The last three articles that I have written have been about Israeli elections, and I have grown weary of that topic. Fortunately, living in Israel, there are always positive things to write about, and I am going to write about one of them now. We just enjoyed a very successful Shabbat Chayei Sara here in Kiryat Arba/Chevron, with almost 30,000 guests celebrating Abraham’s purchase of Me’arat HaMachpela, and there is no better time for this article than now. (Last year, the whole celebration was cancelled due to Covid-19.)
One final comment:
The first 1,100 words of this 1,800-word article are really just a preface to
the last 700.
As a resident of
Kiryat Arba, an eleven-minute walk from the Tomb of the Patriarchs (Me’arat HaMachpela) in Chevron, I know
firsthand that the political goal of our local political and rabbinical
leadership over the past 53 years has been to bring as many Jews as possible to
live in Judea and Samaria, and especially in Chevron. No less important, they
also hoped to infuse the Jewish people with the religious faith to advance our
goals without fear of what the world would say. Our rabbinical leadership was
inspired by their mentor, Rabbi Tzvi Yehuda Kook.
When Rabbi Moshe
Levinger led 100 Jews into Arab Chevron, in 1968, renting space in the bankrupt
Arab Park Hotel and leading the first Pesach Seder there since 1929, no one
knew for sure where this would lead. On paper, he was breaking the law. All
Jews were supposed to be out of Judea and Samaria each night by 8:00 p.m. Yet
he declared, “The Jewish people have returned to Chevron! We shall never leave!”
His goal was to settle hundreds of thousands of Jews in Chevron and to restore Chevron
to its position as sister-city of Jerusalem. The masses of Israeli Jews admired
him as an idealist, even if some considered him eccentric.
Rabbi Levinger
called upon the Israeli government to allow Jews to buy Arab property in Chevron,
rent Arab property in Chevron, and reclaim ownership of all the Jewish property
stolen from the Jews following their evacuation in the wake of the 1929
massacre. The ongoing political struggle that followed has seen many starts and
stops, much progress followed by setbacks, but the net result has been
overwhelmingly positive. Today we are in a totally different place, both in
terms of our political footing vis-à-vis the world, and in terms of the belief
level of the Jewish people as a whole.
Today, besides the
10,000 Jews in my town, Kiryat Arba, there are 105 Jewish families living in four
Jewish Chevron neighborhoods: Avraham Avinu, (the largest), the Beit Hadassah
enclave, Beit Romano and Tel-Rumeida (Biblical Chevron). These large families,
together with the several hundred students in the Shavei Chevron Yeshiva, make
up a Jewish community of 1,000 Jews. Each neighborhood has large, permanent
buildings that were built from scratch. Each constructed building comes with a
story of a political struggle, and sometimes – as with stage two of Avraham Avinu,
Beit Hadassah, Beit HaShisha, and Beit Menachem – in the end it was terror attacks
that led the government to put aside its opposition and to build, as punishment
to the Arabs, recalling the Biblical prophecy, “I say to you, you shall live
through your blood!” (Ezekiel 16:6).
The last new
construction in Chevron was in Tel-Rumeida, in 2005, when Beit Menachem was
built, providing permanent homes for seven families previously living in
caravans (The government permitted construction after Rabbi Shlomo Ra’anan was
murdered.) We have been waiting 16 years since then for permission to build
more.
In the meantime,
the Jewish community of Chevron has developed another means of bringing more
Jews to live in Chevron: the quiet purchase of Arab homes. This approach was
perfected in East Jerusalem. The Elad and Ateret Kohanim organizations have
turned these purchases into an art form. Hundreds of Arab homes have been
purchased there – in
Ras Al-Amud, Ma’alei Zeitim, Beit Orot, Shimon HaTzaddik, and Ir David. East
Jerusalem now has a sizable Jewish population. The geography of Jerusalem has
changed. Every time an Arab home is purchased, the sale takes place through a
non-Jewish middle-man. The Arab owner is paid and given a chance to start a new
life outside the country, and only then is the sale revealed. Often the
purchase is followed by a fight in the Israeli court system as the Arab owners,
to save face, deny the sale. But eventually justice prevails.
Because Chevron is
less in the consensus, things have moved more slowly, but they are starting to
pick up speed. Each purchase creates legal precedents which pave the way for
the purchases that follow. Enormous sums are required to cover legal expenses.
No one is trying to become rich here!
The first
attempted purchase (that I know of) was Beit Shapira, back in 2002. A large
building just outside the Avraham Avinu neighborhood was paid for, and 30 Jews
moved in. Yet within a month, the Jews were physically removed and a court
battle ensued. In that case, the Arabs managed to prove that the wrong Arab had
been paid. Interestingly, however, the home was not given back to the Arabs.
