Jewish Quarter (Jerusalem)

[3] After Israel captured East Jerusalem during the 1967 Six-Day War, the quarter was earmarked for rehabilitation as a tourist destination and a residential neighborhood, and in the years that followed, a large-scale reconstruction and conservation project was undertaken.

[10] The convention of the modern boundaries of the Jewish Quarter may have originated in its current form in the 1841 British Royal Engineers map of Jerusalem,[11] or at least Reverend George Williams' subsequent labelling of it.

[12] The city had previously been divided into many more harat (Arabic: حارَة, romanized: Hārat: "quarters", "neighborhoods", "districts" or "areas", see wikt:حارة).

[20] In CE 135, when the Roman Emperor Hadrian built the city of Aelia Capitolina on the ruins of ancient Jerusalem, the Tenth Legion set up their camp on the land that is now the Jewish Quarter.

[32] According to Benny Morris, quoting a British diplomat, the nearly all-Orthodox community were "on good terms with their Arab neighbours", resented the Haganah presence, and "were loath to see their homes sacrificed to Zionist heroics".

[35][36][37] On April 28, 1948 Francis Sayre, the President of the United Nations Trusteeship Council announced that both Moshe Shertok of the Jewish Agency and Jamal al-Husayni of the Higher Arab Committee had agreed to recommend to their respective communities in Palestine: (a) the immediate cessation of all military operations and acts of violence within the Old City; (b) the issue of cease-fire orders to this effect at the earliest possible moment; and (c) that the keeping of the truce should be observed by an impartial commission reporting to the Trusteeship Council.

On May 7, General Cunningham, the High Commissioner met Arab League representatives including Azzam Pasha, the Secretary-General of the League and obtained approval for a cease-fire agreement covering all of Jerusalem provided that the Jews also agreed, this being forthcoming later the same day when the Haganah issued a cease-fire order to its troops in the Jerusalem area.

Haganah forces occupied the positions vacated by the British army and the High Commissioner left Jerusalem early the next morning.

I knew that the Jewish Quarter was densely populated with Jews who caused their fighters a good deal of interference and difficulty.

Abdullah al-Tal justified the destruction of the Jewish quarter by claiming that had he not destroyed the homes, he would have lost half his men.

[citation needed] The Jordanian commander is reported to have told his superiors: "For the first time in 1,000 years not a single Jew remains in the Jewish Quarter.

[44] Vatikiotis writes of the diary kept by Constantine X. Mavridis of the Greek Consulate General, Jerusalem,[45] "an eyewitness account of the contest between Arabs and Jews for the control of the Old City which went on for at least six months during the Palestine War (1948)".

[46] According to the diary: The Arab guerrilla fighters who later joined with the Legion of Transjordan were preoccupied with clearing the Jews from the Jewish Quarter inside the Old City, who even used their own synagogues as strongholds from where attacks were made.

Since there was no reply from the Jewish side, as it was stated officially by the Red Cross, the Arabs bombed and destroyed it.According to Chief Rabbi Rabbi Isaac Herzog, speaking in Tel Aviv less than two weeks after the surrender and reported on 9 June 1948, of 27 synagogues in the Old City, 22 had been "razed by fire and explosives", with over 500 scrolls and scores of old Jewish manuscripts and sacred vessels being destroyed since the surrender date.

[48] This one-third destruction is doubted by British archaeologist Kay Prag, based on an aerial photograph published by Yigal Yadin in 1976.

[49] As part of a letter sent by Israel to the United Nations in 1968 in response to Jordanian complaints, it was stated all but one of the thirty-five "Jewish houses of worship" in the Old City were destroyed and that "the synagogues" were "razed or pillaged and stripped and their interiors used as hen-houses or stables.

"[50] In the wake of the 1948 war, the Red Cross housed Palestinian refugees in the depopulated and partly destroyed Jewish Quarter.

[52] Jordan had planned transforming the quarter into a park,[53] but neither UNRWA nor the Jordanian government wanted the negative international response that would result if they demolished the old Jewish houses.

During the first week after taking the Old City, Israel dynamited the Mughrabi Quarter, demolishing 135 houses, and two mosques on waqf property and evicting the 650 Arab residents in order that, on the razed ground, a plaza could be created at the foot of the Western Wall.

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.

[63] Some archaeological remains were left in situ and made accessible, either in outdoor parks, or in a series of museums set up between one and three storeys beneath the level of the current city.

[68] The palace has been destroyed during the final days of the Roman siege of 70 CE, suffering the same fate as the so-called Burnt House, a building belonging to the Kathros priestly family.

An Arabic inscription, unearthed in the Jewish Quarter in 2010, dates back to 910 CE and commemorates the granting of an estate in Jerusalem by the Abbasid Caliph.