Pre-state vaults and ancient cisterns provide shelter for Jerusalemites again under siege |
Jerusalem municipal architect Sharon Dinur was in the middle of talking about the city’s public bomb shelters when the early warning for a missile attack sounded.
“Now we’ll get to see one in use,” she said, as hundreds of workers in the municipal complex hurried underground.
Minutes later, we would resume our conversation inside a heavy steel vault built nearly a century ago by Barclays Bank — a room once used to safeguard treasures belonging to Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie during his exile before World War II. We would also visit another shelter nearby, in what was once the morgue of one of Jerusalem’s earliest hospitals.
“What I love is how the story of Jerusalem’s multicultural history and diversity really comes through the layers of these buildings,” said Dinur, who leads the preservation department at the Jerusalem Municipality.
Since the early 1950s, Israel has required municipalities to construct public bomb shelters (miklatim) in residential neighborhoods to protect residents from missiles and air raids. It’s a policy that has developed and evolved over time, even if it hasn’t always been implemented evenly, especially in Arab and Bedouin towns.
But in a city where thousands of buildings predate Israel’s founding, residents often improvise, turning ancient cisterns, bank vaults and forgotten basements into places of refuge when sirens sound.
“Jerusalem has about 10,000 buildings that are defined as historic, meaning they were built before Israel’s independence in 1948,” explained Dinur. “Not all of these require full architectural preservation, but each neighborhood has a master plan that includes instructions about how its historical fabric must be preserved. When people want to create new buildings, that can sometimes create conflicts.”
Jerusalem is a city that is perpetually under construction, and balancing the needs of its growing population and the dictates of its historic nature is a constant tug and pull, Dinur said. The challenge of integrating public shelters into the dense neighborhoods of Nachlaot and Meah Shearim, built in the 19th and early 20th centuries, is a case in point.
Many of the old buildings in these areas stand shoulder-to-shoulder along narrow streets without any real protection from rockets, Dinur said. Public shelters, where they exist, are often too few and too small for the number of residents they are supposed to serve.
“People want protection in their homes, but each building is different, and it’s never the same answer,” Dinur said. “When residents approach us for building permits, we have to come in and tailor the right solution for each structure.”
Sometimes that means converting forgotten underground spaces or old service areas into communal shelters. In some homes, thick stone walls can be reinforced to meet basic safety standards. In other cases, it may mean asking a developer to carve out a shelter in exchange for additional building rights in a project.
Different building techniques used over the centuries make the job even more confusing, Dinur explained. She called attention to the difference between modern shelter construction and the tall arched ceilings in her office, housed in an Ottoman-era building from the 1860s.
“The forces moving through this building are different,” she explained. “If we add concrete reinforcements in the wrong place, we could destroy the structure we are trying to save.”
Jerusalem’s municipal complex houses thousands of workers across 13 buildings, and the site has several safe rooms. When the early warning sounded last Thursday morning, we headed to the old Barclays Bank vaults. These were built in 1930, when British Mandate authorities inaugurated the city hall building, designed by architect Clifford Holliday.
“The British didn’t have the money for the building, so they made a financing deal with the bank allowing them to lease the lower floor as their central branch for about 30 years,” Dinur said. The vaults below are still outfitted with heavy metal doors with a secure locking wheel that had only been recently patented at the time, she added.
Those vaults would prove useful in 1935, following the Italian invasion of Ethiopia, when Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie arrived in Jerusalem as a political exile.
The country already owned numerous properties in Jerusalem at that time, particularly in the area known as Ethiopia Street, and Selassie arrived at the Jaffa Post on a Friday afternoon with his family and treasures that reportedly included 117 chests of gold.
“He took a train from the port straight to Jerusalem, and went straight to the King David Hotel, but the manager said he couldn’t ensure all those treasures on the property,” Dinur said. “It was Friday afternoon, and the manager of Barclays was the only person who could help him. He opened the safe, and the emperor kept his gold there until he was able to return to his country after the war.”
The building was renovated in 1993, but the vaults are still used to store old dusty boxes of papers, and they double as a shelter when needed. “I would love to make this a site for tourists one day,” Dinur sighed.
After the all-clear signal came, Dinur offered to visit another underground shelter, this one in a hospital built in 1860 for pilgrims from the Russian Empire.
She offered a warning first, however.
“There’s a tradition that this building is cursed,” she smiled. “I understand why people wouldn’t want to work in a place where dead bodies were stored, but they went so far as to bring a rabbi to do an exorcism here in the 1970s.”
The hospital remained in use through the British Mandate and during Israel’s War of Independence. In the 1950s, after the state acquired properties in the Russian Compound, the area was converted into an office building for the municipality.
The basement — a windowless tunnel — once served as a morgue, with a rear door allowing bodies to be removed for burial.
“The walls here are very thick,” Dinur said. “It’s built to be used in an emergency.”
Today, the tunnel is used for office space, and there are no indications that it once served a different purpose. Workers can easily gather when rockets are fired, and then return to their desks when the threat is over.
“These stories of Jerusalem’s past now exist only through these buildings,” said Dinur, who occasionally leads tours around Jerusalem. “That’s why it is so important that we preserve them.”
Keeping safe in the Old City
In the Old City, where construction is tightly restricted, residents rely on even older spaces.
Sarah Tuttle Singer, head of The Times of Israel’s upcoming Peoples of Israel project and author of Jerusalem Drawn and Quartered, said she shelters at a 1,500-year-old Byzantine cistern when the rocket sirens go off.
“It may not be up to code, but it has survived Crusaders, Saladin’s brother-in-law, Mamluks, Ottomans, the British, the Jordanians — and now, apparently, this,” Tuttle Singer wrote in a recent blog post.
Tuttle Singer said her building is built on top of the cistern, which is part of an ancient water tunnel system that, according to neighbors, reaches all the way to the Temple Mount. During sirens, the cavern fills up with a colorful group of neighbors that includes, she said, a hyperactive pit bull.
“There are only a few shelters in the Old City, and they are hard to access, so this is what we use,” she said. Fragments from an Iranian missile recently fell near the Sultan’s Pool, just outside of the Old City, she noted.
“The general vibe here is that we are all relying on the ‘be’ezrat hashem‘ factor here,” Tuttle Singer said, using a Hebrew expression for “with God’s help.”
Nearby, an Old City resident pointed to a more standard shelter, built into the walls of the ancient Roman market known as the Cardo. To access it, residents must go downstairs through a row of art galleries, past a display of historic maps and artifacts, into a dank room lined with plastic chairs.
“It’s kind of a story to find your way there,” a shopkeeper noted.
Navigating the Old City is itself a bit complicated during the current war. The Western Wall is closed to visitors, and many shops are closed due to a dearth of tourists. Even Jaffa Gate, one of the walled city’s main entrances, is closed off symbolically, although people can easily enter from the adjacent road.
But with the Old City’s ancient buildings and diverse population, people have gotten used to the fact that things work differently during the war, Tuttle Singer said. She recalled watching a group of visitors huddle under one of the arches during a recent siren.
“With everything that’s happened here, there’s an attitude that, God willing, we’ll get through this,” she said.
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