Most Israeli Jews would probably agree that the heart of Israel is Jerusalem, the heart of Jerusalem is the Old City, and the heart of the Old City is the Jewish Quarter — captured by Israeli troops precisely 45 years ago, an event marked on Jerusalem Day this Sunday.

And yet today’s Jewish Quarter, formed from the ruins and rubble that existed here after the Six Day War, has become a place entirely unlike the country at whose spiritual center it is supposed to exist.

On a recent morning in the Quarter, several contingents of American teenagers were herded across a spotless open square in the direction of the Western Wall. A bearded man sat at a table with a few sets of phylacteries and a banner with a Nike swoosh next to the English words, “Tefillin: Just Do It.”

In a narrow street nearby was the Temple Institute — an organization dedicated to preparing plans for the building the Third Temple — and its gift shop, which does a brisk business in Temple posters, puzzles and balsa wood models. In a different alley, two women with hair covered in severe kerchiefs, their hands resting on stroller handles, conversed in English.

“People dreamed of Jerusalem for 2,000 years. There is a special atmosphere here, and it helps us study,” said Arieh Weintraub, 23, a yeshiva student in a black yarmulke who was taking a break outside the domed Hurva Synagogue on one side of the square.

The unique nature of the Jewish Quarter can be summed up best in two numbers: 3,000, the number of residents, and 2 million, the number of annual tourists.

Trying to navigate the needs of residents and those of visitors “never goes off the agenda,” said Daniel Shukron, secretary of the official body in charge of the Jewish Quarter, the Company for the Reconstruction and Development of the Jewish Quarter in the Old City. (To residents, it is simply “the Company.”)

“It is not easy to find the balance, and no one is happy, which we think means we’re probably doing something right,” Shukron said.

In the other three quarters of the walled Old City, identified with Arab Christians, Armenian Christians, and Muslims, a visitor can sense an authentic and old pulse of life. Families in those quarters have been there, in some cases, for centuries. The Armenians, for example, have had a more or less uninterrupted presence in their quarter dating back 1,600 years.

But life in the Jewish Quarter was ruptured when Jordanian troops captured it in 1948 and expelled all of its residents. Today the reconstructed Jewish Quarter — which is cleaner and more modern than the others, and has a far higher number of tourist sites, excavations and museums, and where many residents are foreign-born — feels less like a Jewish neighborhood than a Jewish theme park.

In the Jewish Quarter there are those gripped by fevered visions of the future, like the people who run the Temple Institute, while others seem to be reenacting a fantasy of the past — Eastern Europe, filtered through the unmistakable prism of Jewish New York. The present, to an observer, can feel artificial and rootless.

The paratroopers who arrived in the Jewish Quarter in 1967 found an area that had been largely in ruin since the Jordanian conquest 19 years before. That provided a nearly blank slate on which the Israeli government could construct the Quarter anew.

The government officially expropriated the land within the Quarter’s boundaries, relocating Arab families who had moved in since the Jews left, and transferred the entire area to the Company for the Reconstruction and Development of the Jewish Quarter, which was to serve both as the contractor and landowner.

The government had contradictory aims — it wanted both to resettle the Quarter with Jews and to create a symbolic landscape and ideological mecca in which archaeology, memorials to the 1948 fighting, and rebuilt institutions from before that war would emphasize the Jews’ historic claim to Jerusalem.

The result, according to a paper published last year by two prominent Israeli geographers, Rehav Rubin and Doron Bar, has been “a new landscape whose connection to the pre-1948 neighborhood is extremely vague.”

Before 1948, the Quarter had been a neighborhood in decline, eclipsed by the modern development in the new city and populated largely by religious Jews whose poverty prevented them from leaving.

The new Jewish Quarter created a revised memory of the old one. Synagogues and yeshivas were rebuilt, the extreme poverty was expunged, and “tourists began to be told highly sentimental stories about the special atmosphere that pervaded the neighborhood,” according to Rubin and Bar.

The Jewish Quarter is home to significant ruins linked to other cultures, but most of those were not developed. Critics have pointed as an example of this policy to the Nea Church, built by the emperor Justinian and one of the city’s great landmarks in Byzantine times, the neglected ruin of which is not open to the public and is barely marked.

