No leaven ‘in all thy quarters,’ including thy car

Hassan Siam is tired of the car wash business. It isn’t what he wants for his children. It isn’t what he wants for himself. But with cars queued up outside his small car washing spot on Bethlehem Road in Jerusalem, during the busiest days of the year in the lead up to Passover, when half the population of the capital seems to be waging an all-out battle against leavened products and the possible remnants of certain grains in their homes and among their possessions, he is willing to talk about the trade.

In fact, as opposed to a host of suspicious Jerusalem car wash owners, he is quite happy to engage in some banter. With his two oldest sons outside handling the clientele, he sits down in his cramped rectangular office, in front of a wall of steering wheel covers and upholstery cleaners and says, “Yes, what would you like to know?”

Siam is from Amman, Jordan. He studied political science and economics in college. In 1995, he married an Israeli Arab woman from Jerusalem. Asked, then, whether it was love that brought him to Israel, he said, “No, no, an arranged marriage.”

Today he has eight children, six boys and two girls. “I want them to not be in this ugly business,” he says. “Life is not money. By hook or by crook, they must go to university.”

At first, he worked at the car wash as a supervisor. At the time, in 1999, he says, there were only two real car wash spots in Jerusalem, “here and in Liberty Bell Park. Today there are 20 places in south Jerusalem alone.”

Many of the competing establishments, he says, are less than honest. “Unfortunately, the municipality gives anyone a license to wash the cars these days. Those who steal water from the city. Those who do not give an invoice.” Other places, he says, employ “workers with no papers, from the West Bank, who will work for a cheaper price.”

His clientele, he says, is varied but overwhelmingly Jewish. His Arab neighbors clean their cars in places like Hizmeh, a small Arab village east of the Green Line, where, he says, you can have your car washed for 20 shekels and you get tea and food while you wait, but the money, he explains, “goes straight in the pocket.”

Seasonally speaking, the winter is slow. “The rain does the work for me.” The dusty sharav seasons are good. And Passover is best. Siam, though, is adamant that the week before the holiday, when many Jews purge their cars of leavened crumbs, avidly inspecting beneath the floor mats and the baby seats, is only 50 percent better than the rest of the year.

Nor does he raise his prices, he says. “Cleaning is cleaning here. I don’t raise my prices, because I like to keep my clients all year round.”

Some gentle nudging – since I had been offered a 50-shekel standard clean or a 150-shekel Passover clean upon arrival – reveals that there are, nonetheless, some changes for the holiday season. The Passover cleaning includes the trunk, he explains. It includes under the seat. It can take up to an hour. “On a normal day, I will not open the trunk,” he says.

Siam is cognizant of his position as an Arab business owner in a Jewish part of the city. “Friday, I work,” he says, of Islam’s holy day. “Yom Haatzma’ut [Israeli Independence Day], I’m closed. Pessah [Passover], I’m closed. Shavuot [The Feast of Weeks], I’m closed.”

Only by respecting the Jewish and Israeli calendars, he says, “will they respect me.”

As with some of the other places where I dropped in (but none of which were willing to speak with a reporter), Siam’s array of customers includes the upper crust of Jerusalem’s society. “Two days before Passover, [former government minister] Dan Meridor will come by,” he says. “Peres” — President Shimon Peres — “sends all his drivers.”

The first car of the president’s fleet came on the day I visited, he says. “But he has Passover all the year. His cars come every few days. They are always clean.”