Talk? These Walls Rant

Take a stroll through the Mea Shearim neighborhood and listen to the walls speak.

Plastered on the stone face of one building is a dire warning, in thick Hebrew characters, about a hotel reportedly being built on the site of ancient Jewish graves. A few paces farther, a poster urges religious students in this ultra-Orthodox enclave to resist the “plague” of idleness during summer vacation.

On any given day, postings offer up glimpses of a family’s private strife or a tiff between neighbors, displayed for all to see in back-and-forth exchanges. Dozens of other notices are more mundane: advertisements for weekend getaways -- strictly kosher, of course -- Bible-themed children’s books, cures for constipation, death notices.

The posters, known collectively as pashkevilim, cover so much acreage in Mea Shearim that it sometimes looks as if a giant, blocks-long newspaper has been unfurled through the neighborhood’s cramped lanes.

And in a way, one has.

For a community that steadfastly sticks to itself and mostly steers clear of mainstream media to avoid what members view as morally corrosive images and crude language, the centuries-old tradition of pashkevilim provides an ever-running news crawl on the issues of the street, serving as a social glue as thick and vital as the flour paste adhering them to the mottled stone walls.

Now a new municipal campaign to make Jerusalem neater by cutting down on the posters has caused hard feelings among some residents, who fear they will lose a crucial means of communication.

The pashkevilim, whose original Old World purpose was to deliver anonymous barbs, now serve as a small-town tattle sheet and free-swinging political forum, a way to sell merchandise and safeguard the strict religious rules that govern daily life for Jerusalem’s 150,000 ultra-Orthodox, or haredi, residents. About 5,500 live in Mea Shearim, part of a swath of ultra-Orthodox pockets in northwestern Jerusalem where pashkevilim are popular.

“It keeps me up on what we need to know,” said 18-year-old Moshe Laufer, who studies in a religious academy, or yeshiva.

Laufer, wearing the sidelocks, pinstriped robe, leggings and black felt hat of many of the haredi men who give Mea Shearim the look of a 200-year-old European Jewish quarter, takes pride in avoiding mainstream news.

He’s not the only one. The neighborhood’s insularity is accentuated by its web of streets and alleys and by large signs at its edges urging visitors to stay out if they are dressed immodestly. Some residents, though Jewish, don’t recognize the state of Israel for religious reasons, and they favor Yiddish over Hebrew, the national language.

Outside events are of little concern, they say. Although a handful of newspapers are directed at the nation’s ultra-Orthodox, many residents don’t read them, insisting that the pashkevilim offer immediacy they can’t get elsewhere.

“Everything we need to know about the community is in these posters,” Laufer said, standing with a group of young men in front of a wall covered with pashkevilim several layers thick.

Getting the word out through posters makes sense in a place where most people are on foot and don’t stray far. The biggest printer in Mea Shearim says thousands of people walk past a new poster on its first day.

Anyone with something to announce can pay a printer to make the posters and paste them up in bulk -- at a cost of about 80 cents apiece -- though some people hang their own. A pashkevil might last a week -- or only a few hours -- before another is plastered on top. Fresh notices usually go up in the morning, but death announcements are posted with urgency at all hours because Judaism calls for burial on the same day when possible.

Haredi activists have employed pashkevilim in political campaigns, such as the successful bid to topple longtime Jerusalem Mayor Teddy Kollek in 1993. The posters in haredi neighborhoods hammered at Kollek with Bible-tinged verses. Only at the end of the campaign did the pashkevilim suggest voting for his opponent, Ehud Olmert.

“The campaign was very successful,” said David Zilberschlag, an ultra-Orthodox newspaper publisher who was involved in the campaign.

A measure of the central role the pashkevilim play among the ultra-Orthodox has been the angry reaction in the neighborhood to the city’s recent effort to enforce rules limiting the posting of notices to city-owned bulletin boards, which offer blackboard-size spaces.

The city has dispatched a team of four inspectors to find unauthorized postings -- and in Mea Shearim that is not difficult -- and hand out $100 fines, though pinpointing the sources of unsigned notices can be difficult.

As part of the campaign to reduce the number of pashkevilim, the city named a local printer its sole concessionaire, making him the only person in Jerusalem licensed to put them up. He is also authorized to rip down those that don’t pass through his hands first.