What has emerged, the researchers wrote, is “an ideologically driven cultural landscape that links the Israelite kingdom and the Second Temple period with the founding of the modern State of Israel.”

In the midst of this complicated landscape live the 3,000 residents of the Quarter, who veer between praising the otherworldly atmosphere of the neighborhood and complaining bitterly about its inconveniences, chief among them an acute lack of parking.

A recent decision by the Company to more than double parking prices led to calls from some residents for a “revolt” against the Company — a body whose officials are not elected and answer not to Jerusalem’s mayor but to the Housing Ministry, and which is therefore, residents say, opaque and all but unaccountable.

The Company’s secretary, Shukron, says there are plans to alleviate the parking crisis by constructing a new 800-car parking garage accessible via a tunnel under the walls. But the planned start of construction is still distant, and considering the sensitivities of the Old City and especially of the word “tunnel” in a place where tunneling has sparked deadly riots, it is almost certainly more distant still.

In the meantime, though, the Company is constructing an elevator and a moving sidewalk to ease access for visitors to the Western Wall, and is also rebuilding another historic synagogue, Tiferet Yisrael. Like the Hurva, rebuilt and inaugurated in 2010, the synagogue was destroyed by the Arab Legion in 1948, and its reconstruction is part of the restoration of landmarks that existed in the Quarter before it fell. And like the Hurva, its reappearance will do nothing to encourage or ease normal life in the neighborhood.

Nonetheless, many of the Quarter’s residents would rather be nowhere else. “Those who live here feel it is the greatest blessing,” said Aura Wolfe, who moved in 12 years ago.

She defined the Quarter simply as “the center of the world.”

“With all the headaches, like the parking, there’s a feeling of being surrounded by an energy that is unlike any other place on earth,” she said.

In the first years of reconstruction after the Six Day War, the population was drawn from Israel’s mainstream — most residents were religious or secular Zionists, and they included a number of artists and writers and government officials, including the military hero and cabinet minister Yigal Alon.

Bernard Spolsky, a retired linguistics professor, moved into the Jewish Quarter with his wife and two children in 1979.

The streets had yet to be paved, and when they bought an apartment it was a third-floor walk-up located 10 minutes on foot from the parking lot.

“It was worth the inconvenience,” Spolsky said. He remembered wandering the streets in those years, walking down the steps to the Western Wall, enjoying the sense that the landscape was significant — the ancient wall, the Temple Mount to the east.

Beginning in the mid-1970s, however, the population had already begun to shift. The Quarter saw an influx of ultra-Orthodox Jews, many of them English-speakers, willing to pay high real estate prices and suffer the Quarter’s inconveniences in order to be in the historic neighborhood and close to the Western Wall holy site.

Over the years, Spolsky said, the modern Orthodoxy practiced by his family and many of their friends was eclipsed by more extreme forms of practice. A landmark, he said, was a decision in the 1990s by the Quarter’s rabbi that English could not be taught after 4th grade because of a 19th-century prohibition that was, the rabbi had decided, still in effect. The neighborhood became more ultra-Orthodox. Stores catered to tourists, not to residents, and the Company seemed preoccupied with projects like rebuilding the Hurva and not with solving the parking problem.

“They didn’t face the issue: Was it going to be a museum, or a place where people would live?” Spolsky said.

Their children grown, he and his wife finally left the Quarter last year, moving to an airy apartment in the new city with an elevator and ample parking.

Many others have left over the years, and today the Jewish Quarter has an ultra-Orthodox majority, according to the Company. The neighborhood’s focal point, the Western Wall, is run by an ultra-Orthodox organization, the Western Wall Heritage Foundation, that enforces strict gender segregation and modesty rules and restricts religious practice according to its own interpretation of Jewish law. That means that the disputed heart of Israel’s capital, an enclave which Israel had intended to be a symbol of the triumph of Zionism and the state, is now largely in the hands of people who identify with neither.

Mazal Hess was born in the Jewish Quarter in 1926.

