Poverty Amid Splendor : Old City--Fabled Core of Jerusalem

The early morning sun slants through St. Stephen’s Gate, casting exaggerated shadows along the Via Dolorosa.

Muslim Arab men in traditional kaffiyeh headdress enter and turn immediately to the left, up the Street of the Gate of the Tribes toward what they call Haram al Sharif, “the Noble Sanctuary,” for morning prayers at the Al Aqsa Mosque.

A little farther on, a bearded Greek Orthodox priest in a long black cassock scurries past a tethered donkey toward the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, built over what is said to be the site of the Crucifixion and burial of Jesus.

Hallowed Remnant

Along Valley Street, merchants setting out their selections of olive-wood carvings and T-shirts pay scant notice to a group of Orthodox Jews, their sideburns dangling almost to the black and white prayer shawls draped over their shoulders, heading toward the Western Wall, the last, hallowed remnant of the once-glorious Jewish Temples.

So begins another day within the walls of the historic Old City, the sometimes materialistic, sometimes mystical core of the much larger modern city of Jerusalem.

The Old City every year attracts more than a million foreign visitors, but there is another Old City behind the facades of the holy places and the souvenir shops. It is a labyrinthine jumble of stone where more than 26,000 ordinary people fight what is often a losing battle to lead normal lives in the tense and crowded showcase that fate or economics or ideological conviction has made their home.

“You really have to have a vocation to live here--it’s tough,” said Anna Grace Lind, the granddaughter of American Christians who moved to Jerusalem in the 19th Century. She lives in a house abutting the Old City’s northern wall where she was born more than 80 years ago.

Still Lack Amenities

Although the municipality has put about $40 million into improving the Old City’s services over the past 11 years, many Arab residents still lack such amenities as running water and inside toilets. Driving is severely restricted, and parking space is almost nonexistent.

Drugs are a growing problem, and in some areas so is theft. Even in the Jewish Quarter, completely rebuilt after Israel captured the walled city in the Arab-Israeli War of 1967, residents say they must put up with inconvenience, overcrowding and too many tourists.

Fran Alpert, an American-born Jew who immigrated nine years ago, exemplifies the conflict that so many residents seem to feel between the national and religious seduction of the Old City and the day-to-day problems of living here.

“You don’t have to wear peyotes (dangling sideburns) to be turned on by this,” she said the other day as she showed visitors the panoramic view from a special platform atop her home in the Old City’s Jewish Quarter. “The Talmud says God created the world right there,” and she pointed to the spot, a few hundred yards away, where the First and Second Jewish temples had once stood, before the time of Jesus.

Home on the Market

Alpert recently put her home up for sale in hopes of trading the view for a more traditional life style outside the walls.

“I’d be all right,” she said, “if I could just stay on the roof.”

The Old City, which accounts for less than 1% of the municipality’s land area but about 6% of its population, is separated into four distinct residential and commercial sections, according to the national and religious identity of the majority in each. And although some of the attractions and problems of living here are common to all, some are peculiar to the respective Muslim, Christian, Jewish and Armenian quarters.

But it was made clear in interviews with more than two dozen inhabitants and officials that no one chooses to stay because it is practical to do so. And while some say the problems are a small price to pay for the privilege of living in the heart of the Holy City, there is a steady outflow of residents from all four quarters.

Orthodox Influx

In the Jewish Quarter, people like Fran Alpert are moving away because they are increasingly uncomfortable with the influx of more Orthodox families who adhere to a strict religious code of behavior that is alien to the secular or more liberal way of life.

In the poorer and heavily populated Muslim and Christian quarters, where the attraction for many is low-cost or even rent-free housing, provided by the religious institutions that own it, many of the predominantly Arab residents leave as soon as they can afford something better outside the walls.

Every year, in the Armenian Quarter, a steady trickle of families abandon what is the Old City’s most cloistered life style to return to their national homeland south of the Caucasus Mountains, now a part of the Soviet Union, or, more often, to join relatives in the United States and other countries they see as offering more opportunity for themselves and their children.

These people are generally replaced by poorer and more religious newcomers. As a result, the Old City tends to get more divided even as it is united physically by a modernized network of services.

Within the Walls

Until a little more than 100 years ago, there was no Jerusalem outside the walls last rebuilt by Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent in the 16th Century, except for a few nomads and wild animals. As Old City inhabitants see it, that is still pretty much the case. When they say “Jerusalem,” they invariably refer to that part of the city within the walls. Everything beyond, as one of them put it, is “the suburbs.”

