A Street Divided: Stories From Jerusalem’s Alley of God

by Dion Nissenbaum

  David lost a lot at pool, but he helped the guys learn some English and get some training. Some got factory jobs. Others went back to school. It wasn’t glamorous work. But he liked it. He could see himself making a life helping people. David returned to the United States to get a degree in social work from Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio. By the time he was done with his casework, he’d found a new girl who wanted to move to Israel with him. This time, he said, “she didn’t dump me.”

  David and his new girl, Judy, got married and made the move to Israel in 1979. This time, the haidak alim was stronger. David dove back into social work. He got a job helping run urban renewal programs in Jerusalem’s poorest neighborhoods. Very quickly, it became clear to David that, if he was going to keep doing social work in Jerusalem, he needed to learn some Arabic. Knowing some would help him better communicate with the city’s poorest residents, both Arab and Jew.

  So he took a three-week intensive Arabic course and studied, off and on, on the side after that. It was one of David’s ways of showing that he was willing to do some serious work to bridge the divide between Arab and Jew.

  “I was able to begin the process of, at least symbolically, demonstrating that I was into communicating,” he said.

  David kept up his work on antipoverty programs and officially immigrated to Israel—making aliyah—in 1983. David and Judy had three children together, but the couple starting drifting apart as their kids got older.

  Alisa met the couple in 1989 when she joined their Jerusalem synagogue, but they didn’t socialize all that much at first. In 1997, David hired Alisa to do some part-time grant writing for his business. Outside of work, David and Judy’s efforts to save their marriage were going nowhere, and the couple finally separated in 1999.

  “Sometimes parents choose their own happiness over that of their kids, which is what I think happened here,” Judy Feierstein said of the couple’s separation. “It’s not nice, but it’s the truth. It really was not a good marriage by the time it ended, and we both knew that. Sometimes you need to end it. We probably waited too long, but OK.”

  Though David and Judy were able to untangle their lives without too much acrimony, the divorce hit their three children hard. So did David’s decision to marry Alisa after his divorce from Judy was finalized two years later. And Alisa didn’t come to the marriage by herself. In 1999, Alisa had flown to Romania to adopt a nine-month-old girl she named Avital. David’s son and two daughters had a hard time adjusting to their dad’s new wife and her daughter. Avital went from being the only child of a single mother to the youngest of four kids in an unusual nuclear family.

  David held the family together with a staple of eye-rolling “dad jokes” and white-water rafting trips. He was the kind of husband who’d make risqué comments to Alisa about their sex life during the filming of an Israeli television documentary about their Israeli Brady Bunch–style family. He was the kind of father who’d turn Friday night Shabbat songs into a performance on the main stage at one of Israel’s premiere outdoor folk festivals. Soon after Alisa and David got married, they went looking for a new home in Jerusalem. They checked out dozens of places, but nothing seemed to fit. Some homes were too pricey. Others were too small. Then they heard about a little house in Abu Tor that was about to go up for sale.

  For David and Alisa, the place on Assael was perfect. First off, it was cute. Built sometime in the 1970s as a backyard addition to an apartment complex, it had a small garden, natural light and an enclosed garage. Secondly, because it was on the dividing line, the price was right. Because they are in Abu Tor, because they are on the cusp of Arab East Jerusalem, the houses on Assael are far cheaper than the ones in the neighborhood across the train tracks in the trendy German Colony.

  “I’m so glad most Israelis are, you know, racist,” David said sardonically. “They hear our neighborhood has Arabs. As a result we were able to get something nice, nearly our dream house.”

  The place had a big living room with mosaic tile floors and vine-covered windows that sometimes made the place feel like a sheltered cave. Alisa planted purple kale and basil in the tiny garden squeezed between their front door and the blue iron gate leading out to Assael. They filled their home with family photos and mementos from their travels—clay Moroccan cooking tajines and a metal sculpture of Shiva, the dancing Hindu god often associated with yoga. Alisa hung a quote by sixteenth-century Renaissance poet Ben Jonson in their bathroom:

  In small proportions we just beauty see; And in short measures life may perfect be.

