My Dad, Max Roytenberg was first in Jerusalem in 1952 and wrote this recently after visiting again 61 years later. Building Jerusalem I have come to Jerusalem to visit family for the holidays, September, 2013. My first September here was in 1952. When I first came the small space we held here seemed to have a border wherever I turned. I had to be careful not to point, for fear of attracting a volley of shots from the Walls of the Old City. The Jews there had been slaughtered and the synagogues there destroyed or desecrated. The hills around were barren spaces of rock and scrub. Jerusalem, today, shines in the sun, its parts like handfuls of jewels strewn over surrounding hills. They are embellished by greenery where we have had the time to plant and grow, so different from the sights before my eyes some sixty years ago. The habitations cling tightly to the hills, like barnacles hanging on to a heaving sea-shore, we are sinking roots deeply into the rock. Here and there, buildings climb defiantly into the sky, like raised fists, exclaiming “we are here and we will not be moved.” Round and round the central fact of our past, the foundations of our Temple mount, clothed by Islam on the ruins of our rebellion against oppression, the pink stone of Jerusalem, wave on wave, washes up and splashes over the embracing hills, proclaiming the evidence of the new life for Israel. Here, as everywhere in the land, the cranes have become a new national bird of the State. This view now hides the scars of old divisions between East and West. The imperatives of overcrowding and ideology have erased the spaces that once existed here. And within these areas, new neighbourhoods in the east have drowned the stagnancy of hundreds of years with, more often than not, swarming Haredi habitations, spilling over with children in the streets. Lines on paper have been ignored and erased, washed away by the blood and sweat of human bodies that will not be moved. Abhorred or ignored, there are new synagogues beside the old mosques, competing for air time among the neighbourhood sounds. New silver lines of twin rails now knit it all together. Today, for a few shekels, seated, as on a low-skimming mythical floating carpet, we can view the whole panorama at the ground level, one varied neighbourhood, enormously differing building shapes and natures, yielding to another, the actors subtly changing in character from stop to stop, from modern stylishly-dressed matron to observant Islamic woman in full regalia. The Haredi and the Imam, the stylish, the cool and the ragged, all join us on our train journey. Only the young look more or less the same across the full spectrum, and therein may lie the future. The city is open to all its residents, All of Jerusalem is now within easy reach of any one of those who might have some wish to do it harm. Luxury abides cheek by jowl with poverty, yet there is less violence in this city than we might find each day in Dublin or Belfast. Reluctantly or not, the inhabitants of this city are embracing this new reality, with all its blemishes and charms. The shopping palaces are accessible to all, along with the kitsch of the old markets, as we can see from the different costumes in the shops. The green of the open space, the glory of the antiquities, above and below the ground, the museums and the concert halls, the open spaces where people gather to eat and talk. The theatres of all persuasions, the street artists, the shops, the garish and the elegant, transplanted from Paris and Rome, the tiny corner nooks unique only to this space on the planet-all at one’s fingertips. We contemplate the world around us. Islam is aflame with fires generated by the friction of its inner contradictions, the mother of parliaments, whose children stood astride the world like colossi, is now led by pygmies who suck her dry of honour. America, the shining white house on the hill, recently the world’s guarantor of freedom and rough justice, led by a leader with a secret hate for the idea it represents, has extinguished its light, emboldening those who seek to re-establish their imaginings of a dark age. Russia, like a slavering wolf, failed in its effort to build a viable civil order to meet its peoples’ needs, envious of others, seeks always to seduce and swallow the weaker members of the pack. China and India, the home of half the world’s population, are gorging themselves on modernity, seeking to feed their people’s needs without a catastrophic collapse in their digestion process. It is obvious we will have to turn more to Asia for friends. Technological innovation is re-engineering the world as we know it with every beat of the clock of time, destroying the verities which those with the levers of power in their hands take for granted. Most of us are unconscious spectators seeking to find some sense of our world and our personal fates in a maelstrom of change. In less than three generations Israel has become a key word in every medium of communication in the world. On this tiny piece of ground, infinitesimal on this planet, a people that, though insignificant in numbers, loved it so much that they turned its wasteland of swamp, desert and barren hills, into a land of milk and honey once again. Technology has played a key role and has been a trump card in Israel’s hand. And now, Israel is the most desired real estate in the world. Suddenly, many of the world’s one and a half billion Moslems cannot contemplate a future without this sliver of land as part of their inheritance added to the vast spaces they already inhabit. Millions of people, perhaps hundreds of millions, are exercised into action to oppose the return of the Hebrews to their ancient land, sixty-five years after it was bequeathed to them by a world congress and the few Jews there wrested it from Arab armies who would have taken it from them by force. The world stood by as the Jewish homeland was converted from a gift of humanity to a statehood earned by courage, blood and tears. Jews have learned, and are learning lessons from these events. The conditions that many offer Israel for its continued existence today, would, in the real world we live in, be those that would ensure its Jewish identity would be extinguished. Even some of our friends offer only conditional approval. But today, Jewish population has increased almost ten-fold, and almost half the world’s remaining Jews are here. And more are coming every day. “Go back to Palestine!” That’s what they cried. By gum, we have and will, from all the trouble spots of the world! What a bizarre phenomenon! From this sliver of land, this tiny splinter of humanity, have come the wireless secrets of the internet and mobile phone, the data world in the cloud, that are now in command of our lives. From here has come efficient drip irrigation and mechanisms to conquer plant disease and product waste that will yet enable us to feed world populations from our limited arable lands, conservation technologies to rescue a water-hungry world. Contemplate the imaging innovations, like internal body cameras, the MRI and the cat Scan, laser repair to our bodies without surgery, technology enabling the blind to see, the deaf to hear, the crippled to walk. How about generic medications for the world’s poor? This is a short list of what has come from this place. And by 2016 Israel will become a reliable source for an energy-starved Europe or Asia, and offer a rail landbridge from Asia to the Mediterranean and back, both to ease the threat of Russian and Arab blackmail. Could we see here an industrial giant feeding the less-developed based on 3D printing technology? We have builded Jerusalem, and are yet building Jerusalem, in a green and pleasant land. What wonders are yet to come? Max Roytenberg September 2013 Dublin
Posted on: Mon, 23 Sep 2013 04:48:53 +0000
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