Whose God? Whose Land?

CHAPTER TWO, THE ROOTS OF CONFLICT

The people watched as the soldiers marched in columns down the street indelibly etched in the pages of history. As they watched, they listened to the sound of bagpipes. It was a sound they would be hearing for the last time, as the marching soldiers made their final departure.

On this fateful May afternoon in 1948 a thirty-year tradition was ending. The British soldiers were the last of many who had marched along the streets of Jerusalem. They were preceded in the annals of history by the Babylonians, Assyrians, Romans, Persians, Arabs, Crusaders and Turks.

Along the Street of the Jews bearded old men peered out from the windows of their synagogues and the hallways of their houses of learning to view the latest chapter of the unfolding saga of the Holy Land. For centuries these rabbis and Talmudic scholars had congregated within the walls of the Old City to study the Torah and copy down Talmudic texts. Daily they had bowed before the stones of the Temple Mount, praying for the return of their people to the Land of Zion. Now, as the sound of the British bagpipes became more faint and the soldiers marched into the distance, a ceremony occurring for the last time, they wondered if the time for which they had prayed had arrived, the return of the children of Abraham to the Holy Land.

Rabbi A. Mordechai Weingarten, chosen in the mid-1930's by the Jewish elders as head of a Jewish Council to represent the Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem in dealings with the British and the Arabs, was known as the "mukhtar" of the quarter, an Arab word meaning village leader. As the scene of the departing village unfolded he also was thinking about history, about the Weingarten family roots in Jerusalem. His wife's great-grandfather had arrived in 1740 from Lithuania, the first Ashkenazic or European Jew to settle in the Old City since the Diaspora. His own family had moved to the Old City in 1813. For years he had concentrated on improving living conditions of Jews in the Old City and encouraging more to settle there. He had persuaded the British to provide a water system and electricity. His efforts had achieved a bus service with special coaches able to maneuver down the narrow streets.

Now the life of this man of God who had concentrated his efforts toward helping improve the living standards of his people had entered a new phase, one alien to his previous experience and present inclinations. As conflict commenced between Jews and Arabs in civil war, the Hagana, the Jewish Defense Agency, sent Abraham Halperin, a capable young officer and administrator, into the Old City. It was necessary for Rabbi Weingarten to tell the British that he was a ''male nurse" in order for Halperin to gain proper admission, but his objective was to organize the Jewish Quarter for the battles that loomed. Now Rabbi Weingarten, the man of God with a distaste for violence, and who had tried to maintain cordial relations with both the British and the Arabs, was allowing the Hagana to store arms in his house. He had also used his influence with the British to permit the smuggling of soldiers and guns into the Jewish Quarter.

While Jews celebrated one triumph with the departure of British troops and the termination of the thirty-year British Mandate over Palestine, the grim reality of present conflict lured in the presence of the sandbagged windows and concealed gunports chiseled into the quarter's venerable stones.

Even while the Hagana forces watched the departure of the British soldiers they prepared to quickly seize positions the departing forces had held for months, a string of vantage points sealing the quarter from hostile Arab forces surrounding it.

The British column of soldiers whose movement had been so curiously watched finally veered off the main street on which they had been marching and moved left up a twisting cobblestone alley leading toward the Armenian Patriarchate. It stopped in front of the arched stones crowning the entry to No. 3 Or Chayim Street.