  Assael proved to be the ultimate proving ground for David’s beliefs, training and skills.

  As he biked to and from his job in the German Colony, where he ran a two-room business helping nonprofit groups raise money, he began to see the divide on his street. It was easy to see where Israeli Jerusalem ended and Palestinian Jerusalem began. The eastern side was a series of flat, low stone houses with stone walls and corrugated tin covered with spray-painted Arabic graffiti scrawled above red crescent moons, blue stars and golden images of the Dome of the Rock. The western side was an unbroken series of locked gates, stone walls and dented, metal electric garage doors. Unofficially, the place where the border fence once rose still marked the edge of Jewish Abu Tor.

  Where others saw a yawning divide, David saw potential common ground.

  This place, he thought, could be utilized much more as a bridge for coexistence.

  David imagined coexistence block parties and bilingual social workers coming to Assael to organize street art competitions.

  Of all the places in Jerusalem where it could grow naturally, he thought, this is one of them.

  As a community organizer, David looked at living in a “mixed” neighborhood as an opportunity. “Obviously there are some degrees of risks and potential negatives, but both of us kind of took a certain degree of responsibility for trying to make sure that possible negatives would actually work out to be a positive,” he said.

  David had a special calling card he used to break the ice: a joke he knew—that worked best in Arabic—with a punch line that went, “The big dog is just a dog, but the little dog is a son of a bitch.” More often than not, it did the trick. David kept the joke in his holster of icebreakers and pulled it out on Assael Street as he got to know the neighbors. David accepted every invitation he could to visit families living on the other side of the street. He went to the Bazlamits to congratulate Zakaria and Nawal when they returned from Hajj in 2006. David’s subtle offers of respect didn’t go unnoticed by the Bazlamits.

  David watched as the other visitors kissed Zakaria’s hand when they greeted him as Haji and figured he’d do the same. It was a small gesture from their Jewish neighbor that the Bazlamits remembered for years. When Zakaria passed away a few years later, David went by to sit with the family and pay his respects. For David, it was the least he could do.

  The Mayor of Assael Street

  By the time David and Alisa moved to Assael, the west side was entirely walled off. Almost everyone with a house on that side of Assael could come and go without actually walking out to the street. David and Alisa’s home was one of the few with a door leading out to Assael—and they made sure to use it.

  “We’re not the kinds of people who barricade ourselves,” David said.

  David was always looking for ways to break through the suspicion on the street. When the Bazlamits got into the dispute with Carol in 2006 over the Hajj graffiti painted on her wall, David and Alisa thought things might have gone down differently if the neighbors had spoken to each other.

  “If that had happened to our wall, I don’t think it would have been a problem,” Alisa said. “I suppose if they had drawn Hajj pictures on my wall, I probably would have handled the situation in a different way.”

  David and Alisa knew the language divide fueled mistrust on both sides. Visitors wou
ld sometimes ask them if the Arabic graffiti on the street was hateful.

  “People come and ask: ‘What does it say? Kill the Jews?’” Alisa said. “When you don’t have information, it can be deadly.”

  David saw Carol’s confrontation with the Bazlamits as a perfect example of why neighbors needed to find common ground.

  “For [Carol], that act was a gross invasion of privacy and an attack on her property,” he said. “It was violation of the ABCs of respectful living together. And she wasn’t able to go to them and say: ‘Jeez, you didn’t ask me, you really shouldn’t have done that, I want you right away to please paint over it.’ They would have done that and they would have said: ‘We really didn’t know’ or whatever, but for [Carol] that was it. She just lost it. With all due respect, she had a decent reason to lose it. She wasn’t totally unreasonable.”

  David had other hopes for that wall. He wanted to see it become a canvas for some authorized street art—legally sanctioned coexistence graffiti. The cement wall was a perfect little billboard in the middle of Assael Street. It would be one of the small dreams deferred time after time by tensions that swept across Jerusalem.

