Not By Bread Alone ...

Last night Diane and I set out with a group of bread enthusiasts to explore some of the wonderful bakeries around the Mahane Yehuda market and Meah Shearim.  

Challot in a Jerusalem bakery.

In Psalm 136, known as “the Great Hallel”, King David praises G-d “Who gives bread to all flesh, for His mercy endures forever” and compares this sustenance to the miracle of splitting the Red Sea during the Exodus from Egypt.  In his last great speech to the Children of Israel, however, Moses reminded them that “Man does not live by bread alone, but by everything that comes out of the mouth of the Lord does man live”.  In Jewish life food is elevated to a level of sanctity.  This is especially true of bread.  Bread was given a special blessing by the Rabbis.  On Shabbat we begin each meal with a blessing over two loaves to recall the double portion of manna that was granted us before Shabbat during our 40 years wandering in the desert.

Millstones from Berman's
1886 flour mill. Photo: Yoninah

Jerusalem is blessed with many wonderful bakeries that provide us with bread for the week and challot for Shabbat and festivals.  The largest is the Angel Bakery.  The oldest is Berman’s Bakery. It was founded in 1875 in the Old City by Kreshe Berman who immigrated from Lithuania with her husband Rabbi Todrus Halevi Berman and their two small sons.  Although the business has moved several times and has grown enormously, Berman’s Bakery has operated continuously for 136 years.  In 1886 Kreshe’s son Yehoshua opened the first Jewish owned flour mill by the Cotton Market in today’s Muslim Quarter.  During the British Mandate, Berman’s had a contract to supply the British Army with bread.  In the War of Independence all the bakeries in the city except Angel and Berman’s were closed down because of the shortage of supplies.  Nowadays these two giant bakeries face each other in Jerusalem’s Givat Shaul neighbourhood.

Natural Choice shop and bakery

Bread can be made from any of the five species of grain that could become chametz - wheat, barley spelt, rye, and oats.  They use all these grains at the unique Natural Choice bakery on Agrippas Street opposite the Mahane Yehuda market.  Natural Choice bake and sell a range of breads, pastries and biscuits all from natural products with no preservatives and no food additives.  Here you can buy organic, gluten free or sugar free products and even bread baked without yeast.  It’s the only place I know that you can find bread made from spelt. 

Plaiting challot at Lendner's bakery.

If Angel is the biggest and Berman’s the oldest bakery in Jerusalem, the most traditional is Lendner’s Bakery in the haredi Beit Israel neighbourhood next to Meah Shearim.  Lendner’s is small, a hole in the wall, but venerable enough to have a street named after it.  It was established in 1887.  Here they bake just one type of challah and sweet rolls.  A constant stream of visitors troops in and out of the bakery and somehow Bentzi Gudinger and his small group of workers welcome them without stopping work for a moment.  On Thursday nights there are thousands of challot to be made.  Each one is plaited by hand and placed on a tray which goes first to a special warming cupboard where the dough rises.  The traditional brick oven has a deceptively small door.  It can bake nearly 500 challot at a time!  The aroma of the baking bread is wonderful.  We just couldn’t resist buying our Shabbat challot there!

Keep It Under Your Hat!

As I write it’s raining hard in Jerusalem and snow has been forecast.  You might expect the hats to be coming out here to protect people’s heads from the weather but if that’s what you think hats are for you are badly mistaken.  You may even see some orthodox Jews wearing plastic bags over their hats to protect the hats themselves!  Hats have a much more social purpose altogether especially here in the holy city of Jerusalem.  “Fashion”, someone once wrote, “is a kind of communication.  It’s a language without words”.  We talk about someone “wearing many hats” and we mean that they have many roles in life.  We mean that a hat is really a piece of uniform.   It signals a person’s role and status; their position in society.  Think of crowns for kings and queens, police officers’ or soldiers’ hats and you’ll get the idea.

Jerusalem society is many layered and therefore it is a place of many different hats - figuratively and literally.

