Once upon a time in Jerusalem,
And this time, British anemones in front of the mythical Cafe Hermon at 10 Keren Kayemet St.
After the British occupation and the end of the period of Turkish rule in the country, Jerusalem awoke as a noble princess from centuries of a long slumber.
The influence of the British rule was felt in the city, and the Rehavia neighborhood, which was established at the beginning of 1920 as a garden neighborhood by the members of the Labor Battalion, who were workers who lived in tents and advocated simplicity, Hebrew work, and communal life, began to change its character.
The German immigration from Europe attracted to the beautiful and well-kept neighborhood an educated and elitist population, and affluent Spanish families such as Elisher, Molcho, Kukia, and Liro.
This is how doctors, engineers, physicists, and chemists who immigrated from Germany, Austria, and Czechoslovakia found themselves side by side, alongside the neighborhood’s Spanish wealth aristocracy.
At the beginning of the British mandate, there were 10 coffee shops in the entire city, and by the end of the 1930s, there were already over 50 in the city.
Cafe Hermon in the photo, located at the end of today’s Keren Kemeymet Street, near King George Street and the complex of national institutions became a gathering place for the leadership of the Jewish community.
10 Kakal Street was the home of Dr. Moshe Glazman, together with the Admoni family.
The Hermon Cafe was opened in 1938 by the Reiner and Sharaf families.
The cafe had a long, open garden, and it was used by the Zionist leadership of that time, as well as Ben Gurion and his wife Paula, who lived in a wooden shack where the Tirat Bat Sheva hotel is today.
Intellectuals, writers, and poets were also added to the cafe’s residents –
Leah Goldberg, Yitzhak Shenhar, and Aharon Applefeld were some of those who frequented the place.
The radio studios that were closed before the War of Liberation moved to 14 Ibn Gvirol St., the Beit Halutz nearby, and thus a situation arose where the reporters who were sitting in the cafe listening with or without permission to the conversations of the country’s leaders, finished their coffee and wanted to report on the radio the gist of the conversations they heard between an espresso and Kremenschnit cake.
It remains only to speculate what the leaders of that generation would have said about what is happening in our country today –
Between the “Group of weaklings” said a minister in the current government to the Air Force pilots who risk their lives guarding the country’s borders and away from it to the “Rolexes and Mercedes” of the thinkers and philosophers of the country’s leadership in 2023.
It seems that the leaders of the country who sat at the coffee table, those that signed the Declaration of Independence are turning in their graves with spectacular somersaults.
Cafe Hermon was closed in 1984, and thus its world fame passed, to a place that concentrated the essence of the Jewish settlement of the past.
Today, 2 new residential floors were built above the building in the photo, and the commercial floor is currently occupied by a Tambour store, clothing, and deli store.
This is how worldly fame ends.
This is our Jerusalem-
A mythical cafe that housed the fathers of the state along the way,
Workers imbued with Zionism who came from the four corners of the world to build a Zionist Jewish home with Sisyphean Jewish manual labor,
Prime Minister and President of the State who lived in wooden barracks, imbued with a sense of historical mission,
and British soldiers with red berets, who were called by the residents, anemones,
And one country is on its way to becoming a home for the Jewish people, for the entire Jewish people, as the promised and safe place for every Jew wherever they are.
How difficult it is to build a glorious country, a light to the Gentiles, with endless efforts and an unbearable price,
And how easy it is to ruin and destroy a Zionist enterprise that is more than a century old, in two months of complete system trolling.
May we have days of sanity and a return to the source, because as cliché as it sounds-
We have no other country.
May we receive a miracle and may sanity and discretion return to our country as soon as possible.
Shabbat Shalom to all, far and near, from Jerusalem.
צילום – צבי אורון
