It happens to most of us. After limiting our travels through the city beyond our own neighborhoods during COVID-19, we got used to it – and kept up the self-imposed restrictions. Then one day, we had to be in another part of town and discovered that in our absence, major changes had been implemented and a street’s character had been completely transformed.
Hardly a Jerusalem neighborhood has escaped the national obsession with urban renewal. If it was just a matter of cleaning facades or even adding a floor to an existing building, people would not mind so much. But in too many instances, it’s a matter of destroying the old and bringing in the very different new.
One doesn’t have to go to another neighborhood. Sometimes things are happening just around the corner, but we’re not aware. That was the case with this writer, who lives around the corner from Aza Street.
When Rabbi Yisroel Goldberg last week invited this writer to attend a candle-lighting ceremony at Aza Park, she was bewildered because she’d never heard of it – possibly because Goldberg had not used its official name – Lehaim Cultural and Information Center. However, it is generally referred to as Aza Park.
Situated across the road from the Netanyahu residence, it has a spacious playground, drinking fountain, and lots of benches. There are very large rooms in the underground bomb shelter a couple of flights down from the playground.
The facility was renovated by Mike and Carolyn Evans and the Jerusalem Prayer team for the Association of Camps and Ghetto Survivors in Israel. Evans is best known in Israel as founder of Friends of Zion (FoZ), which provides aid to Holocaust survivors, Ukrainian refugees, Israelis in need, and Jews facing persecution.
On one of the shelter walls are 26 plaques with the names of hundreds of Christians who have given large and small donations to FoZ projects.
On the way to the candle-lighting ceremony, it was impossible not to notice that once-familiar buildings and commercial enterprises had disappeared. There are more coffee shops than in the past, providing a good alternative to Emek Refaim Street. There are now several new residential complexes, rising considerably higher than previous structures – and more are in the process of being built.
Aza Street is definitely not what it used to be.
An enlightening email
■ IN RESPONSE to a mention in last week’s column of a security fence around the former Eden Hotel on Hillel Street, Dr. David Elter sent an enlightening email:
“Yossi Avrahami Construction Company is building a 10-floor luxury apartment building on the plot which will include six floors above the old hotel building – 84 apartments in all. It will have three underground parking levels and three shops on the ground floor.
“There will be a side road built to the parking levels between the site and 22 Rechov Hahistadrut.
“This construction is being done without any regard for the neighbors whose lives are going to be uprooted for several years.
“The construction has destroyed a unique green space with a bird habitat in the center of town. They have uprooted over 10 large unique trees and destroyed this unique bird sanctuary.
“The building opposite the construction site is an office building with a dentist’s office, four lawyers’ offices, and several other businesses and residences.
“Already these businesses cannot function from the noise; and the construction and digging have not yet begun. Their (the construction company’s) answer is a 4-6 m. acoustic wall which will block off most of the light but not the noise or dust.
“The building permit was granted without notification to the neighbors. The construction company said there were notices put up in the area. There have been three other building projects in the area but not of this size or magnitude, and it was assumed these notices were referring to these earlier small projects.
“The neighbors are considering legal action to stop this project until these issues are addressed.”
Information about the latest Jerusalem mega-project
■ COLLEGIALITY AMONG journalists is often expressed via information sharing. Last week a WhatsApp from Kuti Fundaminski, who writes for Bonus, the Yediot Yerushalayim economics supplement, contained information about the latest mega-project by controversial French-Israeli billionaire and philanthropist Laurent Levy, who has been living in Jerusalem since 2005 and doing business in the capital and Israel since 2007, with the launch of the Foundation Optical Center.
Levy, who owns considerable property in Jerusalem, to which he keeps adding, set up a website in 2010 for seasonal apartment rentals.
In 2014, he opened the Music Square in Nahalat Shiva, gradually adding a music museum and diverse restaurants.
In 2015, he opened the first of 70 planned Optic Centers in Israel on the Zion Square site of the former Bank Leumi building. All together, he operates some 500 optic and audio centers in Israel, France, Canada, Switzerland, Luxembourg, Belgium, and Spain.
Inasmuch as he has an aesthetic eye, Levy is not a favorite at City Hall because he tends to go ahead with whatever he’s building before final approval is granted.
He is building a hotel and commercial center across a whole block of Jaffa Road and has two other hotels planned elsewhere in the city.
He was particularly unpopular a few years back when he closed Café de Paris, which was previously the Restobar, and before that Café Moment, on the seam of Talbiyeh-Rehavia. In its incarnation as Café Moment, it was infiltrated in March 2002 by a Palestinian suicide bomber. In the ensuing explosion, 11 people were killed and 54 wounded. When the enterprise became Café de Paris, it was not kosher and was open on Friday night and Saturday. Levy, who is religious, gave the proprietors the option of turning the venture into a kosher establishment and closing on Shabbat. This did not sit well with the secular clientele, nor with the proprietors. But it’s the old story of the man who pays the piper calls the tune.
Levy tore down the building and its neighboring structures and built a luxury apartment complex on the site. However, he did leave the plaque on the Gaza Road side of the project attesting to the terror attack.
Fundaminski, who is descended from the Chabad families that settled in Hebron 200 years ago and relocated to Jerusalem following the massacre of 1929, in which Arab rioters slaughtered their Jewish neighbors, knows more than almost anyone else in Jerusalem about real estate projects, sales, and acquisitions. The message that he sent about Levy related to the former Gesher building, another of Levy’s properties, adjacent to the Waldorf Astoria Hotel. He intends to build a new structure in which he will establish a school that will teach anything and everything in preparation for the building of the Third Temple, which he believes will be beneficial not only to Israel and the Jewish people but to the whole world.
Just imagine what he would do if he were also in politics.
greerfc@gmail.com