Heimishe Essen - A Story of Haredim, Zionist Socialists and a Barber

Inscription above the doorway
Beit Ezrahi-Brisker 1924

The Rehavia restaurant Heimishe Essen is in the news this week because it has been dragged into the debate over the exclusion of women.  The building that houses Heimishe Essen has a history of its own.  It was originally the home of Shmuel Ezrahi-Brisker, and thereby hangs a tale. 


Heimishe Essen Restaurant

Heimishe Essen (the name is Yiddish and means home-style food) is a long-established restaurant and take-away on Keren Kayemet Street in Rehavia.  Lately it has attracted more and more Haredi customers.  On Thursdays, the traditional night out for the Haredi community, it has become a favourite haunt of yeshiva students and Haredi activists.  Now the kashrut supervisors of Agudat Israel’s Badatz (Beit Din Tzedek – religious court) have demanded that the restaurant stop employing waitresses on Thursday nights if it wants to retain the prized Badatz kashrut certificate.  The restaurant owner and his staff claim that this demand is prompted by complaints from extremists and explain that Rehavia is not, by and large a Haredi neighbourhood and that the waitresses anyway dress modestly.  Despite this they are about to accede to the Badatz demands.

Shmuel Ezrahi-Brisker came to Jerusalem in 1911 as part of the Second Aliyah.  He prepared for life here by training in two “essential” professions as a barber and as a stage make-up artist.  Arriving in Jerusalem he sought to open a barber’s shop.  He found a site in a building owned by the Russian church and put up a sign advertising “a modern Hebrew barber’s shop”.  The next morning he found that his landlords had moved the sign and hung it over the stable opposite.  The story reached the press and people from all over town came to visit his shop.  Brisker spent the First World War years in Tiberias but on his return to Jerusalem he established a luxurious salon in Zion Square that became an unofficial club and debating chamber for the intelligentsia of Jerusalem.  The poet Chaim Nachman Bialik wrote that Jerusalem had “two distinguished public institutions: a national library and a national barber’s shop”.

Brisker was one of the first to buy a plot in the new neighbourhood of “Janziriyeh” (Arabic for “iron chain”) – today’s Rehavia.  Rehavia was to be a “garden suburb”, planned by the architect Richard Kaufmann with more green space than building.  Brisker didn’t have sufficient funds to build the house he wanted.  He raised half the cost by taking loans but the rest he found in a very unusual way.


Members of Gdud Ha'avodah
take a rest from building Rehavia

Gdud Ha'avodah building Eliezer
ben Yehudah's house, Talpiot 1921

The Gdud Ha’avodah was a group of young Zionist socialists formed in 1920.  They built roads, drained swamps, built settlements and worked on farms.  Gdud Ha'avodah suffered major ideological splits and was disbanded in 1929.  Members of the group established several kibbutzim including Ramat Rachel just south of Jerusalem.   Ironically in 1923 a group from the socialist Gdud Ha’avodah was helping to build the upscale neighbourhood of Rehavia.  They had a tent camp where the Yeshurun Synagogue and Beit Avi Hai stand today.   Brisker approached them and offered them haircuts in exchange for building work.  They agreed the deal and he and his family moved into their new home in 1924.  Brisker was still paying off his debt to them with haircuts for a while after the building was finished.  People said in jest that his house hung by a thread of hair!