Rival Cities in Israel Divided by Centuries

Almost every Friday evening, as the stillness of the Jewish Sabbath settles over this holy city, a white-bearded man wearing a black hat and suit takes up his post at its western entrance.

Seated on a folding chair on a small island in the street, he glares and shakes his finger at drivers entering Jerusalem, delivering a stern reminder to the faithless, or forgetful, that religious law prohibits observant Jews from driving on the Sabbath.

It is not by chance that his message is aimed at cars coming up the hill from the direction of Tel Aviv, a city so freewheeling, so adamantly secular, that it often seems the eager antithesis to historic, sacred Jerusalem.

And never more so than today. The two cities, one built of stone, the other on sand, are ever more starkly divergent in their politics, economies and outlooks, embodying for many Israelis the growing rifts within their small but complex nation.

“They are cities apart, different in every conceivable way,” said David Nachmias, a political science professor who teaches in both.

In the recent national elections, for instance, Tel Aviv residents gave 65% of their vote to Ehud Barak, the center-left candidate who won the race and became Israel’s new prime minister. By the same ratio, Jerusalem residents cast ballots for the right-of-center incumbent, Benjamin Netanyahu.

For Yair Lapid, a Tel Aviv-based journalist who hosts a popular television interview program, the differences between the two cities boil down to this: “Do you want a fast connection to your ancestors or to the Internet? . . . Jerusalem is dragging us back to the past and Tel Aviv to the future. Israel has to decide what it wants.”

If Jerusalem veers to the right politically, Tel Aviv leans hard to the left. Jerusalem is poor, insular and divided, a “collection of alienated islands,” according to its former deputy mayor, Meron Benvenisti. Tel Aviv is wealthier, more homogenous, more cosmopolitan.

Anyone who has ever seen a Charlton Heston film knows something of Jerusalem’s appearance. It is dramatic, imposing and hard, with every building--by law--faced in limestone from the surrounding hills. Tel Aviv is anything but classic, a hodgepodge of styles ranging from Bauhaus to bad taste. Elegant office buildings mingle with crumbling slums; tree-lined boulevards abut decrepit back streets.

Jerusalem, with 622,000 residents--including 193,000 Palestinians--is the capital of Israel’s government, although the United States and most of the international community do not recognize it as such, declining to endorse Israel’s 1967 capture and annexation of the city’s eastern half. Tel Aviv, which has 349,600 people, and more than 1 million in its metropolitan area, is the center of the country’s financial life.

A fortress city 2,500 feet up in the Judean hills, Jerusalem is ground zero in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Its eastern side is in dispute, claimed by both Israel and the Palestinians. Political tensions, from verbal spats to suicide bombings, spill regularly into daily life. Only 35 miles away on the Mediterranean coast, Tel Aviv is largely removed from the conflict--and often resented for it in front-line Jerusalem.

Three years ago, the rivalry took an ugly turn after one of a series of deadly bombings in Jerusalem. In a radio broadcast aired repeatedly, a man near the bomb scene said he wished that, just once, the Muslim militants who claimed the attack would target Tel Aviv--”so they know how it feels.” Later that spring, in a bombing that shook Tel Aviv to its core, they did.

Religious Traditions Clash With Secularism

Then there’s religion.

Revered by Jews, Muslims and Christians, Jerusalem contains a multitude of sacred sites within the saw-toothed stone walls of its Old City. It is a powerful draw for thousands of religious pilgrims each year, a few of whom are so overcome by fervor that they succumb to a condition psychiatrists call “Jerusalem Syndrome,” in which the afflicted believe that they are biblical figures.

Jerusalem is also home to many religious communities, most significantly a growing, politically influential number of ultra-Orthodox Jews.

Tel Aviv, by contrast, is the heart of a fervently secular Israel, with restaurants, clubs and theaters overflowing on Friday nights, long after the Sabbath has begun. Its small communities of religious Jews hold little political power.

“Jerusalem is the capital of Israel major, with a capital ‘M,’ ” said author Zeev Chafets. “It is historical, biblical Israel, with all the Otto Preminger themes. Jerusalem is the mythological capital, where you can go to David’s tomb, hang a left and head over to Solomon’s pools.”

Tel Aviv is “the capital of Israel minor, of the actual people who live here,” said Chafets, who divides his time between the two cities but says he much prefers Tel Aviv. “It’s the capital of culture, business, finance, show biz, all the mundane activities that . . . living, breathing human beings are involved in every day.”

What Tel Aviv lacks in historical uniqueness or the dramatic light and stony beauty of its ancient rival, it makes up for in a kind of rambunctious vitality. It is a city that is very much alive, from the jammed cafes on trendy Sheinkin Street to the Miami-like jumble of pastel high-rises and grungy apartments along the seafront.

Jerusalem partisans tend to dismiss Tel Aviv as a city like many others around the world, a place without significant historic, religious or cultural landmarks. “It could be anywhere,” former Jerusalem Mayor Teddy Kollek said in a recent interview.