Detail from a mediaeval Hebrew calendar

Over the centuries Christian or Moslem authorities turned customary forms of dress into badges of shame for the Jews.  Some Jewish communities took these badges of shame and made them symbols of their pride in their own identity.  In the year 1215 under Pope Innocent III the Fourth Lateran Council ruled that Jews and Muslims must be distinguishable by their dress.  The Jewish hat was a cone-shaped pointed hat often white or yellow, worn by Jews in Mediaeval Europe and some of the Islamic world. It was initially worn by choice.  After 1215 it became compulsory in some places in Europe for adult male Jews to wear this hat whilst they were outside a ghetto so that they could easily be distinguished from others.  

Orthodox Jew wearing a shtreimel
Photo: Boaz Gabriel Canhoto

Enter an ultra-orthodox area on Shabbat and you will see many men wearing round fur hats - shtreimels.  The shtreimel is a black velvet cap surrounded by sable or fox tails.  It is worn on special occasions such as Shabbat and festivals by married men from many Hassidic groups and, in the old Ashkenazi community of Jerusalem, by boys from the age of bar mitzvah.   The number of fur tails used gives the shtreimel an added, mystical significance; 18, for example is the numerical value of the Hebrew word חי – life, and 26 the numerical value of the name of G-d.  The origin of the shtreimel is obscure.  Tradition has it that an anti-semitic ruler in Europe decreed that Jews should wear a tail on their heads on Shabbat to identify themselves.  This form of discrimination had been seen before.  In 16^th century Holland lepers had been forced to wear fox’s tails on their backs to mark themselves out.  The Jews complied with the decree but turned the tail into regal headgear rather than a badge of shame.  The shtreimel is worn with pride, and it does indeed resemble a crown.  

Herbert Samuel British High Commissioner
 for Palestine with kavasses 1923

The fez or tarboush probably has its origins in Greece but for about 100 years it became the most common form of hat in the Ottoman Empire.  It was what my great-grandfather wore when he moved from mainland Turkey to Egypt before the First World War.  In 1826 the Sultan Mahmud II made a fez with a cloth wrapped round it the official headgear of the Turkish army.  In 1829 he ordered officials of the empire to wear a plain fez.  This was a symbol of his modernisation of the army and of the civil administration.  The wearing of the fez soon spread to the general population.  After the demise of the Ottoman Empire Kemal Ataturk, the first President of the Republic of Turkey, banned the wearing of the fez in Turkey in 1925 as decadent, Ottoman dress.  Nowadays you will only see the fez worn in Jerusalem by the kavasses walking at the head of important religious processions.  During Ottoman rule these officials of the empire were armed escorts who accompanied consuls of foreign powers and heads of religious groups in the city including the Hakham Bashi, the Chief Rabbi.

Rabbi Ovadia Yosef
Photo: Michael Jacobson

In 1842 Rabbi Haim Gaguin was appointed the first Hakham Bashi or Chief Rabbi of Eretz Israel under the Ottoman Empire.  Just over 100 years later his great-great- grandson, Rabbi Dr Maurice Gaguine officiated at my parents’ wedding.  The title Hakham Bashi was not new but it had never before carried this kind of governmental authority, over education and matters of religious ritual and marital status.  Rabbi Gaguin was granted a firman (a royal mandate) from the Sultan, and with it a hat and embroidered robe of office as well as an escort of kavasses.  The Jews called the Hakham Bashi “Rishon LeZion” (literally “the First in Zion”), a title still used by the Sephardi Chief Rabbis of Israel.  The hat of the Hakham Bashi was a black tarboush with a long blue cloth wound round it.  A black hat like this was worn by all the Sephardi rabbis but that of the Rishon LeZion had a silver thread woven into it.  The Sephardi Chief Rabbi of Israel is today known as the Rishon LeZion.  His hat and robe recall that of the Hakham Bashi.  The current Rishon LeZion is Rabbi Shlomo Amar.  Rabbi Ovadia Yosef who held the post from 1973–1983 is also called by this title.

