Under the Radar

Plagued with poverty and international conflict, Jerusalem's tiny Gypsy community is socially marginalized within Palestinian society and ignored by Jewish society.

By JUDITH SUDILOVSKY
Gypsys 480 x 290 (photo credit: Judith Sudilovsky)
Gypsys 480 x 290
(photo credit: Judith Sudilovsky)
“DO YOU LIKE Gypsies?” asks pretty, dark-skinned Lilah, fixing back a twist of her hair with a hairpin. “I don’t. Gypsies are bad. Gypsies are hardheaded.”
The round-eyed 14-year-old sighs then, takes another hairpin to tuck into her neat, thick braid and says, “I wish I had light skin. My color is ugly. I wish I wasn’t a Gypsy. People make me feel bad.”
She dreams of leaving Jerusalem and becoming a farmer, she says, in an open place where people won’t throw stones at her house or call her derogatory names. “In my school [they treat me] OK, but in our neighborhood [in the Old City], people are mean to us,” she says.
Lilah’s younger cousin, Shayma, is 12 years old and has also been coming to the community center of the Domari Society of Gypsies in Jerusalem, since its inception. She smiles broadly, swings her feet from the edge of a chair and says she is proud of being a Gypsy.
Busy washing dishes in the kitchen of the community center, where Lilah has come to finish her homework, Amoun Sleem shakes her head. She has been trying to combat this kind of attitude since she founded the society in 1999, she says resignedly, but it is not easy.
“With the older children it is more difficult [to instill pride],” says Sleem, in perfect English, which she first picked up from the tourists on the street and then later improved when she studied at university. “They have spent much of their growing up years trying to hide their identity and now it is hard to convince them to be proud of their heritage.”
Sleem, who gives her age as in her “early 30s,” knows only too well how it feels to be an outcast in her own neighborhood and carries painful memories of childhood, of humiliating treatment by her neighbors and teachers. She has dedicated most of her life to a one-woman struggle aimed at pulling her community out of the pit of poverty and deprivation, which engulfs them.
Tall and regal, Sleem usually wears her sleek dark hair pulled away from her face, only sometimes letting it flow loosely over her shoulders. The worry lines on her forehead and around her mouth attest to the hardships in her life, but her piercing dark eyes and stark manner belie a sensitive soul fighting to improve the lot of her people despite the societal and financial obstacles she faces.
The expelling of the Roma from France has disheartened her even more. “It’s a dream to think the situation will change. It’s getting worse. To see so-called democratic European countries trying to make changes in other countries and then doing this in their own countries is sad. For thousands of years, wherever the Gypsies have gone, they have not been accepted,” she says. She adds that the Domari Society is in touch with some of the Roma support organizations in Europe.
Gypsies are perhaps the most oppressed and reviled social group in Jerusalem today. Most members of the tiny Jerusalem Gypsy community – or Dom as they call themselves here – numbering some 1,000 people, have lived in an impoverished enclave clustered around Lion’s Gate all their lives and can trace their roots in the city back for some 200 years. Yet they are still regarded as outsiders by their Palestinian neighbors, who refer to them as nuwari, which means dirty in Arabic.
She would have hoped that in Israel the situation would be different, because, she believes, because both Jews and Gypsies have been persecuted and because both peoples were slated for annihilation by the Nazis.
But even today, she says bitterly, she is spat upon as she walks through the streets of her neighborhood in the Old City and Gypsy children are ridiculed in school – not only by their classmates, but by teachers and principals, too.
Plagued by poverty and internal conflict, Gypsies remain socially marginalized within Palestinian society and politically invisible to Jewish society.
HISTORIANS DIFFER IN OPINION as to when exactly the migrant tribes, the ancestors of the Gypsies, began to leave their native Northern India; dates suggested for the Roma migration range from the 11th to 14th centuries. Most experts do agree that they arrived first in Persia and then in Europe through Hungary, Serbia and other Balkan countries. Some historians maintain that the Dom migrated in the 6th century to the Middle East, where Dom societies can be found in Cyprus, Iran, Iraq/Kurdistan, Uzbekistan and Afghanistan, with the larger concentrations in Turkey, Greece, Syria, Iran and Iraq, totaling an estimated 2.2 million in number in the entire region, though no official numbers are available because often Gypsies do not participate in official census counts.
