Of Friends and Fueds

My cousin’s wife had a driving lesson today and I got a ride with her into Jerusalem. Annoyingly, there is no concept of a learner’s permit here, so there is no way to practice driving in advance of the driver’s test outside of lessons. We drove around, practiced parking, and the instructor, who spent a bunch of time on the phone, told me that I needed to speak only Hebrew in Israel. While waiting for a college friend to get out of class, I sketched in my sketchbook for the first time in years. It took me a while to get into it, slowly remembering the process of drawing. We had lunch at “Kuppah Gh’oh” and then walked around the scenic HUC campus where all HUC rabbinical students from the various campuses in the US spend their first year. She told me about the wall built with narrow windows to minimize exposure to then-neighboring Jordanian shooters. Now squarely in Israel, the campus was an oasis of calm in the bustling city.

View of the Old City walls and the Tower of David from HUC.

I walked around a bit after she left for class, finding myself on front of what will be the Waldorf=Astoria Palace. The designers of the building appreciated the old façade so much they gutted the building and are constructing the new one inside it. Across the street I sat down in the park to check my map and call friends. Among the trash, graffiti, and the odd man peeing, I saw what looked like old grave stones with Arabic writing, now cracked and broken. This was a Muslim cemetery, long since deconsecrated, and under auspices of the Muslim Waqf who clearly didn’t take such great care of it. It is this same cemetery that is now the center of controversy because of plans by the Simon Wiesenthal center to build part of a new Museum of Tolerance here. Without taking sides, I’d hazard that they might take better care of it.

Construction on the new hotel, built in the shell of a hotel built by the Ottomans—on cemetery grounds.

The Mamilla cemetary as it is now. The trash, graffiti, and neglect are just outside the frame.

I walked down to Emek Refaim to meet friend #2 who I just discovered lived there. He had also given up a job in a thriving economy to come here and now is gainfully unemployed. Passing time until meeting friend #3 for dinner, I stopped by the PresenTense office, where I overheard someone lament that they’d prefer to eat free-range eggs, but most free-range eggs come from the Territories, and it was a tough call for him because he didn’t support that either. Upon relating this to Micah, he pointed out the irony that the farmers in the Territories were more humanitarian. At dinner at New Deli we caught each other up on what our high school classmates were up to. Friend #4 had passed on free jazz to go to bed, bringing my friend-filled day to an early close. I hoofed it over to the bus stop, and despite getting temporarily lost on account of Israeli fear of street signs, made it safely home.

The Moses Montefiore Windmill, built in 1857 to grind flour in the first Jewish neighborhood outside the Old City.

A modern masterpiece. How tastes have changed.