The Old City, in what is now the predominantly Arab eastern half of the modern city, stands on the rubble of 27 previous cultures, laid down over a period of more than 3,000 years.

Only about a third of the Old City’s residents had running water when Israeli troops moved in 20 years ago, said Yitzhak Yaacovy, director general of the East Jerusalem Development Corp. Ltd., which is responsible for modernizing the Old City. Today only one person in 10 lacks running water.

The supply of electric power is three times what it was. The old, inadequate sewer and drainage system, parts of which dated from Roman times, has been largely replaced. The entire telephone network is being revamped, and television antennas have been removed and replaced by underground cables in the Jewish and Armenian quarters and most of the Christian Quarter.

Few Changes in City

But aside from these important improvements and the rebuilt Jewish Quarter, the Old City for the most part is not much different from what it must have been hundreds of years ago.

Narrow alleys, unmarked entrance ways and hidden stairways create a maze through centuries-old stone buildings. One building abuts the next. Small, communal courtyards, hidden from view from the street, often provide the only open space for blocks around.

“You always know what the neighbors are having for dinner, particularly in the summer,” Nafez Assaily, a Muslim Arab resident, said with a laugh.

Outside Room Connection

Homes like Assaily’s often consist of two or three individual rooms with no connection between them except an outdoor walkway.

“During the night, you have to go outside to the bathroom,” said Assaily, 31, a publicist. “This I dislike.”

Many of the Old City’s 1,800 shops, owned mostly by Arabs, are literally no more than holes in the wall. They are concentrated in sections of the Muslim and Christian quarters, and their colorful old names have little to do with their present activities--the Butchers’ Market, Perfume Market, Leather Market, Olive Oil Market.

Today, most shops cater to tourists, and even those that serve the residents seem like relics of a bygone era. One Muslim quarter tradesman, for example, still polishes brass and copper trays by spreading sand on them, covering them with a rag and then standing on them, pivoting on the balls of his feet as in some dance step of the 1950s.

Merchants such as Said Barq, proprietor of a tiny laundry equipped with only two dirty ironing boards and an old, belt-driven sewing machine, say life is much more difficult than it used to be. They usually date their troubles to the arrival of the Israelis in 1967.

Villain of Progress

But in many cases the real villain is economic progress, which coincided with Israel’s conquest. Many Old City residents prefer to go outside the walls to shop in a modern supermarket rather than trudge from stall to stall as they used to do.

Yusef Terhi fondly recalled the days when he employed “baker boys” to collect dough from the residents and bring it to his Muslim Quarter shop to be baked in an old stone oven.

“We lost that after 1967,” he said, shrugging, “not because of the war or the occupation or the Israelis but because of development. People have stoves at home now, and it’s less expensive to buy Israeli bread than to make the dough and have it baked here.”

There is virtually no commercial entertainment in the Old City except for a few billiard parlors.

‘We Want Quiet’

“There’s no reason to walk in the night here except to pray,” Chief Superintendent Yair Most, commander of the Old City police force, said, adding, more seriously, “We want a quiet place, not nightclubs.”

There is some mixing of people in the Old City’s various quarters, particularly among Muslim and Christian Arabs. Also, some nationalistically motivated Jews, including Israel’s right-wing former defense minister, Ariel Sharon, have recently been buying up what they claim are formerly Jewish properties in the Muslim Quarter, exacerbating tensions between those communities. Sharon held a large housewarming at his newly renovated, Muslim Quarter apartment last week.

Intercommunal violence in the Old City is given broad coverage in the local and foreign press, but incidents of such violence are actually relatively rare. Nevertheless, most residents prefer to stay close to their own people.

“They were always separate, so why should you mix them?” one official said.

From Time of Crusaders

The separation is most pronounced in the Armenian Quarter, where life is centered around the St. James Armenian Orthodox Monastery. St. James, which dates to before the Crusaders, took in thousands of refugees during and immediately after World War I. About 600 descendants of these refugees, nearly half the residents of the smallest Old City quarter, still live within the gates.

“We call it the prison,” a young Armenian woman said with a laugh. “You know, they lock the gate at 10 p.m.”

There is an elementary school inside the monastery walls, and the community has its own clubs. There are almost no shops, and this is by design, to limit the flow of tourists. Most residents live rent-free, the beneficiaries of other income properties that the monastery owns outside the Old City.

