On Friday afternoons in Jerusalem the entire city buzzes with activity as residents and visitors alike hurry to do last minute shopping and prepare for Shabbat. This Friday I found myself in the amazingly diverse and vibrant Jerusalem neighborhood of Nachlaot, along with other attendees of the Jewish Agency for Israel Annual Assembly. In a fun departure from the traditonal mode of many big conferences which often keep attendees cooped up all day and night in windowless hotel ballrooms, the organizers of this year's Annual Assembly presented us with several choices for Friday morning activities in and around Jerusalem.
I chose to join the group going on a two-hour scaveger hunt throughout Nachlaot and the nearby open-air market, Machaneh Yehuda. Each group of 4 or 5 participants was paired up with a young adult currently spending a year in Israel on a MASA (Jewish Agency-affiliated) program who used a smart phone to read QR ccodes posted around different points in the area. Using these codes as signposts, along with laminated maps provided by the organizers, we had a great time learning about the history of this neighborhood which is home to Jews of practically every denomination and every corner of the globe, from Syria to Poland to the United States. In these winding alleys and narrow roads we stopped to learnabout synagogue built by Jews from Allepo, the generosity of Sir Moses Montefiore who funded much of the early settlement of Jews in the immediate vicinity outside the walls of Jerusalem's Old City, and much more. We also explored the shuk (marketplace) of Machaneh Yehuda, a winding labyrinth of vendors where visitors can buy everything from hard candy and hallavah to fresh-ground spices and cow feet.
After the scavenger hunt was over all of the teams met up at a the Nachlaot community center, where we had a chance to meet some local entrepreneurs who had been given loans by the Jewish Agency to start small businesses. The enterprises included a micro-brewery, as well as a jeweler whose family had once provided their services to the royal family of Yemen many generations ago, and a catering company. It was clear from these presentations that the Jewish Agency assistance had mad a big difference not only in the lives of the individual business owners, but in helping to bolster the base of the local economy.
As we headed back on the busses I thought about the diversity of Jewish life and expression in the city, something very much on display in Nachlaot. It is interesting that for all the points of conflict in the city (and really, in the country) between different groups of Jews, that there are places of remarkable unity that are defined much more by the ways in which people come together than he ways in which they try to pull away from one another. This was also a theme of the opening session of the assembly, which was held Thursday night at the Mamilla Hotel, where President Shimon Peres spoke about the diversity of the Jewish community within Israel, and was followed by two very moving speakers who recounted their own involvement with efforts to rescue Jews from Ethiopia, an effort that represents a remarkable chapter in Jewish history.
It can be tempting to see Jerusalem only as a place of conflict, where tensions simmer and threaten to boil over on a daily basis, but I think the Jewish Agency has done a pretty good job so far in showing us the other side of things and emphasizing the role that Israel can play in uniting world Jewry. It's a valuable lesson and one I look forward to bringing back and thinking about further in New Hampshire in the months ahead.
Shabbat Shalom.
Copyright Daniel E. Levenson 2013.