Rather, Beit Shapira has stood uninhabited for19 years, with enormous steel
plates blocking entry by anyone, like the wall that half falls and half stays
up in the Talmudic story of the “Oven of Achna’i” (Bava Metzia 59b).
More successful
was Beit HaShalom, purchased in 2007. The entire sale was filmed. Every “i” was
dotted and every “t” was crossed. Families moved in, but after a year they were
physically evacuated. It then took 10 years in the courts for a resolution to
be achieved. Today, there are three families living in the building, just to
hold on to it. Renovations are going on right now to prepare 20 apartments,
many of which have already been purchased.
Next came Beit
HaMachpela, purchased in 2012. The sale moved fairly quickly, and six families
moved in. But legal problems arose. Those families moved out consensually and
were allowed immediately to move into the next project, Beit Rachel and Leah,
likewise purchased in 2012.
At present,
renovations are going on in Beit Rachel and Beit Leah, and five Jerusalem
families have already purchased apartments there and are waiting for the
renovations to be completed so they can move it. Hopefully, by the time the
renovations are completed, the six families will be able to move back into Beit
HaMachpela.
*
* *
Everything I have
described is important, but it is only an introduction to what follows: There
were three political decisions by the Israeli government during the past five
years which may prove much more important than the ones
mentioned so far.
1) In 2017, the
Israeli government, with the signature of the defense minister, agreed to build
a
new neighborhood of 31 homes in the Beit Romano compound, where the
Shavei Chevron Yeshiva is located. Half of that compound was the property of
Yisrael Romano, a wealthy Turkish Jew who built Beit Romano in the 1870s, and
half was owned by the Schneerson family of the Lubavitcher Rebbe.
The Israel
government also decided to take the army camp that has been functioning there
since 1980, and build the army a large
two-story permanent building. That neighborhood will be called Beit Chizkiya, named after Rabbi
Chizkiya Medini, who sat in Beit Romano during the first decade of the 20th
century writing his encyclopedic Sdei Chemed commentary on the Talmud.
After starts and
stops, construction was actually ready to begin on that project. My friend
Mendi Arieli, from my Chevron Daf Yomi shiur,
lived in one of six caravans sitting right where the construction is supposed
to take place. Two years ago, he and the other six families were moved
elsewhere in Chevron so that the construction could begin. But there were so
many unforeseen legal challenges that they ended up moving six other families
into the caravans, which were still sitting there.
Then, finally, three months ago, construction actually began
on the two-story army building, the first totally new Jewish construction in Chevron
since 2005. And three weeks ago, they removed the caravans and began digging
down to prepare for construction of Beit Chizkiya!
2) In December of
2019, once again with the signature of the defense minister, there was a
decision to construct 70 homes in the Avraham Avinu compound, on lands
purchased by the Jews at the beginning of the 19th century. That
site is called the “Wholesale Market” site, because after the Jews were forced
out in 1929, the Arabs put a produce market there. The local Jews, however,
call it Shalhevet, after the 10-month-old girl, Shalhevet Pass, murdered in
2002 by snipers from the hills above.
3) Finally, in
October of 2020, the Israeli government approved construction of an elevator to
bring handicapped people up to the entrance of Me’arat Hamachpela. This is such an obvious thing to do it shouldn’t
even be news. Only the pigheadedness of the Arabs could keep this from
happening. The Arabs are still fighting to stop it. (Five years ago I
came to the Me’ara with my
wheel-chair-bound mother, and watched as four border policemen carried her up
the 60 steps.) But at least the government has made the decision to do it.
If all three
decisions are implemented, it will change the face of Jewish Chevron. There
will not be 105 Jewish families but 205, plus a permanent army building.
I wrote above that
when Rav Levinger first appeared, he was admired as an idealist and a hero, but
some outsiders said, “You've got to be a bit nutty to do this sort of thing.” The
more Jews live in Chevron, the less nutty you have to be, and the more rooted
the community will be. Maybe they will even need their own grocery store, which
they don’t have so far. The very fact that the army is building a large
permanent building makes a statement to the world that Jewish Chevron is here
to stay. And the fact that all this is happening when the Arab Islamic movement’s
Ra’am party and, lehavdil, Meretz,
are in the coalition, is good news indeed. We have come a long way since 1992,
when Rabin won the election and construction on a Jewish neighborhood in the
middle of Kiryat Arba stopped overnight. We have much to be thankful for.
