By AVRAHAM AVI-HAINaomi Shemer at her piano(photo credit: YAEL ROZEN/JERUSALEM POST ARCHIVE)
FLASHBACK: A warm Zionist greeting introduced us to Israel, tendered by a tired looking Jewish Agency staff member. The Agency’s Immigration Department had set up a few desks aboard the Artza, a five thousand ton ship on the Marseille-Naples-Haifa route. We presented our Canadian passports with pride. The aliya man looked up at me.“Do you speak Hebrew?” “Yes,” I said loud and clear and proudly.“You’re from Canada?” he asked in an incredulous, sharply rising intonation.Again, “Yes!” even more proudly.“Are you crazy? Everybody is going to Canada!” Now, why this flashback. The date then was December 28, 1952. Ben-Gurion said that on the date of your arrival in Israel you are newborn, and that should count as your birthday. Thus I am 65 years old….I was so drunk with Israel that everything was marvelous. The kibbutz allowed us a couple of weeks to see the country. Thus we arrived in Jerusalem, a small city separated by no man’s land and soldiers.Everything I saw or felt is indelible in my brain. Let me share with you Jerusalem that January, its cold and rain seeping into our bones, unbuilt empty spaces like missing teeth: on King George Avenue we would scurry by the areas open to the walls of the Old city, seeming so far distant, but in easy reach of a Jordanian marksman. There were no shots fired when we were there and indeed there were few such occasions before 1967.Here are the most powerful impressions, which I wrote in a memoir many years ago.The human kaleidoscope is amazing: Some kibbutzniks in khaki shirts and shorts, and old-fashioned cloth caps; important-looking people with old tired suits and badly pressed shirts and ties and worn but polished shoes. Both the kibbutzniks and the pen-pushers carry briefcases. That’s where the lunch sandwiches are.The Ashkenazi chief rabbi, Rabbi Yitzhak Halevi Herzog, wearing a Prince Albert frock coat and black shiny top hat, walks down King George Avenue. The rabbi has a square-cut white beard and seems to be unaccompanied. The Sephardi chief rabbi, Rabbi Nissim bears that magnificent title: Harishon Letziyon – “The first in Zion.”Impressive, biblical. He wears unique garb and head-covering and is preceded by a uniformed middle-aged gentleman bearing a handsome silver-headed black staff. As he walks, he pounds the sidewalk in front of him in a rhythm perhaps born in the storied streets of Sura and Pompeditha, when such a servant would lead to clear the way for a Talmudic sage.The Knesset is in a handsome building on King George Avenue as well. I am waiting there just in case I’ll get a glimpse of Ben-Gurion. I know an MK from his visit abroad and get a pass into the parliament of Israel. My heart beats fast. Later I mail the entry pass to my parents, knowing how it would warm their hearts.There are Kurdish men sitting on the curbside near Zion Square on the street where The Jerusalem Post is located. Each has a padded cushion on his lower back and very strong cloth bands by his side. These men are so sturdy that they can carry a refrigerator – bound to their foreheads and seated on a set of special pillows – up four flights.Moroccan patriarchs with beards and café-au-lait or olive-colored skin are covered in long beige woolen jalabiyas with hoods, like the monks from times medieval. They speak a guttural Hebrew and pronounce “sh” as though it were “s.” Yemenite men are distinguishable by their slight build and long, curled peyot.In Mea She’arim, the very orthodox neighborhood, all men are bearded, and wear various styles of peyot. These range from beautifully curled earlocks, to long, straggly, unkempt, straight hair running parallel to the beards almost to the shoulder.Some peyot are barely visible, tucked unobtrusively behind the ear. All women wear either wigs or often just put on cloth kerchiefs covering every single hair. Some men wear woolen below-the-knee-length coats of blue or black, and the Hasidim are clothed in shiny black gabardine kaftans.They, the Hasidim, wear a black rope made of cotton stranded together (a gartel) around their waists, to separate “the spiritual from the physical.” They must take it off at night, because I see lots of children in their area.The kids all look like little adults. The boys wear the same kind of hats as the men, except for a few who wear a cap, like children in cheder in Poland wore.The old-time Jerusalemites in Mea She’arim – six, seven generations in Jerusalem – wear yellow or gray striped kaftans and white stockings tucked in knee breeches.Little boys have white pointed beanies with a little pom-pom on top. The women wear dark colors. The little girls are charmingly turned out in purple or black velvet Shabbat dresses, and bows in their hair.Yiddish in an authentic Lithuanian accent discords with broad Hungarian versions of the language. They speak Yiddish because Hebrew is too holy to be used for quotidian affairs. Over their narrow streets, the balconies seem to merge, and are all bedecked with laundry, and always, always, on a sunny day, the bedding is airing out on the rails.All told I felt that I was in a shtetl.THE KALEIDOSCOPE of color is accompanied by a weird cacophony unique to Jerusalem.Little raggedy children with burning dark eyes run wildly down the streets with huge piles of newspapers under their little arms. They race each other toward the customer, shouting gutturally the names of the afternoon papers: Yedioth, Yedioth, Yedioth Ahronoth, and just as throatily Ma’ariv, Ma’ariv, Ma’ariv! They are children of poverty who I hope one day will rise, if not from rags to riches, then from poverty to a good life. Older men stand in kiosks, shouting an incantation sounding like “ham-tarry-boatnim,” which is Hebrew for “hot fresh peanuts.” And other middle-aged men with lined faces stand at bus stops, trying to sell their wares through the bus window. They chant “menta, mastic, shokalad, menta, mastic, shokolad,” a mantra for making a few pennies and which means, as you must have deduced, “mints, chewing gum, chocolates.”Other stooped men sit at street corners with small portable shoeshine stands; I have my shoes polished out of pity, it makes me uncomfortable. Poverty there is: women sitting on the main streets offering to repair carpets and clothing. Hardly any car traffic; who can afford a car? There is a taxi stand on Ben Yehuda street. The buses have hard wooden seats and rattle along exhaling dark fumes into the street.We can’t cross from Jewish Jerusalem to the Arab part which is occupied by Jordan – even though that’s where the Christian Holy sites are, the Moslem mosques where the Temple of Solomon stood, and of course, the Western Wall. (There are new tall concrete walls on the streets leading to the Old City to prevent snipers from the Old City crenellated firing positions from taking potshots at pedestrians.) Thus the Old City of Jerusalem and the Wall, the Hebrew University and Hadassah Hospital on Mount Scopus and the cemeteries on the Mount of Olives are closed off to Jews. New buildings are rising all around the city in new neighborhoods to accommodate the new immigrants.This is Jerusalem as it is, while in transformation to Jerusalem as it will be.That was 65 years ago. And then 50 years ago, Naomi Shemer wrote in her song, “Jerusalem of Gold,” “The city which sits alone, and in her heart a wall.” The years have granted us a home facing those Old City walls. The city is, then as now, at the heart of our lives.Avraham Avi-hai has lived in Jerusalem since 1953. Through his public work in government, the Jewish Agency and Keren Hayesod, and at the Rothberg International School he has striven to make Jerusalem a physical as well as a spiritual center for Jews everywhere. 2avrahams@gmail.com
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