Jewish Quarter

Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - Cite This Source

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

The Jewish Quarter (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. 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 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. During the nineteen year Arab administration, a third of the Jewish Quarter's buildings had been demolished by the Jordanians. 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.

In 1969 the Jewish Quarter Development Company was established under the auspices of the Construction and Housing Ministry to rebuild the desolate Jewish Quarter. 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. 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. As of 2004 the quarters population stood at 2,348 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.

References

Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia © 2001-2006 Wikipedia contributors (Disclaimer)
This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License.
Last updated on Wednesday February 27, 2008 at 14:14:36 PST (GMT -0800)
View this article at Wikipedia.org - Edit this article at Wikipedia.org - Donate to the Wikimedia Foundation