  In time, though, David and Alisa’s efforts paid off. Their neighbors could see that they were making an effort. But Reiki and hand kisses only got you so far. David decided he should do more. If he wanted the street walls to represent something besides hostility and suspicion, he needed to step up his game. In 2011, with his wife’s encouragement, he decided to run for a seat on the city’s community council, an advisory group made up of neighborhood advocates. If he won, David would have the power—and, maybe, the money—to implement his vision. David took the campaign seriously. First, he tried but failed to convince one of the other two candidates to drop out so they wouldn’t split the secular vote and lose to the ultra-Orthodox contender. So he had to go door to door to get support and explain his plans. On election day, David won 62 percent of the vote. He became the official community advocate for Abu Tor. Now all he had to do was put his ideas to the test.

  “I’ve been walking around with a vision of what needs to be done for ten years,” he said in 2014. “I say to myself: ‘Why didn’t I do this a long time ago?’ All of the sudden I found myself in a position where I was more than just one person.”

  Technically, the district David represented ended right outside his front door—up to the spot where the barbed wire used to define the edge of Israel. The families on the eastern side of Assael were represented by another council member, someone living in lower Abu Tor. David’s district was meticulously gerrymandered to exclude most of the Arab residents of Assael. The line ran down the center of Assael, curved around the Arab homes on the other side of the street, and enveloped a street dominated by a controversial religious Jewish compound that was a popular target for Molotov cocktails and rock attacks when tensions rose.

  David decided to ignore it. He wanted to be an advocate for all of Assael Street, not just the Jewish side. But how? It took David quite awhile to come up with a plan. Eventually, he turned to the Jewish families of Abu Tor with a question: Are you interested in building better relations with our Arab neighbors?

  Many ignored his e-mail. Some people thought of it as the naïve endeavor of an American-born Israeli who didn’t really understand how the Middle East worked. But there was enough interest to get everyone together to see what they could come up with.

  In April 2014, more than a dozen of Abu Tor’s Jewish residents met at David’s place to talk about what they could do to bridge the gap. They drank green tea and talked for hours about crime and speed bumps, yoga and garbage bins, parking and politics. It wasn’t much, but it was something. It was more than most people on that side of the road were willing to do. Some people took to calling David the “mayor of Assael Street.”

  The group decided to go to the Palestinian families in Abu Tor with some suggestions. They wanted to host a coexistence street fair on Assael and thought it would be nice to set up an organic community garden where Jewish and Arab neighbors could share the secrets of their green thumbs. They thought Hebrew-Arabic-English classes might be a hit. And they proposed yoga classes for any and all women and girls from Abu Tor. Ideas in hand, David had to figure out how to get the families on the other side of the street involved. It wasn’t as easy as inviting them over for tea. David wanted to help. But he didn’t think he could dive into the biggest problems on that side of the street right away. David wanted to start with small things that wouldn’t create too many waves.

  “One of the things that one has to keep in mind is the political situation, and it was my strategy that it would be important to talk about common interests, neighborly relations, people’s lives, and to keep out as much as possible discussion of politics, political parties, political issues, unless they’re related to getting something done,” he said.

  The challenges became clear when David reached out to a group of young East Jerusalem leaders to see if they could work together on something—getting speed bumps, hosting a community meeting, whatever might work. The group said no. They saw working with David as “normalization.” They weren’t willing to take part in anything that could be criticized as helping to prop up Israel and undermine Palestinian nationalism.

  Eventually, David found people willing to help: the Bazlamits agreed to host a meeting in their courtyard. The small group gathered underneath the family’s grapevines, on the same slope were an Israeli sniper killed the elder Hijazi Bazlamit in 1951. The Palestinians had a list of concerns. They wanted dumpsters with lids for the street, so the cats and dogs wouldn’t keep dragging trash into the road. They wanted the city to clean the stinky sewer grates that made the street smell, especially in the summer. They thought speed bumps on one of the main roads through Abu Tor might slow down drivers who zoomed past the entrance to Assael at dangerous speeds. They talked about turning the small patch of empty land at the entrance of the street into a little park. They were small things. David figured he had to start somewhere. Garbage bins and speed bumps seemed to be as good a place as any.