Her childhood memories are unsentimental — of large families crowded into small rooms, of dark alleys barely lit by kerosene streetlamps, of rushing through the streets to be home before dark, of the knowledge that they were cut off from the new city by the largely hostile Arab population that surrounded the Quarter.

“The Quarter was poor, and it was frightening at times,” Hess, 85, remembered this week. She spoke from her home on the kibbutz in northern Israel where she moved in 1943.

“Those who could leave left,” she said of those years before 1948. “Those who stayed were, as always, those who had nowhere to go.”

When the Quarter returned to Israeli hands after 1967, she and the members of her extended family went to visit but stayed put in their new homes.

“Those who were born there did not want to go back,” she said.

The European Union needs to become more integrated with a common finance policy and a central government, German finance minister Wolfgang Schaeuble said Wednesday (16 May).

“I would be for the further development of the European Commission into a government. I am for the election of a European president, he said at an event in Aachen, reports Reuters.

“I am in favour of being more courageous on Europe,” said Schaeuble, who is one of the German government’s most pro-European ministers.

He said this is a longterm response to the current eurozone crisis, which many have said has been exacerbated by the fact that the EU lacked the tools – such as a central transfer system – to effectively deal with it.

“We certainly won’t manage it in this legislative period,” said Schauble referring to the creation of a finance ministry but noted that for a currency union, a part of finance policy needs to be harmonised.

That should be the “lesson” learned from the current crisis.

He said he wants to widen citizens participation in EU politics beyond voting for MEPs to voting for the president of the European Commission, noting that the recent French presidential elections, including a three-hour TV debate between the two candidates, attracted interest far beyond the country’s borders.

His comments come as the eurozone is in its most difficult period since its sovereign debt crisis began over two years ago.

Politicians are openly talking about the prospect of Greece having to leave the euro following the 6 May election which saw most of the population reject the tough terms attached to the two bailouts the country has had.

Some EU leaders, including European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso, have indicated that Greeks should see the follow-up elections, due on 17 June, as a referendum on whether they want to stay in the euro.

Political messages on the future of Greece and the 17-nation eurozone have multiplied in recent days leading to a febrile atmosphere in the markets.

British leader David Cameron is due to step into the fray Thursday (17 May).

He will tell a business audience in England that the eurozone has to head towards political and fiscal union or risk a “potential break-up,” reports the Financial Times.

“Either Europe has a committed, stable, successful eurozone with an effective firewall, well-capitalised and regulated banks, a system of fiscal burden sharing and supportive monetary policy across the eurozone or we are in uncharted territory which carries huge risks for everyone.”

As points of religious contention go, the current status of the Temple Mount is one of the most potentially explosive issues for competing faiths anywhere in the world.

For Jews, it is the holiest place on Earth, from where the world was created, the site of the Binding of Isaac and the location of the First and Second Temples.

For Muslims too, al-Haram al-Sharif (noble sanctuary), has become a crucial place of worship and pilgrimage, where there stands a monumental shrine – the Dome of the Rock – and the al-Aqsa Mosque, a site of great importance in Islam.

This reality, combined with the Temple Mount’s physical location at the heart of contested territory, has given it a unique geopolitical combustibility not to be found anywhere else on the planet.

Ariel Sharon’s visit to the site in September 2000 prompted large-scale riots that eventually escalated into what became the second Palestinian intifada.

In 1969, a fire started in the al-Aqsa mosque by a mentally unstable Christian evangelical from Australia caused extensive damage and led to mass demonstrations in east Jerusalem and the West Bank. The event was also one of the motivating factors in the creation in 1969 of the Organization of the Islamic Conference, an international body devoted to safeguarding Muslim interests.

But inter-religious and political concerns aside, there is another, less prominent but nevertheless bitter dispute currently being waged, this one between different Orthodox Jewish groups regarding the permissibility of going up to Judaism’s holiest site.

The divisions among different rabbinic leaders are sharp; some outlaw ascent to the Temple Mount in absolute terms on pain of spiritual excommunication; others see the refusal to go up and insist on the Jewish right to pray at the site as a deviation from Torah law.

