Congregation Ohav Sholom

The Israel Experience - The House on Rechov Nisan Bek

The Israel Experience - The House on Rechov Nisan Bek

by Michael Rosenbloom (spidermr@aol.com)

In 1975, while still living in America and planning on eventually making Aliyah, I decided to spend the summer in Israel. I would lease an apartment in Jerusalem together with a friend and spend three months in Israel, touring, taking some classes at the university and generally taking stock of myself and the country to which I was planning to immigrate.

I rented a railroad flat in a working class neighborhood in north Jerusalem, near Sanhedria, on Rechov Nisan Bek (Nisan Bek was the founder of the Tiferet Yisrael synagogue built in the Jewish quarter of the Old City in 1865). It was a quiet unassuming street populated mostly by Sephardic Jews. A typical house on Rechov Nisan Bek was one or two stories, with a courtyard serving as a buffer between the street and the house. Two steps would lead from the street to a creaky metal gate, leading to the courtyard. Typically, an elderly Moroccan Jew with a navy blue beret on his head would be tending to the fruit trees (maybe a fig tree) on the outer edges of the courtyard. The children would be playing marbles in the courtyard, oblivious to the world around them.

What I found most special about Rechov Nisan Bek was something everyone else may have overlooked. Like most of the other houses on the street, one house had two steps leading to a gate. But one of the steps, which led to a particular courtyard, consisted of part of what was once unmistakably, a column of some other structure. The column fragment was lying horizontally and served as a step. I would let my imagination wander when I would pass that broken column. I pondered what this once proud column had supported. From what time period was it? Was it somehow connected to the Sanhedrin Tombs, a site only a stone's throw away? Perhaps it was a column, which supported a building from Roman times. More interesting to contemplate was the event that brought down this pillar. Was it Jerusalem's very destruction in 70 CE, when the Temple was destroyed? Might it have been toppled over by an earthquake or an invading army, or something less romantic? Regardless, it was now unobtrusively part of the cityscape, serving as a stepping stone into a courtyard of an unassuming house on Rechov Nisan Bek.

August 2001

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