The population in Jerusalem has dwindled significantly since the 1948 and 1967 wars, during which some members of the community fled to the Anata refugee camp now located near Shuafat, in northern Jerusalem, the Jabalya refugee camp in the northern Gaza Strip and to refugee camps in neighboring countries. Estimates hold that there are some 10,000 Gypsies living in Israel and the Palestinian territories, not including the Jerusalem community, says Sleem. In Jerusalem, the Domari population now consists of only three extended families and, over the years, there have been a series of internal family disputes, which have further splintered the community’s ability to coordinate among themselves.
As with other Gypsy communities throughout the world, the local Gypsy community has adapted themselves to the customs of the local population among whom they live. In Israel and the Palestinian territories, the Gypsy population has adopted Arabic as their daily language, follow the Islamic religion and have even incorporated aspects of Palestinian cuisine into their own cooking. Years ago, the Gypsies could be easily identified by their colorful traditional dress, but now that too, along with their dying language, has been lost.
In Gaza, notes Sleem, where the community has less contact with the outside world, the Gypsies have been better able to preserve parts of their traditions and there are more people who still speak the Dom language, which is unwritten. When the political situation was better before the second intifada, members of the Gaza community used to come to Jerusalem to teach the language and conduct heritage programs, she says. Today, there are only a few older people who still speak Domari in Jerusalem.
Intermarriage between Palestinians and Gypsies is very rare, although now some Gypsy men have married Palestinian women and indeed, the wife of the community’s unofficial mukhtar (chief), Abed Sleem, is Palestinian. Abed Sleem is related to Amoun Sleem and inherited the title from his father who received his appointment from Jerusalem’s long-serving mayor, Teddy Kollek.
Sleem says she and some others in the community no longer agree to recognize his authority over them and this is a main source of friction within the community.
Abed Sleem did not respond to numerous attempts by The Jerusalem Report for an interview.
This trend of intermarriage, while ostensibly pointing to social mobility, has also caused a new social problem. Many Gypsy women are now left without partners because Palestinian men consider it degrading to take a Gypsy wife and the Gypsy women are unwilling to compromise on whom they marry, refusing to marry the elderly, ill or otherwise inappropriate men who will agree to marry them In recent years, many Gypsy families who have lived in the Old City for years have had to move to East Jerusalem neighborhoods from their rented homes, as Palestinian owners return to the Old City from the outlying Palestinian neighborhoods that are now on the other side of the Israeli security barrier, for fear of losing their Jerusalem residency status.
“Our rights as a group are so limited within the city. We have huge
problems compared to other communities— we are one of the neediest communities. We have no businesses, the educational level is very low. We are trying to protect our culture,” Sleem says, noting that though Jerusalem is home to a slew of international and local non-governmental organizations, most of their efforts and funding are directed toward the Palestinian population.
“We live as part of the Palestinian [community] but we have our own identity. I try to teach the youth to be proud of their culture and not hide their roots. Like everyone in the Holy Land, Gypsies have roots in this city.”
Keen on using every tool to advance the cause, Sleem has also turned to the Internet to reach out for supporters and has a website as well as a Facebook address. According to the Domari Society of Gypsies in Jerusalem website, (www.domarisociety.com), their roots can be traced back to 18th century India where links between the Romany language and Punjabi have been discovered.
There the community referred to themselves as Dom, meaning “man” in Sanskrit, from which their language derived. In Europe and North America, the Gypsy communities began to refer to themselves as Rom or Lom, while in the Middle East and North Africa, Gypsy communities continue identifying themselves as Dom.
A SMALL, WELL-KEPT courtyard leads to the bright three-room ground-floor apartment where the community center of the Domari Society of Gypsies is located behind a residential apartment building in the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Shu’afat. The struggling center, which opened its doors two years ago as a gathering place for the Domari, runs on a shoestring budget and receives small donations only from two Dutch charities and a few smaller donations from other foundations for specific projects.
“We have some good friends who are standing by us,” says Sleem, but still the rent needs to be paid every month and funds are short.”
