Friday Flicks Crack Fragile Truce : By Opening Cinemas, Secular Jerusalem Takes On Orthodoxy

For the first time since the early 1950s, cinemas in Jerusalem are no longer dark on Friday nights. What is significant is not that the black-garbed Orthodox Jews have staged massive demonstrations. It is rather that the secular community has decided to mount an assault on their sensibilities. A new front in the other war for Jerusalem has finally opened. The fragile consensus between Jerusalem’s secular and militantly Orthodox Jewish residents has cracked.

There has always been a tension between Zionism and Judaism. Almost from the beginning, Orthodox Jews contended that Zionism usurped the messianic promise. Although Jews may return to Jerusalem, Jewish sovereignty can be achieved only through divine action, not by secular hands. So severe was this conflict between the laws of man and the law of God that Israel never developed a constitution. David Ben-Gurion fashioned a compromise, allowing the Orthodox to develop their own publicly funded school systems, to continue to control all matters of personal status like birth, death, marriage and divorce, and to be exempted from military service.

The irony was that Israel became the only democracy in the world in which Jews lacked religious freedom. Once Jewish sovereignty was established, the temptation of the Orthodox to use the authority of the state to enforce the dictates of the Torah was irresistible. After all, Judaism is basically a legal system originally designed for a political community, placing primacy not on faith or intention but on behavioral compliance with the law. Nowhere has the tension between Zionism and Judaism been more acute than in Jerusalem, which has always been the sacred center for Judaism--and since 1948 the national center of Israel.

The Orthodox population has grown more rapidly than any other segment in Jerusalem, because of both high birthrates and immigration. Until 1967 the community was boxed into a relatively small territory to the north of the divided city. Hemmed in by the Jordanian border on the one side and by Jerusalem’s major commercial thoroughfare on the other, the community’s densities increased tremendously. Since the Six-Day War, its population has expanded in every direction--not only north, where the Israeli government was madly building to solidify its claim on the now “united” city, but also south, into traditionally secular and modern neighborhoods.

This expansion has been accompanied by ferocious conflicts as the Orthodox have demanded that Sabbath traffic be routed around their new neighborhoods, thereby cutting off the secular inhabitants who want to enjoy their one day of weekly recreation. In classic “blockbusting” tactics, exorbitant prices have been paid to those who sell first. The remaining residents are harassed--subtly at first, with looks and taunts, but ending frequently in slashed tires and even death threats to those who offend religious sensibilities. Recently the Orthodox community has even begun to make inroads into the heartland of cosmopolitan, middle-class secular Zionists.

Orthodox political militancy in Jerusalem has been intimately connected to the struggle for resources. Until 1977 the non-Zionist Orthodox parties had been on the periphery. With Menachem Begin’s assumption of power, not only was God introduced into the nation’s political rhetoric, but the most important Orthodox party--Agudat Israel--entered the coalition.

In exchange for the religious parties’ support, they were given larger and larger amounts of state funds. The parties developed into political machines, doling out jobs and money in exchange for political loyalty at the ballot box. Demonstrations in Jerusalem could be used as bargaining chips to exact even more resources, even under the most severe fiscal austerity. Currently, with political power evenly balanced, Labor and Likud are both intensely vulnerable to pressure.

The city’s Orthodox community continues a long tradition of dependence on outside financial support from the Diaspora. It has long been considered a religious duty to provide financial support to Jews who would go to Jerusalem to study and to pray. Militancy defending the sanctity of Jerusalem is a way in which to earn greater support. It was very significant that the Orthodox “pray-in” at the Western Wall was staged on the first day of Elul, the month before the High Holy Days, traditionally a time at which Orthodox Jews donate money.

Finally, the Orthodox have continually attempted to achieve a monopoly over the meaning of the city. Their struggle is not simply to be left alone within their growing neighborhoods but to control public behavior throughout Jewish Jerusalem. So demonstrations, sometimes violent, have been mounted against archeological digs, a soccer stadium, New Year’s parties, fashion advertisements at bus stops, public swimming pools and daylight-saving time. The younger generation has increasingly been leaving the city for the Mediterranean cafe society of Tel Aviv and Haifa.

The Orthodox believe that by capturing Jerusalem they can shape the political culture of Israel. The city’s new Friday night moviegoers will not give up their seats willingly.