On pashkevilim that violate the city’s rules, enforcers now affix warnings that read, “This notice is illegally posted.”

Critics of the new drive deride Jerusalem’s mayor, Uri Lupolianski -- the first ultra-Orthodox Jew to hold the post -- as a turncoat seeking to silence his detractors. They’ve launched a surreptitious counterattack in the time-tested manner: through posters.

Showing up on city-authorized posters for job fairs and cellphones lately is a sticker mocking the city’s warning: “This advertisement violates the rules of the Torah.”

The pashkevil skirmish represents the latest clash between the haredim and Lupolianski, who took office last year promising he would not impose his ultra-Orthodox views on Jerusalem’s secular majority. By most accounts, he has kept his word, but in the process he has disappointed many fellow haredim.

Anonymous posters excoriating Lupolianski pop up with regularity. A common theme has been that he is catering to the secular community -- an accusation that highlights Israel’s long-standing internal tensions between religious and secular Jews.

One recent pashkevil accused the mayor of undermining community morals through city support for a street fair that features live music and alcohol in a downtown pedestrian mall. Another poster darkly suggests a link between the annual festival and a suicide bus bombing last year that killed more than 20 ultra-Orthodox worshipers returning from the Western Wall.

Lupolianski insists that his administration’s crackdown on the pashkevilim is aimed at making Jerusalem’s neighborhoods tidier, not squelching street-level dissent against him.

“I think that keeping the ads under control and not turning the entire city into one big bulletin board where all we see is ads is just as important as cleaning the streets and planting flowers,” Lupolianski wrote in response to faxed questions.

“There’s no connection to the ads that were posted against me,” he said. “In fact, I also acted for the removal of ads that were aimed at opposition members, like one ad that published the private phone number of an opposition member’s mother.”

Posting someone’s home number may seem a low blow to many outsiders, but the pashkevilim have long been used to deliver targeted warnings, often anonymously.

Residents of modern-day Mea Shearim who oppose a neighbor’s plans to build an addition might wage their fight through street posters rather than protesting to City Hall. A woman who gets a divorce through rabbinical court but whose husband resists can apply pressure by posting notices urging community members to avoid associating with the holdout spouse.

Last month, Israeli police arrested a 21-year-old man on suspicion of blackmail after he allegedly threatened to post pashkevilim saying his target had been involved in a homosexual relationship. Authorities said the posters were already printed.

In the sharp-elbowed world of pashkevilim, naming names is allowed but outright slander is not. The line can be razor-thin, especially in a tightknit community where reputation is paramount. Certain pashkevilim carry a seal at the bottom indicating that the text has been reviewed and cleared by rabbis.

Property disputes are sometimes played out via poster -- with charges and responses put up within hours of each other. Rabbinical court rulings are often publicized the same way.

In one such public exchange, two Jewish organizations sparred over the right to use a building for activities. The posters went up, back and forth, as arbitrators weighed in and as the rabbi overseeing the case announced that he was seizing control of the property and ordering both sides to stay out for the time being. “And peace shall reign in Israel,” he wrote.

Peace in Mea Shearim may be more elusive. Yisrael Klatzkin has been in the thick of things since being awarded the city’s pashkevil contract in June.

First Klatzkin had to cope with critics who hired a taxi with a speaker on top and drove around the neighborhood urging residents to boycott him and any collaboration with “sinner City Hall.”

Now he and his 10 employees are trying to bring order to the chaotic pashkevilim scene and cope with a demand for posters that exceeds the bulletin board space the city has authorized. For now, he is continuing to put them on walls in addition to the green sidewalk boards. The city says it is too early to know whether people are accepting the new system, but officials report that initial reactions have been mostly good.

Klatzkin, who speaks of the vast numbers of posters his company puts up each year, said it’s difficult to imagine the disappearance of pashkevilim. Still, he dares dream of their next generation: an electronic billboard with ever-changing messages, a la Times Square.

He concedes that the high-tech idea isn’t likely to win over traditionalists, but says there may yet come a day when Mea Shearim’s news is no longer posted with a glue brush.

“Everything will go forward,” Klatzkin said in Yiddish as his workers prepared an announcement for an upcoming visit by an American rabbi.

“Everything will change in 10 years. Cellphones were a dream 10 years ago, and now every child has one.”