Rediscovering Jerusalem: Journalist releases new edition of Six Day War-era book
Abraham Rabinovich’s updated book offers new insights and photographs, capturing Jerusalem’s transformation and enduring tensions since 1967
In the spring of 1967, a young Abraham Rabinovich requested the permission of his superiors at the local New York publication he wrote for to fly to Israel because he felt the rumblings of war and wanted to report on the action.
“They said, ‘You have two weeks, war or no war,'” he recalled in a recent interview with The Times of Israel. He stationed himself in the Musrara border area, chatting with people in the shelters and keeping an eye on the Arab side of the fence.
In the end, he stayed much longer than two weeks. Rabinovich enrolled in an Ulpan to learn Hebrew and better communicate with the locals. He began compiling stories and interviewing civilians and returning soldiers about their experience of the Six Day War. These stories eventually became his first book, “The Battle for Jerusalem,” published in 1972.
Over the next several decades, as he developed his career as a Jerusalem Post reporter, he continued to author books. He has used his slower retirement years to write independently for various publications worldwide, offering his unique perspective on global events.
“Jerusalem on Earth, Clamoring at Heaven’s Gate: Post-Six Day War Jerusalem,” was initially published in 1988. Recently, a revised version has been released with additional chapters and new photographs.
The new edition of “Jerusalem on Earth” opens with the story of two men, Haim and Abu Ali, living on opposite sides of the Jordan-Israel border fence in pre-1967 Jerusalem. These two develop a close friendship that blossoms when the city is united. The book’s final chapter catches up with them several years later; their wives, children, and grandchildren have grown close, with Haim’s son preparing to join the IDF.
Throughout the series of compelling vignettes, Rabinovich paints a picture of an evolving city through the eyes of its inhabitants. In particular, he focuses on former mayor Teddy Kollek, using Kollek’s career as a throughline.
As a beat reporter covering Jerusalem police and municipal activity, Rabinovich kept a very close eye on Kollek. Their relationship started with a bang, Rabinovich recalled.
“I was sitting in a room [in the municipal offices], and suddenly somebody kicked the door in. It was him! He said, ‘Good piece you did.’ And that’s how it began.”
Kollek’s arc in the book begins with an intimate portrait of a meeting with Arab community leaders to gauge their municipal needs despite not being represented on the city council. According to Rabinovich’s portrayal, he was, above all, a man of the people.
Kollek’s phone number was listed, and he fielded calls from constituents at all hours. In addition to municipal needs, he diligently cared for the city’s cultural development, creating the Jerusalem Foundation and the Israel Museum.
Rabinovich was also privy to Kollek’s less polished side. In his later years, Rabinovich wrote, Kollek grew more short-tempered and easily frustrated. And by the end of his tenure, as he struggled through the First Intifada, his fiery pursuit of a peaceful, coexistent Jerusalem had been tempered.
The book is more than just Kollek and war stories. Rabinovich is a born chameleon. He has a gentle demeanor and a quiet voice and has perfected the art of prompting others to open up. This, and the judicious use of chance connections, got him the inside scoop into Jerusalem’s most colorful characters and their extraordinary stories.
He dives into the lives of such characters as an anti-Zionist haredi man who loves the philosopher Nietzsche. There was also a bicycle-riding Danish nun who was inducted into an Ethiopian Orthodox order, a young police officer who went undercover for months as a haredi yeshiva student, and an Arab Muslim journalist who translated several tractates of the Mishna into Arabic.
Rabinovich even studied Talmud with the reclusive Uri Zohar, a famous Israeli comedian who abandoned the public eye in the late 1970s to become an ultra-Orthodox rabbi.
In particular, Rabinovich drew attention to Jewish-Arab relations through the years.
“A tale of two cities that became one. A tale of two peoples who didn’t,” Rabinovich writes.
Throughout the vignettes, Rabinovich paints a picture of a conflicted city, two peoples who fear each other but do not want to be separated again.
Reading Rabinovich’s stories of the not-so-distant past, the hopelessness of the present fades into the background.
“For an instant after the guns fell silent, nothing could be heard across the hushed city except the faint flutter of history,” he writes.
Neither Rabinovich nor his book offers any promises of peace. Still, at a particularly tense time in Israel’s modern history for Jewish-Arab tensions, “Jerusalem on Earth” is a refreshingly hopeful read.
