The Mamilla neighborhood is located in a valley between the Old City’s Jaffa Gate and the New City.
The neighborhood was built at the end of the 19th century and its residents were Jewish and Arab merchants who wanted to get out of the crowded and limited old city.
Among them, there were craftsmen, small business owners, and shop owners, just like in the days when the Ottomans ruled the city.
After the British came to Israel, in 1917, there was an attempt by the administration to organize the neighborhood in the typical British style, but it didn’t yield the expected results.
In 1928, the Shemaa Center was built in Mamilla.
This was a commercial center established by Eliyahu Yosef Shemaa and his friends from the Halabi Jewish community. It included 250 shops owned by Jewish and Arab merchants from various niches and was considered modern and the first of its kind in the city. The center changed the face of commerce in the city.
On December 2, 1947, nearly twenty years after its establishment, Arab demonstrators stormed the center of Shemaa, plundered the shops, and murdered and injured the Jewish merchants, while the British police remained passive. Later, the commercial center was set on fire and several other residences in the neighborhood were also burned.
So much for the famous coexistence …
After the War of Independence began, the neighborhood was abandoned, and eventually became a no-man’s land between the old city, which was under Jordanian control, and the new and developing part of Jerusalem.
Gradually, new immigrants and Jewish families with many children and limited possibilities began to inhabit the neighborhood.
Most of them were expatriates from Kurdistan. They later acted as a ‘barrier’ between the old and new city. They became cannon fodder for snipers from the Jordanian Legion and the victims of occasional shelling.
In the Six-Day War, Israel liberated the Old City and the West Bank, and the Mamilla neighborhood became a ruin.
After the city’s unification, the concrete walls that formed the border that separated Jerusalem from the Old City were broken. This triggered a rapid process of demolition of all the buildings along the wall, including Beit Stern, which hosted Herzl, the state visionary during his visit to Jerusalem in 1898. Afterward, facing opposition from residents and the Preservation Sites Council, it was restored, and today, it is part of the new Mamilla mall complex.
The Passat Hotel, where poor Jewish families lived, was also destroyed. After negotiations that lasted for years, these families were evicted from the building by Benazid Lent. Then, the Jerusalem Pearl Hotel was built in that place, but it has been in arrears for many years. Only recently the permission to build a new building was released … Karma, as always, works.
The restoration of the Mamilla neighborhood, the related planning, the appointment of the government company Karta for this project, the story of how the complex was built, the tenders and how the developers changed, as well as how the tenants were evicted, are the subject of a long and separate post.
I still remember the giant cranes with steel balls that destroyed all the old buildings in the neighborhood while its residents were hopelessly watching.
I also remember a modest and quiet boy from Mamilla, from a small family of 12 people who slept on the floor, had no refrigerator or heating in the harsh Jerusalem winter and played with a football made of rags with the other children in the neighborhood. His parents warned him not to go near the old city walls. However, he went there and lit a candle on the 69th independence of the State of Israel, and became a symbol of Jerusalem, so close to today’s Mamilla neighborhood. This was our Uri Malmilian.
Today, Mamilla is the exact opposite of the historic neighborhood it once was. Here you can find:
-
A closed and luxurious ghost town called Kfar David, where properties were bought by the wealthy elite of Jewry, and are mostly used as homes for active Sukkots and Israeli holidays.
-
The Citadel of David Hotel, the former Mamilla Hilton, Mamilla Hotel, and the Mamilla Mall, built by the entrepreneur Alfred Akirov, which host a variety of tourists from around the world.
The Mamilla open mall, which spreads between Agron and King David Streets and the Jaffa Gate, has become a must-see site for everyone who comes to the city.
All in all, there is nothing left of the old neighborhood.
This is our Jerusalem – a city of contrasts and intriguing history. A city that saw attempts at economic coexistence during riots, plundering, and indifferent British rule. A city where distressed families lived in a single room next to extravagant penthouses. A city where a luxurious shopping mall was built next to the dwellings of poor families who were evicted and given meager compensation, one of their members being Uri Malmilian.
Peaceful Shabbat for those far and near Jerusalem!
Photo by – Werner Braun