In the small entrance hall, colorfully embroidered pillows are strewn about on the chairs that line the walls. Two foreign volunteers— one German and one Canadian—bend over a computer in one corner. Behind them hangs an immense handmade purple quilt embellished with sequins and intricately sewn designs. Yasser, a cherubic-cheeked boy, helps Sleem with the dishes and then wanders off to the other room.
Several rababbah, traditional Gypsy string instruments, lean against the wall, for the children to try to play. Framed pieces of Gypsy embroidery and beaded quilts also decorate the walls in one corner. The center also offers handmade jewelry, beads, ceramics and jams and hand-pressed olive oil for sale.
Twice a week, the center offers literacy completion courses for women. The children come three times a week to do their homework and get off the streets.
“There is very little sign that [the Jerusalem municipality and others] understand what a revolution it is that a young woman like Sleem has founded such an organization and is making it work so well,” notes Anat Hoffman, executive director of the Israel Religious Action Center and a Domari Center board member, who helped Sleem set up her non-profit organization. Hoffman became aware of the Dom community while serving as a Jerusalem municipal councilwoman and has became one of their most active and concerned supporters.
Khaled, a 15-year-old Gypsy living in the Old City, meanders through the streets near Lion’s Gate, a lit cigarette in his hands. A Palestinian young man inside a nearby kiosk identifies Khaled as a Gypsy; at first, Khaled denies it. No, his father is Palestinian, he insists, taking puffs from his cigarette, his head bent so the thick bangs of his dark hair partially cover one of his eyes. He doesn’t like the Gypsies, he says, after admitting he is one of them. He’d rather be with the Palestinians. Then he calls out to someone in the street and is gone.
“In general they are simple people, usually they only study until the sixth grade,” observes the Palestinian youth, sitting on a stool and dipping a piece of bread into a container of white cheese. They are peaceful, he adds, and don’t make any problems with their neighbors. They mostly feud among  themselves.
“They are a closed society. Palestinians do a sort of apartheid with the Gypsies,” he admits. “We say, ‘You are Gypsies, we don’t talk to you.’ Even to this day it is a shame [for a Palestinian] to deal with them. [Palestinians] see them as second-class citizens.”
Most of the beggars at the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound are Gypsies, he contends, and the Gypsy men are garbage workers. “But begging is their main career. They are ashamed of that, but it is in their blood.”
Further inside the Muslim quarter, a neatly dressed 10-year-old boy wearing a clean yellow shirt plays with a cart. At first he, too, denies he is a Gypsy but then he gives a sidelong glance and slowly nods his head, yes, he is Dom. And, he says, he likes to study.
“There is immense prejudice against the Gypsies in Palestinian society,” notes Hoffman. “I have sat with educated Palestinians and heard very negative prejudices against the Gypsies… It showed me the underside of Palestinian society. I was able to see how they treat their own minority and it was quite disturbing.”
IN ISRAEL, THE FEW ISRAELI JEWS who even know of their existence regard the Gypsies as Palestinians. But, says Sleem, Gypsies are “a really peaceful group” and avoid taking sides in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Traditionally the Gypsies have never been interested in outside politics or who their sovereign is as long as they are left alone to teach their own culture, she says, nor do they think in territorial terms or seek an independent homeland.
She sees clear similarities between the histories of the Jews and Gypsies, as both groups have always been seen as “the other” and regarded as easy scapegoats for all of society’s ills, subjected to vitriolic hatred and attacks.
Both groups were denied certain privileges in many European countries, were victims of pogroms and forced to live in ghettos.
Like the Jews, the Gypsies in Europe were seen as a scourge upon Aryan society by the Nazis. They were the only other group singled out for annihilation and were sent to concentration camps where they were subject to horrendous medical experiment and sent to the gas chambers in the same manner as the Jews. Estimates of the number of Gypsies killed in the Holocaust range from 250,000 to 600,000; but because of the low literacy rate among the Gypsies this type of information is not easily available as is data about the Jewish victims of the Holocaust. It is, however, known that proportionately they suffered losses greater than any other group of victims except Jews; according to data from the Jewish Virtual Library, 15,000 of the 20,000 Gypsies in Germany as well as almost the entire Eastern European Gypsy population were wiped out by the Nazis.