“A poor man’s Manhattan,” sniffed Jerusalem City Council member Ornan Yekutieli.

But that, Tel Aviv enthusiasts say, is precisely what they like about it: It is a city without the burden of thousands of years of Jewish history, whose residents feel free to express their sense of belonging to Israeli society in a nonreligious context. It is a place where Israelis, at long last, have achieved normalcy, many say.

“The spirit here is that you can do whatever you want, wear whatever you want,” said Doron Tsabari, a documentary filmmaker, as he sipped coffee at a Tel Aviv cafe one recent Friday. “Jerusalem is so nerdish, so depressing. Everyone looks bummed all the time.”

Each City Has Its Devout Supporters

Founded in 1909 as an extension of the ancient Arab port city of Jaffa, Tel Aviv was the first real “Hebrew city,” said Shlomo Lahat, who was its mayor for 20 years. Under Lahat, who left office in 1993, the municipality battled the religious establishment and bucked tradition to open coffeehouses, theaters and restaurants on the Sabbath, which begins at sunset Friday and extends until after dark Saturday.

“It was a tough fight with the religious communities, but I felt that people who were not religious should also have things to do on the weekends,” Lahat said.

His successor, Roni Milo, now a member of the Israeli parliament, followed the same course, fending off political and legal challenges that would have forced restaurants and stores owned by collective farms to close on the weekends. Under his leadership, Tel Aviv became associated with a more militant form of secularism.

Milo said he felt he could not allow Tel Aviv to “become more like Jerusalem,” a city he dislikes so intensely that he tries never to spend a night in it. “My favorite part of Jerusalem is the road to Tel Aviv,” he said.

But Jerusalem, too, has its passionate partisans.

Amal Nashashibi, a member of one of Jerusalem’s oldest and most prominent Palestinian families, has lived on the city’s east--once predominantly Arab--side for most of her life. Her ancestors arrived in the area 800 years ago, accompanying the Muslim leader Saladin in his battles against the Crusaders. A cousin now serves as finance minister to Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat.

Nashashibi, who has fought efforts by the Jerusalem municipality to change aspects of the east side’s Palestinian character, says life in the city is not easy. East Jerusalem is overcrowded, tense and often cut off by Israel from the Palestinian communities of the West Bank.

“But living here is very important to me,” said Nashashibi, who works as a human resources consultant. “The style of Jerusalem is very conservative, I grant you, but it is an old, beautiful city and it is important to me to preserve its character and to stay here.”

Across the city, Rabbi Aharon Feldman, an ultra-Orthodox Torah scholar and writer, says that living in Jerusalem is a joyful experience. Feldman, 67, emigrated from New York 38 years ago and settled at first in Bnei Brak, a religious community near Tel Aviv.

But he was drawn by Jerusalem. “The place just reeks of history. You can walk in the steps of great Jewish leaders of previous generations and feel their presence,” he said. “The culture here is much more Jewish, much more religious than other Israeli cities.”

Feldman lives in Bayit Vagan, a religious neighborhood of about 20,000 on the southern end of Jerusalem, which has synagogues and seminaries in abundance but no movie theaters, he noted approvingly. The streets are closed to traffic on the Sabbath, making it a time of peace and prayer for adults, and a chance for children to play outside.

Feldman credits the increasing power of the ultra-Orthodox in Jerusalem--they now control 15 of the city’s 31 council seats--with helping to keep the atmosphere more serene, more family-oriented and more Jewish than in other cities.

But this growing influence is deeply troubling to Jerusalem’s secular residents. The ultra-Orthodox now make up 30% of the city’s Jewish population and their birthrates are soaring. Many do not work, studying the Torah full time and living off state subsidies under an agreement reached between the government and religious leaders in the state’s earliest days. But the ultra-Orthodox were then a tiny percentage of the population; as their numbers have risen, so has the resentment of many Israelis at having to support them.

At the same time, growing numbers of Jerusalem’s young, secular residents are choosing to leave the city, usually for better housing or work opportunities, according to a recent study by Maya Choshen of the Jerusalem Institute for Israel Studies. While ultra-Orthodox also are trickling away from Jerusalem, heading mostly to new, religious communities nearby, Choshen found that the broader trend involves young, employed members of the secular community.

City Council member Yekutieli, who is militantly secular, has little patience with those who leave, viewing each as a turncoat soldier in the religious-secular war. Jerusalem and its struggles should be seen as a test case, he argued, in which both secular residents and the ultra-Orthodox are flexing muscles and joining the battle for control of the city.

And Jerusalem is worth it, he said, briefly waxing eloquent about the play of light at sunset that bathes the walls of the Old City in a rose-colored glow.

“We are at the forefront here of everything the Jewish people have for a conflict,” Yekutieli said, leaning across his desk at City Hall. “We have the chance to decide what kind of state this will be. My friends and I can have great influence over all of that.

“Here in Jerusalem, we are living in Jewish history, and we have the chance to make Jewish history. What is Tel Aviv next to that?”

*

Batsheva Sobelman of The Times’ Jerusalem Bureau contributed to this report.