Armenian Patriarch of Jerusalem 1900

There are about 20 ancient Christian communities and some 30 more Protestant denominations in Israel.  The Armenian Orthodox Church is amongst the oldest here.  Armenia was the first nation to adopt Christianity in the year 301.  Like the Druze the Armenian Orthodox Church does not accept converts.  There have been Armenian Christians in Jerusalem since the fifth century.   In the past there were many Armenian institutions in the city.  Armenian mosaics from the Byzantine period were uncovered on the Mount of Olives during the building of the Russian Church of the Ascension.  The community is now concentrated mostly around St James’ Cathedral in the Armenian Quarter - the smallest and most private of the four quarters of the Old City.  Senior Armenian priests wear a characteristic high black triangular cowl.  Some say that it represents Mount Ararat in Armenia where Noah’s Ark came to ground.  Others say that it is taken from the lines of construction of the dome of the church and represents the “point of perfection” where the cross is suspended.

I have only just scratched the surface of the hat culture here.  Jerusalem is wonderfully rich and diverse; a mosaic of different cultural, religious and ethnic groups.  Each one makes its unique contribution to the sights, sounds, tastes and aromas of this amazing city.

Hug a Tree

“It’s Tu B’Shvat.” announced our 3 year old grandson on Wednesday.  “It’s the birthday of the trees” he went on “and it’s Daddy’s birthday too because my Daddy’s like a tree.”  Now it is true that our son-in-law is tall and strong and straight like a tree but what was most important to my grandson at that moment, I think, was that his Daddy’s name is Alon – and Alon is the Hebrew word for an oak tree.

Tu B’Shvat, the Mishna tells us, is the New Year for trees.  It marks the time when most of the winter rain has fallen and the sap is rising in the trees.  It’s a sign that Spring is on its way - a time to celebrate the amazing variety of climates, habitats and species that are found in this small country.

The Land of Israel, says the Bible, is a land of plenty, “a land of wheat and barley, of vines, figs and pomegranates, a land of olive trees and honey”.  Even though 60% of Israel is desert we have here over 2,800 different species of plants and among them many beautiful trees.

The Lone Oak Gush Etzion
Photo Refa'el Danziger

The oak tree is mentioned many times in the Bible.  By the oak trees of Mamre, just north of Hebron, Abraham is visited by G-d and runs to greet three men who turn out to be angels.  Deborah, Rebecca’s nurse is buried under an oak tree near Bethel.  The prophet Isaiah describes the oak as a tree whose stump will regenerate even when it has been cut down.

When the kibbutzim of the Etzion Bloc south of Jerusalem were overrun and destroyed in 1948 the Jordanians uprooted most of the trees that had been planted there.  An ancient oak tree survived and came to symbolise the yearning to re-establish the kibbutzim and to resettle the Land of Israel.  The tree came to be known as the Lone Oak.  For 19 years people would come to the Israeli-Jordanian border to gaze at it.  It stands now by Alon Shvut.

Coin of Vespasian
Judea Capta

The honey that the Bible mentions as produce of the Land is date honey.  Dates have been domesticated for over 6,000 years.  A source of food, shelter and shade the date palm came to symbolise the kingdom of Judea.  When the Romans destroyed the Temple and put down the Great Revolt in the year 70 AD the emperor Vespasian minted coins inscribed with the words Judea Capta showing a woman sitting forlornly under a palm tree.  The lulav that we wave on Succot is the bud of a date palm leaf that has not yet opened.

Date palm grove, Kalia, Dead Sea
Photo: Sharon Shlomo

During excavations in the 1960’s at the Masada fortress by the Dead Sea date palm seeds were discovered in a jar in one of Herod’s palaces.  Carbon dating showed them to be some 2,000 years old.  In 2005 three of them were treated with fertiliser and hormones and later planted at Kibbutz Ketura in the Arava.  One of them germinated and by the summer of 2010 the sapling had grown to about 2 metres. It is thought to be the oldest seed ever germinated. 