“In the old Yad Vashem [before the reconstructions and renovations, completed several years ago], there was a picture of Gypsies and Jews waiting together on a train platform waiting to be sent to Majdanek,” says Hoffman, noting that three members of Yad Vashem – two of whom have since died and one who now lives outside Israel – were among the original board members of the Domari Society.
Officials from Yad Vashem did not respond to The Report’s request for information or commentary.
PALESTINIAN WELFARE WORKers assigned to her community are lax in their work, charges Sleem, and she would expect more involvement from the local authorities. “The municipality promises things we want and there are social workers in East Jerusalem but they do not pay much attention to the problems in my community,” says Sleem, noting specifically the high truancy rate among Gypsy children. “By law, children need to be in school and the municipal [truancy officers] should follow up on that.”
Part of the problem, stresses Hoffman, is that the Arabic-speaking municipal welfare workers who are responsible for the Gypsy community are not forthcoming in helping them because of ingrained prejudices against the community.
“They have showed very little interest in the Domari. Just because they speak Arabic does not mean they care about the Gypsies.
There is a lot of prejudice and they feel oppressing the Gypsies is natural. The Jewish workers in the municipality are usually extremely sensitive and show solidarity and support.”
About a year ago Sleem and Hoffman met with Bony Goldberg, director of Community Services of the Jerusalem Municipality, to discuss a potential 250,000 shekel ($63,000) pilot project aimed at improving the status of the Gypsy community in Jerusalem. Goldberg tells The Report that the program is “holistic” and aims to integrate another 60 Gypsy families into the social welfare system and help them find employment as well as to follow up on children’s education and provide funds for school supplies. Also included in the program are enrichment, extra-curricular activities for children and programs to aid in the empowerment of women in the community.
“They are really on the fringes of society,” says Goldberg, referring to the Gypsy community.
She spent time meeting with other members of the community including Abed Sleem and noted that the divisions that exist between the mukhtar, who is opposed to Sleem taking an active role in the community with her initiatives and Sleem’s supporters “are not good for the community.”
Referring to how long it has taken to get the proposal on the table, Sleem says she is not optimistic about the plan. She doesn’t want to comment further, she says, until she sees it actually implemented.
Hoffman, however, is not so reserved. She notes that though the municipal plan presented to Sleem as a fait accompli is a step forward, it was put together in an “unprofessional manner,” without conducting research within the community as to what their real needs are. “The first thing they should have done is to talk to the community to see what their priorities are, as is done for projects within the haredi community.”
Hoffman adds that she has written to Mayor Nir Barkat expressing her dissatisfaction.
In a written response, the municipal spokesman’s office tells The Report that “the program had been developed after consultation with various groups, including the mukhtar and the neighborhood community council.
“It is important to emphasize that, towards the finalization of the program, thorough background work which examined the characteristics and needs of the community was carried out,” the spokesman writes.
The program has been submitted to and accepted by the mayor, the statement concludes.
WHEN SHE FOUNDED THE Domari Community Center, Sleem had hoped it would be a place where young Gypsy children could come to feel safe and accepted and to learn about their distinctive heritage while being encouraged toward academic excellence and continued enrollment in school. Every week some 23-25 children pass through the doors of the center, she says.
With the high truancy and school drop-out rate in the Gypsy community, the emphasis on continuing education is high on Sleem’s list of priorities. While routinely the official truancy and absentee rate for Gypsy children given by the municipal welfare workers runs at around 25 percent, Sleem says the number is much higher.
One way she is tempting young boys away from spending time aimlessly on the streets of the Old City is through a soccer club. Former semi-pro Israeli Palestinian soccer player Saleem Yagmour, who now works at the Progressive (Reform) Judaism’s Hebrew Union College, approached Sleem with the idea of participating in the Neighborhood Soccer League sponsored by the Hapoel Katamon soccer team, which includes teams from schools throughout the city and includes a team of deaf children and a mixed Arab- Jewish team.
The program appears to be succeeding.
On a hot June day at the start of summer vacation, a group of rambunctious Gypsy boys, all dressed in blue soccer uniforms, waits in front of the center for Yagmour to pick them up. When Yagmour traded in his car recently, he specifically bought a van so he could transport the boys to their practices and games knowing that they would not be able to get there themselves.