And although access for Jewish Israelis (and foreign tourists) is currently subject to tightly restricted, time-limited slots, this has not impeded the prosecution of a tough war of words and a struggle over the contested battleground of what is and is not permitted according to Jewish law.

FOLLOWING Israel’s conquest of east Jerusalem in 1967, the Israeli government allowed a Jordanian Islamic Wakf (religious trust), which had traditionally administered the Temple Mount complex, to continue to do so, despite the historical and religious importance of the site in Judaism.

Additionally, current Israeli law stipulates that Jews and other non-Muslims may not pray on the Temple Mount because of tensions this may cause, and supervisors from the Wakf follow visiting groups to ensure that they do not pray or conduct any visible form of worship But despite these restrictions, there is a small, committed contingent of devout Jews who visit the Temple Mount regularly, deny that doing so is not permissible under Jewish law and campaign actively for Jews to visit in greater numbers.

It is a widely held belief that Jews today are forbidden from going to the site of the Temple because of ritual impurity caused by contact with the dead.

Should someone contract this status – and it is hard to avoid – Jewish law prohibits entry to certain parts of the Temple Mount on pain of spiritual excommunication.

The religious establishment, principally the Chief Rabbinate, is keen to reinforce this notion. In April, for the second time in two months, the Chief Rabbinate issued a notice reiterating the stance of chief rabbis Shlomo Amar and Yona Metzger, as well as numerous other senior rabbinical figures such as Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, that it is completely forbidden according to Jewish law to visit the Temple Mount.

But for many others, the ban is an affront to their religious sensibilities. Rabbi Chaim Richman of the Temple Institute is one such person who fervently and passionately believes not only in the permissibility of ascending to the Temple Mount but that there is an obligation to do so, and to pray there.

“This is the holiest place in the world and the only true holy site in Judaism,” Richman told The Jerusalem Post. “We have a natural, healthy desire to be seen by God on the Temple Mount, and there is something very, very, wrong with rabbis who want to cauterize the natural well-spring of feeling and dedication Jews have for this place.”

Politicians from the Israeli Right are also eager to assert Jewish rights to and sovereignty over the Temple Mount. National Union MKs Arye Eldad and Uri Ariel visited the Temple Mount in December and Likud MK Danny Danon, who has also visited in recent times, is another advocate of Jewish rights at the site.

“The time has come for the government to exercise its sovereignty over the holiest spot in the Jewish religion,” Ariel said after his recent visit.

According to Richman and other notable rabbis, both past and present, concerns about stepping in the wrong place on the Temple Mount are unfounded.

Maimonides, for example, is known to have gone up to the Temple Mount in 1166 during a pilgrimage he made from Egypt to Israel. He wrote a brief letter about his experience, vowing to commemorate the date, the sixth of the Jewish month of Cheshvan, as a special holiday.

Richman cites David Ben-Zimra, a 15th-century rabbi from Spain who lived intermittently in Safed, Jerusalem, Fez and Cairo, and who wrote a responsa detailing the site of the Holy of Holies, which is strictly off-limits halachically, as well as areas where he said that it is permissible to visit. Moshe Feinstein as well, one of the most respected arbiters of Jewish law in the last 60 years, wrote of an “established tradition from the earliest sages, that it is permitted to visit [the site].”

There are also various historical sources that illustrate how Jews were accustomed to go up to the Temple Mount following the destruction of the Second Temple by the Romans in 70 CE. One of the most famous such sources is a recounting in the Talmud of a story that occurred after the destruction, when several of the most prominent sages of the time, including Rabbi Akiva, went up to the Temple Mount. All of them began to cry over the ruins, the Talmud relates, when they saw a fox running over the Holy of Holies, but Rabbi Akiva laughed, seeing in the experience the fulfillment of one prophecy and thereby expecting the future of fulfillment of the Temple’s restoration.

Other historical accounts also testify to Jews visiting the site, and even the presence of a synagogue in the early Muslim era until the 11th century.

