Jewish Quarter

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Map of the Jewish Quarter

Early 20th century. The Jewish quarter is at the bottom of the image. The two large domes are the Hurva Synagogue and the Tiferes Yisrael Synagogue. Both were destroyed by the Jordanians in 1948.

For the article on Jewish Quarters throughout the Jewish diaspora, see Jewish Quarter (diaspora)

The Jewish Quarter (Hebrew: הרובע היהודי‎, HaRova HaYehudi or the Rova) is one of the four traditional quarters of the Old City of Jerusalem. The 45,000 square meter area lies in the southeastern sector of the walled city, and stretches from the Zion Gate in the south, along the Armenian Quarter on the west, up to the Cardo in the north and extends to the Western Wall and the Temple Mount in the east.

The quarter has had a rich history, with a nearly continual Jewish presence since the eighth century B.C.E. At the turn of the 20th century the Jewish population of the quarter reached 19,000.^[1] In 1948 during the Arab-Israeli War, its population of about 2,000 Jews was besieged, and forced to leave en masse. The Israeli representative to the United Nations claimed in 1968 in a letter to the United Nation Security Council that Jordanian Colonel Abdullah el-Tal, one-time commandant of the Arab Legion, had described the destruction of the Jewish Quarter in his memoirs (Cairo, 1959) with the words:

"... The operations of calculated destruction were set in motion.... I knew that the Jewish Quarter was densely populated with Jews who caused their fighters a good deal of interference and difficulty.... I embarked, therefore, on the shelling of the Quarter with mortars, creating harassment and destruction.... Only four days after our entry into Jerusalem the Jewish Quarter had become their graveyard. Death and destruction reigned over it.... As the dawn of Friday, May 28, 1948, was about to break, the Jewish Quarter emerged convulsed in a black cloud - a cloud of death and agony."

—Yosef Tekoah (Permanent Representative of Israel to the United Nations) quoting Abdullah el-Tal, ^[2]

The quarter remained under Jordanian rule until its capture by Israeli paratroops during the Six-Day War of 1967. During the 1960s American town planners, together with the Jordanian authorities, had planned that the quarter be transformed into a park.^[3] During the nineteen year Arab administration, a third of the Jewish Quarter's buildings had been demolished by the Jordanians.^[4] All but one of the thirty-five Jewish houses of worship that graced the Old City were wantonly destroyed. The synagogues were razed or pillaged and stripped and their interiors and used as hen-houses or stables.^[2] The Western Wall, the most sacred site in Judaism, was used as a garbage dump. Tombstones were used as paving stones.

In 1969 the Jewish Quarter Development Company was established under the auspices of the Construction and Housing Ministry to rebuild the desolate Jewish Quarter.^[5] At this stage the Arab population of the Quarter reached approximately 1,000, most of whom were refugees who had appropriated the vacated Jewish houses in 1949. Although many had originally fled the Quarter in 1967, they later returned after Levi Eshkol ordered that the Arab residents not be forcefully evacuated from the area. With Menachem Begin's rise to power in 1977, he decided that 25 Arab families be allowed to remain in the Jewish Quarter as a gesture of good will, while the rest of the families who had not fled during the Six-Day War were offered compensation in return for their evacuation, although most declined.^[1] The quarter was rebuilt in keeping with the traditional standards of the dense urban fabric of the Old City. Residents of the quarter hold long-term leaseholds, leased from the Israel Lands Administration.^[5] As of 2004 the quarter's population stood at 2,348^[6] and many large educational institutions have taken up residence.

Before being rebuilt, the quarter was carefully excavated under the supervision of Hebrew University archaeologist Nahman Avigad. The archaeological remains, on display in a series of museums and outdoor parks to visit which tourists descend two or three stories beneath the level of the current city, collectively form one of the world's most accessible archaeological sites.

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Jewish Quarter

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Coordinates: 31°46′34″N 35°13′56″E / 31.77611, 35.23222

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