Stories from Jerusalem during the Six Day War

Stories from Jerusalem during the Six Day

Naggar School of Photography in Musrara neighborhood (Wikimedia)

Prior to Six Day War, Jewish residents of Jerusalem were routinely targeted by snipers and denied access to holy shrines. Yet since Jerusalem’s reunification, Jews from around the world come to pray at the Western Wall.

The Musrara neighborhood, located near the former ‘no-man-zone’ between Israel and Jordan prior to the Six Day War, suffered immensely before the reunification of the Holy City in the wake of Israel’s miraculous victory in 1967. Avi Elzam, a longtime resident of the neighborhood, recalls that it was very difficult to live in a divided Jerusalem.

“We used to have a very regular Shabbat schedule,” he recalls. “The morning would start with an encounter with the Arab Legion snipers. They shot at us out of sheer boredom.”

Ayala Sabbag, a former resident, says, “We didn’t have any shelter. Whenever they started to shoot, my mother would gather all her 11 children and carry the youngest ones up the street to the building of the Voice of Israel [radio station] where we would hide ourselves. The Voice of Israel’s building was in range of the shots, but at least they had a shelter inside.”

She continued, “The fire from the Jordanian soldiers was a part of our everyday life in Musrara. Their favorite time was on Shabbat mornings, I don’t know why, perhaps because we were all at home or in the yards down on Ayin-Het Street, so close to them. They managed to kill quite a few.”

In the days leading up to the Six Day War, the atmosphere was very tense in Jerusalem. According to Abraham Rabinovich, a reporter who arrived in Jerusalem five days before the Six Day War began, “2,000 volunteers turned out each day to dig trenches in areas where there were no shelters. Hundreds were yeshiva students. […] The woman who normally gave advice on etiquette on Israel Radio’s program for housewives treated the security crisis as sensibly as she handled other social complications. She advised mothers to let their school-age children play where they usually did and to explain to them that if the siren sounded, they should go to the nearest shelter where an ‘auntie’ would look after them. The listeners would, of course, be ‘aunties’ to any children that came into their shelters. Small children, she advised, had best be kept in sight.”

At first, Israel sought to avoid fighting on the Jordanian front and offered an olive branch to the Hashemite Kingdom to stay out of the war. The Jordanian king could not withstand the domestic pressure to join the war, in addition to the defense pact with Egypt, which made neutrality impossible. Within the Holy City, the situation was frightening for the residents, who lived in very close proximity to the Jordanian forces.

Yoske Schwartz was one of the brave Israeli soldiers who fought to defend Jewish Jerusalem and to reunite the Holy City. He recalls, “It was the night of June 5, and it was very, very dark. I remember the ambulances were blaring their sirens as they transported people to hospitals. We drove in total darkness, and I could only see my friends when something would explode outside. We had no idea where we were. Some of us had never even been to Jerusalem before.

“Suddenly the buses stopped, and our commander said to us ‘Put your helmets on, put your magazines in your guns and get yourselves ready, because in a few minutes you’ll be fighting.’ We started to laugh, and he didn’t understand why, and we said, ‘Commander, we learned how to fight in the Sinai desert, we don’t even know where we are right now.’ He said to us, ‘You’re in Jerusalem, on a street called Shmuel Hanavi, and as soon as we get to the corner of Shimon Hatzadik you’re going to get off the buses very quietly and start fighting.”

IDF paratropers upon liberation of Old City of Jerusalem in 1967. (David Rubinger(

Schwartz was then sent to the Old City, where he was assigned the task of liberating the Western Wall. The fighting was fierce. According to Schwartz, “From where we were, we could see Ammunition Hill. We could see our people advancing every time a grenade exploded, and we could hear their shouts and screams, and then as quickly as they had left a flow of them came back, all of them on stretchers. The Jordanians fought to the death. We fought for many hours, and many died.”

In the end, Schwartz did manage to make it to the Western Wall, yet it came at an enormous humanitarian cost. Out of 1,200 paratroopers who fought for Jerusalem, only 400 lived; 183 Israeli soldiers perished while liberating Jerusalem, of whom 96 were paratroopers.

When Israel did reunite Jerusalem, the Jewish community was ecstatic. A dream that the Jewish people had kept for over 2,000 years was finally fulfilled. Jews across Israel flocked to the newly liberated Jerusalem to pray at the Western Wall, which had been denied to them during the Jordanian occupation of the Old City. Pnina Usherovitz was one of the many Jews who journeyed to Jerusalem in the wake of the Six Day War to visit the Western Wall.

“I have, thank G-d, been privileged many times since to get to the Kotel to pray. I have been there in the heat of mid-summer, in the cold of winter, in rain and in spring but I have never gone without remembering the first time. […] I lean my head on those cool, huge, ancient and rough stones that are smoothed over by the years and tears slide down my face and my soul relaxes. The tears are from gratitude that yes, once more I have been allowed to come close to the Kotel to rest and renew and hold on while I pray.”

By Rachel Avraham

Longtime Musrara residents recall life in the neighborhood, from the sniper fire before 1967 to today's demographic changes.