Though officially the league is over for the season, Yagmour continued with the practices for his mixed Palestinian-Gypsy team. “I can’t tell these boys to wait for two months for the next practice,” he says. “So I invite them to a practice once a week. They don’t have money to go to summer camps, the only thing they can do is play soccer.”
The boys always show up for practice, while the Palestinians sometimes have other things to do, notes Yagmour. At first, some of the Palestinian parents were reluctant to allow their sons to play on an Israeli-sponsored team with Gypsy boys but Yagmour persisted and they ultimately agreed.
On the concrete court of the Beit Hanina school where they hold most of their practices, there are no differences between the players. Sometimes Yagmour takes them to Sacher Park in West Jerusalem so they can play on a grass field. “In their schools [the Gypsies] are always on the sidelines,” said Yagmour, noting that the team is also a way to bolster the boys’ self-esteem. “Here we are one of the best teams in the league.”
IN ADDITION TO REACHING OUT to Gypsy youth, Sleem hopes to empower the growing group of uneducated, single women through small business projects such as an embroidery workshop, jewelry making and catering, sponsored through the Domari center.
In this way, says Sleem, Gypsy women can become more involved in their community and build up their self-confidence and selfesteem.
The center has produced a Gypsy cookbook based on traditional recipes collected from elders in the community and the women are ready to prepare Gypsy feasts for any special event on request, though they do not have a kashrut certificate.
“It would be great if these women could make a switch in their lives. We can even go to any place you want to cook,” she says.
“The women can prepare a maqluba – a traditional Palestinian upside-down casserole of rice, lamb and eggplants – in a unique style,” she boasts. “Gypsies have a long tradition of hospitality and like feeding people. [We] have a special soul for cooking.”
She is never short of ideas to help empower the women and children of her community – it is the funding and personnel that she lacks. Currently she is searching for a clothing designer willing to volunteer time to design a skirt inspired by traditional Gypsy designs that the women of the center could produce and sell on-line to bring in some funds for the center.
Sometimes, she says, her frustration level is so high that she feels two decades older than her age. “I have so many dreams and hopes and I don’t think that in this year I have been able to do one percent of what I had hoped,” she says. “There are many disappointments and too much work. We are a group of women trying [to make something of ourselves] and no one is knocking on my door [to help]. If God wants some switch or a change in life, He will do it in the right moment. But right now what I am doing is not exactly easy. It is hard for a single woman to do these things.”
Sleem’s mother died in childbirth when she was six years old and her father was left alone to raise her and her eight siblings. She still remembers the humiliation she experienced as a child in school in Jerusalem, when teachers would single out the Gypsy children to inspect them for dirty fingernails and lice.
As a result, she dropped out of school, joining the groups of other Gypsy children in the streets of the Old City selling trinkets and postcards to tourists at the age of 12.
But after a year she realized that in order to break the circle of poverty she needed to receive an education. “In the end you see your life is connected to education,” she says.
“Sometimes you can say that God opens your eyes even if you are a child.”
Following in the footsteps of her older sister Zarifeh, who some 20 years ago became the community’s first registered nurse, Sleem eventually continued her studies and received an associate’s degree in hospitality management from Notre Dame College in Jerusalem and a diploma in business administration from the Ibrahimi College in Jerusalem. She is now hoping to continue her hospitality studies, either at Hebrew University or Bethlehem University.
Zarifeh, 45, tells The Report that “the community looked at her strangely when she began studying nursing.” But she was determined.
Zarifeh was 12 years old when her mother died and still remembers the helplessness she felt when nobody in the community knew how to help her mother when she went into cardiac arrest. “She could have easily been saved,” says Zarifeh. It was then she decided to become a nurse.
Yet, despite her seniority, motivation and commitment in her work, Zarifeh says she feels discrimination against Gypsies in the maternity hospital in East Jerusalem.
Recently, she was overlooked for the position of senior nurse although she had seniority as an operating room nurse. “People don’t look at you as an equal. Even educated people, who know we are human beings, act this way,” she says, noting that when she first started working she didn’t tell anyone she was a Gypsy.
She is still outraged by an incident three years ago when a thief slit the throat of an 8- year-old Gypsy boy – “like a sheep” – in the streets of the Old City, as he went to buy fresh bread for his family’s breakfast. She carefully makes sure that the name is written down correctly in this journalist’s notebook: Rafaat Sleem.
