in the Russian Compound and used the area less for its spiritual use than for its strategic potential – turning its buildings into the center of their government’s administration, with police headquarters, courts, immigration offices and a central prison.The area was heavily guarded and nicknamed “Bevingrad” after British foreign secretary Ernest Bevin. The prison, which was housed in the former women’s hospice, included gallows for inmates condemned to death by execution. Jewish underground fighters were imprisoned here but were usually executed in Acre, to minimize agitation among the city’s Jewish population – which meant that the British mainly executed Arab prisoners in the Russian Compound. The most famous exception was the case of Moshe Barazani and Meir Feinstein. The two were members of the underground – Barazani belonging to the Stern Group and Feinstein to the Irgun Zva’i Leumi. They found themselves in the Jerusalem Central Prison on death row, but instead of transferring them to Acre, the British – worried their convoy might be ambushed – decided to execute them in Jerusalem.Knowing this, Barazani and Feinstein set into motion a plan to blow themselves up before they were taken to the gallows. The grenade used to do this was smuggled into the prison inside a hollowed-out orange.On April 21, 1947, the day before their scheduled execution, the two condemned men prepared to blow themselves up. To spare the life of their British guard, Thomas Goodwin, Feinstein gave him an inscribed Bible and asked for a private moment in which to pray. As Goodwin stepped away, Feinstein and Barazani sang “Hatikva” and detonated the grenade.They were buried on the Mount of Olives, but their defiance fills the halls of the former women’s hospice where they ended their lives. It emanates in the tragedy of lives taken in fighting – their ghosts still seeking the lost human destinies.Places have destinies, themselves shaped by people, and this haunted area underwent yet another transformation when – during the State of Israel’s fight for independence – the Hagana, together with the Stern Group and Irgun, overtook the Russian Compound.Because the Soviet Union voted at the United Nations for the establishment of the Jewish state, Israel returned all the properties left behind by the British to what had been dubbed the “Red” Church – the Moscow Patriarchate that existed under the control of Soviet authorities.The Sergei Courtyard housed a Russian cultural center, which was code for Soviet spy nest, while most of the other buildings either continued to be used for administrative purposes or, as in the case of the hospice- turned-prison, were left abandoned.Then in 1964, the Soviet Union, apparently seeing no use in buildings historically connected to “spiritual missions” – the significance of which they were trying to erase – decided to sell all the buildings they could to Israel. The price tag was $3.5 million, and because the Jewish state was cash-strapped, it was paid in oranges and dubbed the “Orange Deal.” Two buildings, however, were not included in the deal – the Holy Trinity Cathedral and the Sergei Courtyard – the first because it was a place of worship and the second because its legal ownership was still unclear.But the demons of Russia don’t rest for long, and the stability that returned to the Russian Compound was undermined three years later with the 1967 Six Day War, in which the Soviet Union played a significant role as both agitator and military supplier. After Israel’s military victory, all diplomatic ties with the Soviet Union were cut, and all official Russian presence in the Russian Compound was expelled – including the spy nest at the Sergei Courtyard.Israel was given legal custodianship of the building, first using the space to house its Agriculture Ministry and later including the Society for the Preservation of Nature in Israel. New life was breathed into the building, its courtyard renovated and landscaped by donations made to SPNI, and hopes were that the structure – which still had no clear legal owner – would officially belong to Israel.But in the late 1980s, during glasnost and an ensuing period of rapprochement with the Soviet Union, talks began about returning the property to Russian control. As usual, however, the Russian demons rose up, and the transfer was never made. Instead, the Soviet Union collapsed.THE EARLY 1990s brought a lot of change to the whole world, including a massive immigration of Russian Jews to Israel. At the same time, the world itself opened up, and the true global period began, with Israel joining the community of nations in a way it couldn’t have before.Europe and America were no longer distant lands of plenty, where culture was created, as cable television and consumerism reached the Jewish state in an unprecedented way. Israeli culture became more contemporary and, with this change, a new nightlife entered the country – with pubs and clubs that resembled those in London, Paris or New York. A more hard-core underground culture developed, and in Jerusalem it settled in the Russian Compound.By the early 2000s, the Russian Compound was known as the heart of Jerusalem’s pub district, where people went to party. It seems the demons of Russia, along with all the death and turmoil focused on this little area of land, brought the kind of wild spirit that fuels nightlife.This also made the area a target for terrorists, and on August 21, 2001, Hamas, taking a move from Russia’s playbook, sent a suicide bomber to detonate himself in the Russian Compound. By some miracle, no one was killed in that attack except the terrorist, who achieved the opposite of Ivan Kalyayev – the Russian revolutionary who survived his attack on the Grand Duke Sergei.This attack, and many others on Jerusalem’s city center, which achieved their goal of killing innocents, led to a decline of cultural life in general and especially in the Russian Compound. The area became a ghost town – a shell of its former self – again victim to demons that led some to blow people up.Living human spirit can sometimes be stronger than demons and death, and as the security situation in Israel began to improve, so the Russian Compound’s nightlife began to be slowly resurrected. Alternative art-rock pubs like Uganda and the Record, which opened in the mid-2000s, began to draw crowds, and eventually the scene expanded to include the Cassette, the Video, the Radio, al-Bir, 420, Mitte Bar, and others.The parking lot around the cathedral, which was included in the Orange Deal, was allocated to the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design for its new campus, and the area has already been sealed off ahead of construction. Life is returning to the Russian Compound.But Russia doesn’t rest for long. Around the same time that this cultural revival began, Russian President Vladimir Putin set his eyes on the Russian Compound and urged Israel to pick up negotiations for returning the building to Russia where they’d left off in the late 1980s. As a goodwill gesture, and needing Russia’s support, thenprime minister Ariel Sharon agreed, and in April 2005, just months before the Gaza disengagement, even toured the Sergei Courtyard with Putin.The negotiations were put on a fast track. But then, in the first days of 2006, Sharon had a stroke and fell into a coma, resulting in another setback for Russia.Putin, however, did not rest. And in 2008, Ehud Olmert, former mayor of Jerusalem who’d also been Sharon’s deputy and was then prime minister, promised to finish what his predecessor had started, finally giving control of Sergei Courtyard back to Russia.The Agriculture Ministry received offices in a new building; and despite indications that SPNI would remain in its cozy corner, it, too, was evacuated by 2011. Since then, the building has been undergoing renovations, perhaps with the purpose of opening another Russian cultural center.And still, Russia doesn’t rest, its demons fired up with three major military interventions in less than two years – first the Crimea, then eastern Ukraine, and most recently Syria.How these demons will affect the Russian Compound and its destiny is yet to be seen. But one thing is certain: Stability will likely not reign for long on this hilltop overlooking Jerusalem’s Old City. The Russian Compound cannot be purged of its demons. The most we can do is get to know them – and do our best to get along.