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The story of the Jewish homes in the Arab section of the Old City developed along the following lines: in the late 19th century, Jews from Russia and Eastern Europe came to Jerusalem and began buying houses there. They used the houses to organize yeshivas, synagogues and apartments which were soon filled with inhabitants. In the first quarter of the 20th century, there was a booming Jewish life in the Muslim section. Scores of yeshivas, synagogues, small enclosed courts with a lot of apartment in which Jewish families lived… All this lasted till the 1929 pogroms when Jews had to leave the neighborhood. Later, some of them returned and tried to restart normal life there. But already in 1936, another pogrom burst out after which Jewish life came to an end in this city district.
After Jerusalem had been reunified in 1967, the Israeli government didn’t do anything to return the property of the Jews, even though there were registers of the Jewish houses and the legal bearings of the case were never challenged. In the late 1970s, an amuta was established for the purpose of acquisition of the lost Jewish property. A lot of houses were bought out again and Jewish families moved in.
To find out how Jews live in the Muslim neighborhood today, we went on a tour led by our wonderful guide Yitzchak Fishelevich through the small enclosed Jewish courts of the old city of Jerusalem.