“It was in the middle of the street in the Old City and no one tried to stop the man.
Nothing was even written about it in the newspapers. The boy died in the streets and our mukhtar [head of the community] did not speak out about it,” she says sadly.
Since Zarifeh forged the path to become educated, two other Gypsy women have studied nursing, both sisters of the mukhtar. But no one in the other two Gypsy families has continued with their education, notes Zarifeh.
“Most parents are not educated and so they are not interested in having their children study,” she says, sitting in the sunny courtyard of her family compound where she still lives with her father along with her other siblings.
Her married brothers all have small homes adjoining the courtyard while the four unmarried sisters and younger brother live with their father in the house which their grandfather first rented some 100 years ago. She notes that one of her female cousins is now studying administration at a college in Bethany, just outside Jerusalem.
No Gypsy man has continued with higher education because they normally are sent out to work at a younger age, she adds.
“In our family, Amoun and I encourage the children to study,” says Zarifeh, adding that she will do everything in her power to make sure her ten nieces and three nephews continue their education. “At that moment, when they are all educated, I will be able to rest easily.”
Amoun credits her work as a manager in the Dutch Guest House on the Mount of Olives over a decade ago for exposing her to European visitors, who raised her own political and social consciousness. It was then that she became motivated to help develop community awareness and self-respect within the Gypsy community, she says.
SLEEM’S EMPOWERMENT INITIAtives are causing friction within the rigid patriarchal society, which balks at the thought of its women changing the traditional social order and resents Sleem’s outspokenness. When Sleem began her workshop courses, mukhtar Abed Sleem, tried to dissuade women from attending, although a core group of women do continue to participate.
“The mukhtar is not focusing on the problems in the community,” says Zarifeh.
“He wants to be the leader of this community without doing anything.”
But breaking through a centuries’ old way of life is not easy and three young Gypsy women beggars sitting near Jaffa Gate scoff at the idea of Sleem’s community center with its workshops and classes. A little girl toddles nearby and a seven-monthold infant sleeps on his mother’s lap.
Wearing a traditional black Muslim robe and a long, white head cover, the oldest of the three sisters is 25 and says she was married at the age of 15. But now, she says, her husband has left her and she has no money to feed her children. The women do not want their names published in an article and they don’t want to take part in any training workshops. What they want is money, say the younger sisters, 17 and 13. The 17-yearold has some basic education; the other two say that they never attended school because “there was never any reason to study.”
A man with light skin and graying hair, who claims to be their father, hovers nearby and angrily protests against Sleem’s efforts and any article being written about the community.
“She never helped us, she never gave us any money,” he says of Sleem, shooing a journalist away. “If you write an article in the newspaper, will that bring us money?” Insular and marginalized, the Gypsies have as yet to be recognized as a national minority by the Israeli government and they are listed as Arabs on their identity cards.
Formal recognition as a minority, says Israeli Attorney Omri Kabiri who has helped Sleem establish the center as a non-profit organization, would enable the Gypsies to apply for government aid for education for children and adults; entitle them to specific medical tests needed to determine heredity diseases; and help in preserving their cultural heritage.
“With such recognition it will be easier to get help,” he says. Recognition of the Gypsies could also have international ramifications, he adds, regarding the status of Gypsies as ethnic minorities in other countries as well.
Progress is very slow, he says, and first the government officials would have to “recognize that there are Gypsies in Israel.
Then they need to recognize that the community is in need of assistance from the government.”
Zarifeh notes that in Jordan, Gypsies are recognized as a separate national minority and that the Gypsy community there is much stronger and includes Gypsy parliamentary members and other professionals.
Meanwhile, as the Jerusalem municipality weighs the pros and cons of the proposed program and determines its budget, Sleem is not surprised she has ruffled some feathers here in the heart of her community.
“You are trying to make changes where people don’t want there to be changes, especially men,” she shrugs. “They try to make things difficult. They don’t accept it.”
Her main support has come from her family, she says.
“My father has really been behind me. He has been my main support. He has always given me his attention and support, even though most men have been against the work that I do,” she says. “My father wants to prove that his daughter can do something that the elders have not succeeded in doing.”