It was and still is the closest thing to the Garden of Eden," says Avi Elzam, 56, a lifelong resident of Musrara. "For me, nothing can compare to this place." Elzam, who was a city council member in Teddy Kollek's administration and is the director of the community center in Shmuel Hanavi, spent his childhood in one of the toughest neighborhoods of Jerusalem in the years before the Six Day War "We used to have a very regular Shabbat schedule," he recalls, while pointing to highway No. 1, which was the no-man's land between Jordan and Israel from 1948 to 1967. "The morning would start with an encounter with the Arab Legion snipers. They shot at us out of sheer boredom. Then we would rage a war in the streets - the kids of Musrara against the kids of Mea She'arim. The young Kurdish boys from Mamilla would join us, to play ball and to support us, the Iraqis and Moroccans from Musrara against the Ashkenazi boys of Mea She'arim. Then we would come home for Shabbat lunch, and after that we walked to the YMCA soccer field to watch the Betar game. That was the schedule on Shabbat, for years." Musrara, on the line between west and east Jerusalem, had a hard time during the years between the creation of the state and the Six Day War. It was a neighborhood on the seam, and with Jewish houses only 4-5 meters from the Arab houses on the other side of the demarcation line, Musrara suffered more than any other Jewish neighborhood in Jerusalem from snipers and other manifestations of the tense stand-off in Jerusalem. "We had a wonderful mulberry tree, in the middle of no-man's land," recalls Elzam. "It was the most beautiful tree you can imagine; its fruits had the real Garden of Eden taste. Children and adults alike, from both sides of the border, couldn't resist the temptation to pick the fruits, even though we all knew it could be very dangerous." Ayala Sabbag, who today lives in the Katamonim where she is known for her social activism, was born in Musrara. "My parents arrived in 1947 and set up home in one of the Arab houses on Rehov Musrara, which later became Rehov Ayin-Het. Our house was the last one on the street, and until 1948, my parents had very close relationships with their Arab neighbors, whom they met right after the Six Day War." Sabbag, born in the early Sixties, recalls the frightening moments of sniper fire: "We didn't have any shelter. Whenever they started to shoot, my mother would, in great panic, gather all her children - we were 11 - and carry the youngest ones up the street to the building of the Voice of Israel, where we would hide ourselves. The Voice of Israel's building was in range of the shots, but at least they had a shelter inside." "The fire from the Jordanian soldiers was a part of our everyday life in Musrara," adds Elzam. "Their favorite time was on Shabbat mornings, I don't know why, perhaps because we were all at home or in the yards down on Rehov Ayin-Het , so close to them. They managed to kill quite a few of us, but somehow, [and] I really cannot understand that now, we stuck to the place and didn't even think of going elsewhere. Those were different days." In 1966, the shootings became more frequent. One Shabbat morning Yaffa, 12, was shot in the head and killed by a sniper while standing on the balcony of her home A few minutes later, her neighbor, a middle aged woman named Allegra, was also shot and seriously wounded. The only two schools in Musrara had no shelters either. The primary school was located in the house that now contains the Musrara School of Photography. "It's another aspect of the changes that occurred here," Elzan explains. "The neighborhood is closed from all sides. There is nowhere to expand [into] Mea She'arim, the Arab part of Musrara, or Rehov Hanevi'im. It's too small, we cannot develop and it will never become like Nahla'ot for example, where new residents merged with the veterans and created something old and new together." For Ayala Sabbag, things look a little different. "Right after the Six Day War, when it wasn't dangerous to live there, rich people began to show interest in our old Arab houses. We didn't have the money to restore them - they did, and they usually bought the beautiful houses for peanuts, as our parents had no idea of the real value of their dwellings, or that [such things] were becoming fashionable. Even I had no idea, and I sold my house for almost nothing because I needed the money so badly then. I still bear the injustice. No one from the authorities came to help us or to advise us. In fact, it was like in Yemin Moshe, where they took all the residents and relocated them into ugly and small block apartments. I don't think I will ever forgive that." In the '70s, the Black Panthers, a Mizrahi-oriented protest movement, came forth from Musrara and spread to the Katamonim and beyond. The Panthers, taking their name from the American Black Power group of the same name, were instrumental in revealing to the public the endemic poverty, joblessness and lack of education among many Mizrahi Jews. Later, artists and Bohemian figures started coming to Musrara, buying gorgeous Arab houses at relatively low prices and transforming them into beautiful, modern residences. But according to both Sabbag and Elzam, this was without any connection to the local population and its needs. Over the past decade, some haredim have arrived in the small neighborhood. There are now two yeshivot, a few families and a Bratslav synagogue, adding to the diversity while making some residents uneasy.. "I don't think that in Musrara there will be a real haredi invasion," says city council member Meir Turgeman, who also sits on the Planning and Construction Commission. "The houses there are really too expensive for them, but real plans of development, despite all the efforts made by the local community center, have not been successful in truly improving the neighborhood." "My house doesn't exist anymore," says Sabbag, "It was demolished for the construction of a road, but I still remember exactly how it was, and my parents' house, and running under the bullets. I cannot forget what it was like to live in Musrara. After all, I was born there."

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