SO IF the historic evidence is so compelling why is the rabbinate so adamant that Jews must not visit the Temple Mount? The rabbi of the Western Wall complex, Shmuel Rabinovitch, who has endorsed the ban on visiting the site, says that despite the opinions and historical evidence cited by those in favor, many of today’s leading and most authoritative Torah scholars nevertheless continue to prohibit such activity.

He told the Post that Rabbi Yosef Shalom Elyashiv, the most respected authority on Jewish law today, personally spoke with him about the importance of doing everything possible to prevent Jews from setting foot on the site.

“Does Rabbi Elyashiv not know the [opinions of] Rambam [Maimonides], the Radbaz [David Ben Zimra] and these other arguments?” he asked rhetorically.

“Did [the late] Rabbi Shlomo Zalman Aurbach, who also prohibited it, not know them?” Rabinovitch continued, proceeding to reel off a long list of other prominent scholars all banning Jews from visiting the Temple Mount.

Rabinovtich himself is reluctant to enter into the specific laws, details and debates surrounding the issue, sufficing to rely on the rulings of the abovementioned rabbis instead of listening to what he would consider less authoritative opinions.

But Rabbi Ratzon Arusi, municipal rabbi of Kiryat Ono and member of the Council of the Chief Rabbinate, expounds to a slightly greater extent. Yes, he acknowledges, Maimonides did ascend to the Temple Mount, as did others. The reason behind the rabbinate’s ban he says, is because, despite the fact that there are some areas of the Temple Mount where we know it is possible to visit, issuing a blanket permit for Jews to ascend would be very problematic.

As even Rabbi Richman and others concede, it requires a great deal of knowledge and expertise to know where one halachically may and may not go on the Temple Mount. Coupled with this are numerous other restrictions and requirements, including the necessity of immersing in a mikve [ritual bath], not wearing leather shoes and other conditions.

Most people, Arusi says, are not familiar with these issues, and may anyway disregard them. The consequences in Jewish law for stepping in the wrong spot, spiritual excommunication – one of the gravest punishments applicable to transgressions such as failing to be circumcised – is too great to risk, he argues.

OUTSIDE of a religious desire to visit and pray on the Temple Mount is another driving factor for those who are so insistent on Jewish access to the site.

MK Arye Eldad of the National Union sees not only religious significance in the Temple Mount, but cultural and political importance as well. The failure of Jews to maintain their connection with the place, he says, undermines Israel’s political claim to it as well. In addition, he continues, it bolsters Muslim and Arab claims to the site, and denials that any Jewish Temple ever stood there.

“There is most definitely a political struggle going on here,” says Eldad. “The Arabs think that if they can succeed in prizing away this piece of property from the Jews, then they will be able to seize every other Jewish property here, whether it’s territorial, historical, cultural or religious.”

Richman concurs.

“Efforts are being waged by the forces of Islam to delegitimize the Jewish connection to Israel and Jerusalem. And on the Temple Mount in particular, they are trying to remove all vestiges of Jewish history,” he says. “We need to go to show we’re still connected and that it’s still ours. Unfortunately, the Diaspora experience has lobotomized the ‘body of Israel’ and has created an idiosyncratic self-defense mechanism which has denuded Judaism of its true spiritual essence.”

There is also something Messianic in the efforts of those who ardently seek to restore a Jewish presence on the Temple Mount. The Temple Institute has devoted huge sums of money into constructing and producing the vessels, implements and garments required for the Temple, using the exact instructions set out in the Torah. Among the vessels constructed is a fully working golden menorah, which cost $2 million and is ready for use in the Temple.

Yisrael Ariel, the founder and director of the Temple Institute, who was among the soldiers who conquered the Old City of Jerusalem in 1967, certainly felt at the time that the re-establishment of Jewish sovereignty over the Temple Mount was a harbinger of the very imminent arrival of the Messiah.

Dr. Motti Inbari, an expert in Jewish fundamentalism at the University of North Carolina at Pembroke, cites an interview with Ariel in his book, Jewish Fundamentalism and the Temple Mount. In the interview, conducted in the Or Hozer journal of yeshiva high schools, Ariel vividly describes his emotions and experiences upon the capture of the Temple Mount and states that he thought that “these are the days of the Messiah.”

