Religion

•VID EOGRAPHY

The Holy City
'Lacks Tolerance

GARY ROSENBLATT

Special to The Jewish News

he poet Yehuda Amichai
once wrote of a couple
searching for a place to
make love in Jerusalem.
Their effort was in vain because every
site was suffused with sanctity, every
stone a battlefield for holiness.
Jerusalem is a city of powerful
passions — political, cultural and
religious — and that is why there is
so much strife over physical and
emotional turf here. The ugly show-
down involving a group of
Conservative Jews, excessively force-
ful police and taunting haredim in
the shadow of the Western Wall on
Tisha b'Av, is just another symptom
of the religious-cultural clash that
threatens to destroy the country
from within.
Jerusalem has become a city
increasingly divided and never mind
the conflict between Arab and Jew.
When haredim, who now make up
about 25 percent of the city's popula-
tion, lay claim to a neighborhood,
less observant Jews move away. So
there are fewer "annexed" neighbor-
hoods these days, and secular Jews
continue their flight from the city,
abandoning it to the Orthodox.
The centrist Orthodox are out-
raged by the situation. As religious
Zionists whose children serve faith-
fully in the army in addition to
studying Torah, they have little toler-
ance for the haredim who do not take
up arms. And they resent that anti-
Orthodox Israelis lump them togeth-
er with their more extreme brethren,
who do not share their live-and-let-
live attitude toward other Jews.
Ehud Olmert, the mayor who was
elected on the strength of the haredi
vote, continues to cater to his most
powerful clientele. In frustration and
anger, the anti-Orthodox rhetoric
from critics of the haredim, who see
themselves as the keepers of the tradi-
tion, has grown increasingly ugly.
- Everywhere you go, people complain
- that the situation is getting worse,
and that it could lead to a civil war.
And so it is that despite the delight-
fully cool evening breezes here, one
can feel emotionally claustrophobic at
times. With so many people choosing
to live in Jerusalem to stake their
claim, whatever it may be, the feuding
groups are in each other's faces in this
:,-7city, where every place is.holy and

°

Gary Rosenblatt is editor and publish-

er of the New York Jewish Week.

thus worth fighting over, it seems.
One feels the need to get away, to
see the less glamorous but more real
Israel. For just as no one can appreci-
ate Israel without visiting Jerusalem,
the spiritual center of Judaism, it is
difficult to understand the national
psyche by only spending time in the
holiest city.
I feel I got a more typical sense of
life in this country in recent days by
visiting such unremarkable cities as
Hadera, Pardes Chana and Or Akiva
in the north and Beersheba in the
Negev.
In each I saw lower- and middle-
class people of many diverse back-
grounds — Ashkenazi, Sephardi,
Russians, Ethiopians, and native
Israelis — going about their daily
life, interacting naturally. The scene
in such cities is not idyllic. There are
ongoing tensions between the haves
and the have-nots, with the most
recent immigrants being the lowest in
the economic and social pecking
order. But there is a basic sense of
community, of people working
toward a common goal.

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Jerusalem
has become
a city divided by
religion.

Hadera, a city of about 40,000,
has a slower pace to it than big cities
like Tel Aviv or Haifa. The dress is
casual and the architecture nonde-
script. On the downtown streets in
late afternoon, the talk is more likely
to be about the day's soccer match
than the latest Mideast diplomatic
machination.
Beersheba, about a two-hour drive
south of Jerusalem, is of particular
interest because some see it as the
major Israeli city of the future, the
oasis in the desert — in part because
it is far removed from large Arab
populations. There are about
150,000 people living in Beersheba
today, 96 percent of them Jewish,
and city planners say that by the year
2020 there will be more than
750,000 people living in the greater
metropolitan area.
Large numbers of Russians settled
here in the last decade, though some

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