Art, shmart. It looks like a naked man, and it’s not going up in the Holy City.
So reasoned the city fathers last month in rejecting a gift from the Italian city of Florence of a full-scale replica of Michelangelo’s “David.”
The $700,000 marble statue had been offered on the occasion of the 3,000th anniversary of David’s establishment of Jerusalem as the capital of the ancient Kingdom of Israel, to be celebrated next year.
But Jerusalem’s City Council, in deference to the sensibilities of ultra-Orthodox voters, to whom Mayor Ehud Olmert owes his election, politely turned it down.
“We are not talking about an art exhibit inside a museum, which we would not have interfered with,” Olmert explained in an interview with Israel Radio. “The statue was to be placed outside, in a public place, and it was legitimate for us to consider how the population would react.”
So Florence reportedly would send a clothed “David” by a lesser Italian sculptor, Andrea del Verrocchio.
The David incident drew only a couple of smart-alec headlines in the national press, but it aroused anxiety among secular Jerusalemites, who fear a return to the days when all businesses and places of entertainment were shuttered from sundown Friday to sundown Saturday, the Jewish Sabbath.
With the ultra-Orthodox haredi, or “God-fearing” parties comprising the dominant bloc in the coalition that runs City Hall, many Jerusalem residents fear that more roads will be closed to traffic on the Sabbath and that funds will be diverted from industry, theaters and parks – the accoutrements of modern life – in favor of housing projects for haredi families, who observe literally the biblical commandment to “be fruitful and multiply.”
Secular and modern Orthodox families by the thousands are leaving the capital for its suburbs and for cities closer to the Mediterranean, where secular administrations rule and the good times roll seven days a week.
Most leave for jobs, cheaper housing and other economic opportunities. But some also cite a desire to escape the “Wars of the Jews.”
Dedi Zucker, a left-wing member of the Knesset (parliament) who moved recently to the coast north of Tel Aviv, admitted that was part of his motivation.
“I was living in northern Jerusalem,” Zucker said, “in a neighborhood that had become more and more occupied by haredim. The trend was clear; secularists were moving out.”
But the main reason he left, Zucker said, was that “I didn’t like the city – the lifestyle, the opportunities, the potential. Jerusalem can never be a totally Western place.”
In 1993, some 16,000 Israelis left Jerusalem, about 80 percent of them secular or modern Orthodox, said Israel Kimhi, a town planner at the Jerusalem Institute for Israel Studies. At the same time, 10,000 moved in, more than half of them haredi. The trend is expected to hold up for 1994, he said, although he lacked final figures.
At present, haredim comprise 30 percent of the capital’s Jewish population, Kimhi said. The figure is estimated to reach 40 percent in 15 years, and the haredim easily could become a majority of the Jewish population in a generation. The proof is in the elementary schools, where 52 percent of the Jewish children under 10 are haredi.
The demographics go a long way toward explaining one of the chief complaints secular Jews have about the haredim: They’re expanding into neighborhoods where they didn’t live a few years ago and “taking over” by trying to impose their lifestyle on their environs.
Often this involves hundreds of young men and boys in black frock coats and long earlocks holding rock-throwing demonstrations on Saturdays to keep motor traffic from driving through their neighborhoods. Jewish law forbids travel, along with all other forms of work, on the Sabbath.
Secular Jerusalemites aren’t the only ones who feel their rights are threatened. The “we/they” mentality cuts both ways, and Anat Hoffman, a city councilor from the opposition Meretz party, pointed out that the haredim frequently are discriminated against and stereotyped by other Jews.
“There’s an Israeli tradition of hating the frightened, frail miserable Jew of the Diaspora. He’s not a fighter-not like us. It’s close to anti-Semitism,” she said.
Deputy Mayor Meir Porush of the haredi bloc, who is widely expected to become the first ultra-Orthodox mayor of Jerusalem, acknowledged that the City Council created two new departments to cater exclusively to the cultural and educational needs of the ultra-Orthodox community. The body also doubled to $20 million the budget of the haredi school system. But he said that was necessary to compensate for past inequities.
“Per capita, the haredi child does not get more than the secular child,” Porush said.
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Arie Shachar, an urban geographer and senior researcher at the Florsheimer Institute for Policy Studies in Jerusalem, believes the solution to the culture war is in “spatial segregation,” a gradual migration of populations into areas with some ethnic and cultural homogeneity.
Shachar sees a clear trend toward three such areas in Jerusalem: an Arab section to the east, a haredi section to the northwest and a non-haredi Jewish section to the southwest. “The dividing line between the two Jewish sections is Jaffa Road,” he added.
David Landau, author of “Piety and Power: The World of Jewish Fundamentalism,” believes much of the tension will be alleviated when the haredim come into their own and get their needs met, especially the need for housing.
“Paradoxically, the stronger the haredim get, the more tolerant and less fundamentalist they will become about the areas they don’t control,” Landau said.
Conceding his views put him in the minority, Landau, who is modern Orthodox, also predicts that Porush will be mayor by the year 2000 and will be “the embodiment of live-and-let-live.”
Menahem Brinker, a professor of modern Hebrew studies at the University of Chicago and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, doubts that Jerusalem will have a haredi mayor in the foreseeable future. But he agrees that the culture war already is less intense and that a compromise is shaping up based on geographical separation.
“The haredim were able to prevent construction of a soccer stadium in the north of the city, near their neighborhoods,” said Brinker. “But they weren’t able to stop the stadium from being built in the south.
“There are soccer games on Saturdays, and a booming nightlife on Fridays-movies, cafes, bowling-in areas of the city far away from haredi neighborhoods. And no one bothers them.”
Brinker agrees that secularists will have to continue to “fight for their rights” in their own neighborhoods to maintain this status quo.
In the meantime, Jerusalemites probably won’t be able to view the replica of Michelangelo’s “David” next year.
Asked how the City Council was persuaded to reject the statue, Porush said, “We relate to King David exactly as if he were alive. I said to (Mayor) Olmert, `If they wanted to put a naked statue of you in the street, you wouldn’t like it either.’
“He saw my point.”