Rabbi Richman and the institute insist that the Temple will not “descend from the heavens,” as some believe, but will have to be constructed by men here on earth, as evidenced by their efforts to reconstruct the Temple vessels.

Asked if it is time to re-build the Temple, he responds “We’re 2,000 years late in doing so.”

To those who say that now is not the right time, or that the Jewish people must work on themselves spiritually and socially before even beginning to think about such an endeavor, Richman retorts, “maybe it’s not the right time to put on tefillin? Who says there is a time limitation for the mitzva of building the Temple? It is our job to do all the mitzvot.” He insists, however, that it is not the intention of the institute to start rolling out the tape measure on the Temple Mount and start building.

Other groups, such as the Temple Mount Faithful, led by Gershon Salomon, are clearer about their ultimate goals. This organization says unabashedly that its goals include “the building of the Third Temple on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem in our lifetime in accordance with the Word of God and all the Hebrew prophets” as well as “the liberation of the Temple Mount from Arab (Islamic) occupation.”

The homepage of the Temple Institute website currently bears a line from the well-known movie Field of Dreams: “if you build it, he will come.” The longterm goal, as stated on the website, is to do “all in our limited power to bring about the building of the Holy Temple in our time.”

Journalist and author Gershom Gorenberg, who wrote The End of Days: Fundamentalism and the Struggle for the Temple Mount, sees a strong nexus between Jewish messianism and aspirations for the Temple Mount.

“The place has always elicited strong messianic symbolism and exerted a magnetic attraction for anyone awaiting the Messiah,” he told the Post. “For those who find it unbearable that we haven’t rebuilt the temple, there is an urge to bring about a redemption by human means, forcing God’s hand, as it were.”

For those opposed to increased Jewish activity at the Temple Mount, Gorenberg continues, although it’s generally wrapped in technical objections of a political or halachic nature, the subtext is that rebuilding the Temple is beyond the ability of human hands and effort and must await the arrival of the Messiah.

“In Jewish history, people who were certain they knew how to bring the Messiah ended up being disastrous for the Jewish people,” he concludes.

Regardless of the longer-term aspirations of the various groups, the current debate surrounding whether or not Jews can and should visit and pray at the Temple Mount will continue because of the activities of organizations like the Temple Institute.

According to the Chief Rabbinate, the reason they have recently re-iterated their ban on Jews going to the site is because of increased organized visitations, a growing phenomenon that it would like to stamp out.

But the political and spiritual desire among some who want to insist on their right to pray at Judaism’s holiest site is still very much alive. The nature of that desire highlights both the very deep-seated Jewish attachment to this revered place and the huge potential it has to spark intra-religious dispute along with political conflict.

A new museum in Tel Aviv – the Beit David Museum, dedicated to the House of David – offers two fun-filled free days honoring the holiday of Shavuot, which is also celebrated as the 3,025^th birthday of greatest Jewish king ever.

The twin-day treat will take place on Monday, 21.5, and Tuesday, 22.5. It will include a lecture at 7:00 p.m. Monday by Dr. Chaim Luria on genealogy and King David’s DNA, and events for children starting at 11:00 a.m. on the following day. These will include actors dressed as biblical characters who will teach the children about King David in a fun way.

The museum, located on 5 Brenner St. in central Tel Aviv, opened just four months ago. It contains archeological exhibits from First and Second Temple times and includes artifacts of special significance in the story of King David: for instance, one section displays slingshot stones found in the Emek HaEla region, where David killed Goliath with a single accurate stone to the head.

In another room, a video shows the life of King David, from his humble beginning as a lonely shepherd until his anointment as king. Another video explains the art of lyre-making, and based on writings that describe how King David built the lyres he played.

The museum prides itself on the Genealogy Center, a database that traces the descendants of King David to this very day. It is centered on Rashi, a famous descendant of David, and his progeny. It includes over 100 surnames of present-day families descended from the greatest king of all. The results of the research are presented in the museum and can be accessed through a special website. 

Susan Roth, founder of the King David Museum and the Genealogy Center, is herself a direct descendant of King David.