‘A Piece of Armenia’

“Even those who have left the country look back and miss Jerusalem, because we have a very close environment,” said Bishop Guregh Kapikian, headmaster of the Armenian school. “For me, Armenian Jerusalem is part of my motherland, a piece from the land of Armenia brought and set down in Jerusalem.”

That others are not so enthralled with the quarter is clear from the enrollment at Bishop Kapikian’s school, where there are now about 200 students, in contrast to about 300 as recently as the mid-1970s.

“Everybody thinks about leaving,” said Hagop Antreassian, 43, a potter. “Life is good in a way, but it’s bad from another side. Everybody knows everybody. There’s no secrets. You don’t have much privacy in our kind of life.”

His two small children, Antreassian said, “don’t have any future here in Jerusalem.” The opportunities lie elsewhere. “Some day,” he said, “it will be the same as it was here before World War I--only the priests will be left.”

When the government decided to rebuild the Jewish quarter, it offered property to Jewish families that had owned homes there before 1948 and had lost them when the Old City fell into Jordanian hands in the first Arab-Israeli War. Almost all turned the government down.

‘Negative Memories’

“Between the Arabs and the poverty and the minimum facilities, all the memories of this place (from before 1948) were negative,” said Mordechai Dolinsky, a former director of the Israeli government press office who lives there. “It’s a different sort of Jewish Quarter today from what it was.”

The modern Jewish Quarter, which has about 2,000 residents, is a mixture of chic tourist restaurants and shops, quarter-million-dollar apartments, and generously endowed Talmudic academies.

Originally, it was thought that the population would be about 50% secular and 50% religious. And 10 years ago, one resident said, there was an almost Bohemian element in the area. Now, however, it is increasingly an ultra-Orthodox neighborhood.

“God is a Zionist,” says a sign outside the Jerusalem Jewish Information Center in the quarter. “Jerusalem is where it’s easiest to get to know him and his Torah. Come in for further information.”

A lot of Israelis do not like the change, said Dolinsky, who could be classified as traditional but not ultra-Orthodox. But while he conceded that “life has its problems here,” he added quickly that he would never think of leaving.

‘This Is the Hub’

“For the Jews, this is the hub,” he said. “If it’s important, it started here. This is the essence of what it’s all about. If I had a choice of anywhere in the world, this is just where I want to be.”

The Muslim Quarter is the largest and poorest in the Old City, with about 17,000 residents, or two-thirds of the total population, crowded into the northeast quadrant on about a third of the available space. The area is heavily patrolled by Israeli border guards, and younger residents particularly complain that they are frequently stopped for identity checks.

“Because of security reasons, we must check many of the people who come in and out,” said Most, the police official.

Residents and officials agree that the Old City’s drug problem is at its worst in the Muslim Quarter. Last month the police arrested 18 drug sellers there in one night.

“When we left the house and went out, we used to leave the key on a nail outside,” said Assaily, who lives in the quarter with his parents, his wife and two young children. “Now we can’t, because there are robberies, thieves.”

Still, Assaily went on, “inside me is something that clings to the Old City.” He spoke excitedly about the “beloved” sounds of the church bells and Muslim calls to prayer so characteristic of the Walled City, and said he is annoyed that so many Muslims leave.

Empty Apartments

Four of the 12 apartments in his courtyard are empty, Assaily said, and added, “Many people prefer to live outside because they say inside there is no fresh air, or they don’t want to share a bathroom with their neighbors.”

The 5,000 mostly Arab residents of the Christian Quarter share many of the problems of their Muslim neighbors. But they say they feel caught in the middle--distrusted by Jews and also by Muslims, who see them as bourgeois religious outcasts.

“I have more Israeli friends than Muslims,” said Charles Asmar, 17, who lives in a rent-free building owned by the Latin Patriarchate and occupied by 40 Roman Catholic Arab families. “I don’t like to be friends with Muslims. You can’t trust them.”

But when his neighbor, Dalal Abuhabeeb, a 36-year-old housewife and mother of two children, said she would like to leave the quarter for the fresh air and trees outside the walls, Asmar disagreed.

“If we didn’t take care of the Holy Sepulchre and the Via Dolorosa, who would take care of them?” he asked. “Not the Muslims or the Jews!”

“Everything in the Old City is political,” said Yitzhak Yaacovy. But to him this only adds to the challenge of modernizing the area’s services so it can remain a place for living, not just a tourist attraction.

He said he meets every other day with Jerusalem’s chief archeologist.

“I’m probably the only director of a company in the world that works with a New Testament, an Old Testament, and a Koran in his hand,” he said.