  Songs of Freedom

  As the couple found ways to break through the mistrust on Assael, David and Alisa bumped into unexpected difficulties raising their youngest daughter, Avital. Avital was seven when they bought their house on Assael Street. Any move can be a challenge for a kid. And moving to Assael proved to be an especially trying one for Avital. Though she kept going to the same school—an alternative private “democratic” program where students had complete control of their education—she had to make new friends on the street. Since most of the kids spoke Arabic, that was hard.

  Avital was tall for her age and athletic. She liked to wear pink plastic Crocs and zip around the dead-end street on her purple scooter with her long brown hair whipping across her face.

  “I like our street,” Avital said. “At first I thought it’s annoying that there are Arabs here. I didn’t know anything about them. I can’t understand their Arabic. But then my dad helped me to play with them and we would play together every day.”

  David taught Avital a little bit of Arabic to help her make friends. At night, they would sit and learn basic sentences in Arabic that she would repeat over and over.

  “Shu ismek?” David would ask while Avital played Sims on the computer. (“What’s your name?”)

  “Ismi Avital,” she would respond. (“I’m Avital.”)

  “Ween inti saaken?” David would ask. (“Where do you live?”)

  “Ana saaken fil Shayara Assael,” Avital would say. (“I live on Assael Street.”)

  Avital tried it out on the young girls across the street, who giggled at her Arabic. As she got older, Avital became better friends with one of the neighbors who spoke English well: Khulood Salhab’s middle daughter, Maha.

  Though Maha was six years older than Avital, the two found plenty of things to bond over, l
ike doing their nails together and trading makeup tips. Maha was protective of Avital and liked to spend time with her, even though some of Maha’s friends told her that it was a bad idea to hang out with Jewish girls. Avital didn’t care that Maha covered her hair with stylish, colorful hijabs. Mostly they just made each other laugh. Avital quickly grew taller than Maha, who had no tall genes from her parents. The biggest things about Maha seemed to be her dark eyes and eyelashes. Where Avital was outspoken, Maha was demure. Maha mothered her favorite kitten like a baby. She took the kitty to the vet when she was sick and drove her around town in the family car when she needed to do errands.

  While Avital didn’t stick to her dad’s Arabic lessons, she loved the nights spent singing while he played guitar. Every Friday night for Shabbat, the family would sing old American civil rights tunes and folk songs from the ’60s. They’d sing traditional Sabbath tunes and John Denver hits. In 2007, the Epstein Family Singers—David, Avital, and the three older kids—spent eight hours in a recording studio to produce a nine-song CD. They sang “Leaving on a Jet Plane” and “Oh, Freedom.” They were impressive enough to be asked to perform a few tunes at Jacob’s Ladder, the country’s premier country and bluegrass festival at a hotel overlooking Lake Tiberias, the place where Jesus Christ had gathered his disciples and walked on water before traveling to Jerusalem.

  In 2011, an energetic, young redheaded American guy came to Avital’s school looking for singers. Micah Hendler, a skinny guy with rectangular glasses who is fluent in Arabic and Hebrew, wanted to create a new youth chorus of high school students from East and West Jerusalem. He was looking for kids who wanted to “transcend conflict through song.”

  Micah, a one-time member of Yale’s famous a capella singing group, the Whiffenpoofs, wanted to build a Jerusalem chorus where Arab and Jewish kids could meet on common ground to sing songs and talk about their lives. Micah enlisted Palestinian girls from Jerusalem’s refugee camps and Israeli boys who lived in the West Bank settlements encircling the city. There were Muslim girls who covered their hair and those who didn’t. There were Jewish girls who went to ultra-Orthodox school and those, like Avital, who were getting an alternative education.