Acacia tree in the Negev
Photo: Mark A Wilson

“They shall make an ark of acacia wood, two and a half cubits long, a cubit and a half wide, and a cubit and a half high.”  The Ark of the Covenant, the Table of Showbread and the walls of the Tabernacle itself were all made of acacia wood.  In Israel the acacia can be found on the side of wadis, dry river beds.

Olive trees in the Garden of Gethsemane
Photo: Chad Rosenthal

When a dove brought back an olive leaf to the Ark Noah knew that the waters of the Great Flood were receding.  Olive oil was used to anoint the kings of Israel.  It was used in sacrifices and to light the Menorah, the candelabrum in the Temple.  It is still used today to light Shabbat and Chanukah lights.  For centuries it has been a major ingredient of the economy and of the diet of people all around the Mediterranean. Olive leaves have a special beauty.  The trees are very hardy and can live to a great age.  It is claimed that some olive trees are as much as 2,000 years old.  Among these are the olive trees in the Garden of Gethsemane in Jerusalem.

The Psalmist says: “How great are Your works O Lord.  You have made them all with wisdom; the earth is full of your creations.” 

The writer of the Tanya, Rabbi Shneur Zalman of Liadi wrote:
“All that we see –
The heaven, the Earth, and all that fills it –
All these things
Are the external garments of G-d.”

Like my grandson we should learn to celebrate the birthday of the trees and to understand what a wonderful gift they are.

Where the Train Stopped in Jerusalem

I know that in a city like Jerusalem we have to make a balance between preserving its heritage and meeting the demands of modern living.    Even so I hate to see a beautiful, historic building knocked down in the name of “progress” or, even worse, just allowed to decay until it has to be taken down.

The Jerusalem railway station in the 1890s.

That’s what I feared might happen to the old Jerusalem railway station.  The station opened in 1892 opposite the Khan as the final stop on the Jaffa to Jerusalem line – the first railway in the Middle East.  When the station finally closed its doors in 1998 it was sadly neglected despite its special architectural and historical merit.  The years took their toll on the building.  Decay, vandalism and the occasional fire almost damaged it beyond repair.

The neglected old railway station in Jerusalem. Photo: Dr Avishai Teicher

In 2008 I had watched in horror as a crane with a concrete ball on the end of a chain demolished the Ashkenazi Orphanage building on Harav Kook Street in the centre of town.   Bought from a wealthy Arab in 1881 the building had been extended and developed into “one of the finest public buildings in the city”.  In this orphanage and the nearby Alliance School the first attempts were made to introduce Modern Hebrew into the school curriculum.  Both buildings have been pulled down.  The Alliance School was replaced by the large, ugly Clal Centre.  The orphanage made way for “7 Harav Kook”, a huge 10 storey apartment complex, being built by developers Africa Israel.

About a year ago, after seeing a short film about the restoration and development of the old Jaffa railway station, I wrote to the mayor of Jerusalem. Follow this link to see the film.  I was impressed by what Tel Aviv had done and ashamed of how the old Jerusalem station was being allowed to decay.  He told me that I needn’t feel ashamed.    The city already had plans for a comprehensive renovation of the station and of the railway track all the way to Malcha.

The renovated Jaffa railway station.  Photo: Dr Avishai Teicher

Since then the first phase of the project has been completed.  The railway track from the old station along Rechov Harakevet to the junction of Emek Refaim and Pierre Koenig Streets has been transformed.  What was overgrown and unsightly is now a popular and attractive urban park with cycle and walking paths.

It was good to hear last week that a contract to renovate the station itself had been awarded to Avi Mordoch, the same developer who had done such a good job in Tel Aviv.  The plan for the site includes the preservation of the building, railway carriages turned into bars and cafes, a visitors’ centre for the railway, shops, galleries, exhibitions and restaurants.  The railway station together with the Sherover Centre under construction nearby will become a major cultural and entertainment focus for the city.   There is already, however, some controversy over the plan.  Both these sites will be open on Shabbat and charedi authorities have expressed their dissatisfaction.