An Ultra-Orthodox Mayor in an Unorthodox City
By STEVEN ERLANGER
New York Times, NY
July 16 2005
Published: July 16, 2005
JERUSALEM — URI LUPOLIANSKI is the first to admit he runs an unusual
city – a place considered holy by Muslims, Christians and Jews,
who talk about tolerance more than they practice it, at least here.
Jerusalem has all the problems of big cities, with crime, unemployment,
garbage. But it has also been the prime location for suicide bombings
and other attacks on civilians in Israel: 90 since October 2000,
including 34 suicide bombings that have killed 183 people and wounded
1,454.
Then there are the less existential indignities: fistfights
among Christian clergy members over sacred turf; ultra-Orthodox
Jews spitting on the cross carried by the Armenian archbishop; the
demolition of Palestinian houses for zoning irregularities, which Mr.
Lupolianski happens to support. And Jerusalem is surrounding itself –
and in some places dividing itself – with a wall, a concrete security
barrier cut by checkpoints that is, in many places, 33 feet high.
But Mr. Lupolianski, 54, is almost as unusual as his city, and he
represents a growing power here.
He is Jerusalem’s first ultra-Orthodox mayor, a rabbi who has
been accused of favoring Jewish interests over Muslim ones, and of
favoring other religious Jews over more secular Jews, an unknown but
noticeable number of whom are leaving Jerusalem for less religiously
heated places like Tel Aviv and Haifa.
Born in Haifa, Mr. Lupolianski is an ultra-Orthodox Jew, known in
Israel as haredi, named for a fear, awe or dread of God. He will not
shake hands with women, for example, so his aides carefully, politely
and even gracefully insert themselves to spare female visitors any
embarrassment.
He has 12 children and 15 grandchildren, so far, he said, a not so
unusual number among the haredim. Indeed, the haredim make up an
increasingly large part of the city’s population – about a third of
it, roughly the same as the number of Muslims – and represent about
half the Jewish population. The number of Christians in Jerusalem
is tiny, fewer than 3,000, while fewer than 9,000 residents have no
stated religion.
Mr. Lupolianski was elected to a five-year term in June 2003. In his
campaign, he promised fair treatment to everyone.
“If we take the wrong steps here, we can cause a world conflagration,
God forbid,” he said in an interview in his office overlooking the
milky-tea-colored stones of the Old City. “So people have to behave
carefully,” he said, here in what he calls “a great human mosaic.”
Speaking in Hebrew, he said: “We have to take care of three religions
and their interests. But Jerusalem is not just the capital of the
people and state of Israel. It’s the heart and soul of the Jewish
people.”
MR. LUPOLIANSKI was recently and widely criticized for trying to
stop a gay rights parade in Jerusalem, a parade deplored by the
leading religious figures of all faiths here. A court ordered that
the parade be allowed to take place, and a young haredi man broke it
up by stabbing three participants.
Still, Mr. Lupolianski is best known in Israel not as a politician,
but as the founder of Yad Sarah, a charity that supplies medical
equipment to those in need, and runs low-cost dental clinics and
centers for disabled children.
The big battles in Jerusalem – over housing, zoning, equal education
and land sales – are small versions of the national struggle between
Israelis and Palestinians. Given their nature, some of the disputes
are beyond Mr. Lupolianski’s purview. The health services and the
police, for instance, are run nationally, not municipally.
Uniquely in Israel, Jerusalem, not the state, administers its own
educational system, although the state pays the bills. But there are
controversies here, too, with suspicions that the mayor is helping
religious education more than secular schooling.
One secular school, for example, Yad Beyad, has about 250 students,
half of them Jews and half Arabs, who learn in Hebrew and Arabic. But
Mr. Lupolianski’s administration recently canceled the school’s license
to educate children beyond the sixth grade, leaving this year’s sixth
graders without a school for next year. The administration, says,
though, that it treated Yad Beyad the same as any school.
THERE are larger issues, too, like the relatively poor garbage
pickup in East Jerusalem, home to many of the city’s Arabs, and Mr.
Lupolianski’s zoning and municipal plans office, which appears to
be trying to restrict Palestinians in East Jerusalem from building
housing, perhaps to limit the number of Palestinians in the municipal
boundaries.
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Forum: The Middle East Recently, in the Silwan and Issiwiya
neighborhoods, there have been cases of forced demolition of homes,
sometimes of Palestinian homes built a decade or more ago, because
the city authorities said that proper zoning and planning permission
had not been granted.
Palestinians like Hind Khoury, the Palestinian minister for Jerusalem
affairs, consider the city to be carrying out national policy and
trying to plant as many Jews in East Jerusalem as possible while
limiting the number of Palestinians there.
Mr. Lupolianski rejects such criticism. “It’s not true we’re trying
to keep Arabs down,” he said. “It is true that Arabs from Jenin and
Hebron, who are not citizens or residents of Israel, cannot just come
and move into Jerusalem as if they were from Tel Aviv.”
About Silwan, he said that the issue was houses built on land
classified as parkland, and that he would pull down Jewish houses,
too, if they were built there. “Would New York allow people to build
houses in Central Park?” he asked.
He stopped, then said, “Most of the Arabs here want to be part of
Jerusalem and remain here. When I ask them if they would prefer to
live under the Palestinian Authority, they say they want to stay here.”
As for the separation barrier, Mr. Lupolianski considers it a blessing
for helping to stop terrorism. “I call it ‘the gate of life,’ ”
he said. “The wall you can later remove, but a life you never replace.”
But he also argues for more sensitivity to the Arab population. “I
think the government must act, even if it costs more, to give humane
living conditions to everyone, no matter which side of the fence they
may be on.”
Jerusalem, which can feel small and even suburban outside the walls
and sites of the Old City, is in fact sprawling, especially since
Israel annexed East Jerusalem after seizing it from Jordanian control
in the 1967 war. Few countries recognize that annexation, which is
why nearly all have their embassies in Tel Aviv.
With an official population of 706,300 people, Jerusalem is Israel’s
most populous city, with more than 10 percent of the country’s
inhabitants. It has grown quickly with the state; it had only 84,000
residents in 1948. In East Jerusalem alone there are now about 400,000
people, half of them Jews and their descendants who moved there after
1967, and who are considered illegal settlers by the Palestinians
and much of the world.
Perhaps the city’s largest quandary is the sizable number of people
who are not working. Its large population of ultra-Orthodox Jews
includes many who study for a living and do not enter the work force;
its many Palestinians from East Jerusalem have endemic problems of
joblessness, made worse by security limitations on travel. And each
of these communities has a high birthrate.
About two-thirds of the people pay the minimal level of tax, and
there is little industry beyond tourism, which is recovering only
now after the last four years of intifada.
Mr. Lupolianski rejects the notion that he favors religious Jews,
and he said a great virtue of the haredi population was that its
families were strong and that they were “very little involved in
crime or drugs.”
Sometimes he is surprised by his situation. “It’s hard to believe
that I have to sit, as a religious Jew, with the representatives of
the Greek Orthodox Church and the Armenians to try to make peace
between them,” he said. “But I’m their mayor, and they need to be
able to come here and talk to me about their problems.”
As a city, he said, “we want to help everyone to preserve their
traditions in freedom, so that everyone can dance their dance –
so long as they don’t step on other people’s feet.”