A Street Divided (21 page)

One day in 1970, she disappeared from campus and turned up on the nightly news. Katherine and some friends had decided it was time to overthrow the government. But they needed money to do it. So they decided to rob a couple of banks. Things didn't go quite as planned. While Katherine waited as the getaway driver, one of her accomplices shot and killed a Massachusetts policeman trying to stop the bank robbery.

Three of the five radical robbers were quickly arrested. The fourth managed to live under an assumed name for a few years. Katherine was the only one to get away. Though she was on the FBI's Most Wanted list, she created a new life for herself on the West Coast. She took a new name, got married, had a son and tried to work out her demons with a therapist who encouraged her to come clean. In 1993, after decades of living with lies, Katherine finally turned herself in to face her past.
2

David wasn't that kind of activist. He was against the war. But he wasn't a bank-robbing radical like Katherine. He had other plans. For his junior semester abroad, David decided to go to Israel. It was 1969 and Israel was still living off the euphoria and adrenaline of winning the 1967 war. David's mom couldn't understand why her son wanted to go. To her, Israel was an unappealing backwater.

“Why Israel?”
she asked David.
“Why not a cultured country like England or something?”

David was undeterred. He spent six months traveling the Mediterranean coast, praying at the Western Wall and trying out his witty pick-up lines on the aloof but alluring Israeli girls. By the time he left, David contracted what he called the
haidak alim
—the Israel bug. It would take a few years—and a girl—to get him back to Israel.

And, when he did come back, it was more for the girl than the country. It was 1971. David had an acceptance letter from Northeastern University Law School and a beautiful girlfriend who was moving to Tel Aviv. He chose the girl. It lasted about three months, tops. The fact that the girl dumped David for the guy she eventually married offered him some consolation. But he was still brokenhearted and adrift in Tel Aviv. So David took a job as what was then known as a “street worker.”

“That's not as bad as it sounds,” he said.

David was paid to go hang out in Rosh HaAyin, a depressed town on the outskirts of Tel Aviv, where he played pool with high school dropouts who had nothing better to do. Many of the people living in Rosh HaAyin were part of Yemenite families flown to Israel as part of Operation Magic Carpet, one of Israel's early airlift campaigns for Jewish families living in Arab and Muslim nations. The Yemenite boys laughed at David's American-accented Hebrew and helped him get some of the kinks out of his new language.

David lost a lot at pool, but he helped the guys learn some English and get some training. Some got factory jobs. Others went back to school. It wasn't glamorous work. But he liked it. He could see himself making a life helping people. David returned to the United States to get a degree in social work from Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio. By the time he was done with his casework, he'd found a new girl who wanted to move to Israel with him. This time, he said, “she didn't dump me.”

David and his new girl, Judy, got married and made the move to Israel in 1979. This time, the haidak alim was stronger. David dove back into social work. He got a job helping run urban renewal programs in Jerusalem's poorest neighborhoods. Very quickly, it became clear to David that, if he was going to keep doing social work in Jerusalem, he needed to learn some Arabic. Knowing some would help him better communicate with the city's poorest residents, both Arab and Jew.

So he took a three-week intensive Arabic course and studied, off and on, on the side after that. It was one of David's ways of showing that he was willing to do some serious work to bridge the divide between Arab and Jew.

“I was able to begin the process of, at least symbolically, demonstrating that I was into communicating,” he said.

David kept up his work on antipoverty programs and officially immigrated to Israel—making
aliyah—
in 1983. David and Judy had three children together, but the couple starting drifting apart as their kids got older.

Alisa met the couple in 1989 when she joined their Jerusalem synagogue, but they didn't socialize all that much at first. In 1997, David hired Alisa to do some part-time grant writing for his business. Outside of work, David and Judy's efforts to save their marriage were going nowhere, and the couple finally separated in 1999.

“Sometimes parents choose their own happiness over that of their kids, which is what I think happened here,” Judy Feierstein said of the couple's separation. “It's not nice, but it's the truth. It really was not a good marriage by the time it ended, and we both knew that. Sometimes you need to end it. We probably waited too long, but OK.”

Though David and Judy were able to untangle their lives without too much acrimony, the divorce hit their three children hard. So did David's decision to marry Alisa after his divorce from Judy was finalized two years later. And Alisa didn't come to the marriage by herself. In 1999, Alisa had flown to Romania to adopt a nine-month-old girl she named Avital. David's son and two daughters had a hard time adjusting to their dad's new wife and her daughter. Avital went from being the only child of a single mother to the youngest of four kids in an unusual nuclear family.

David held the family together with a staple of eye-rolling “dad jokes” and white-water rafting trips. He was the kind of husband who'd make risqué comments to Alisa about their sex life during the filming of an Israeli television documentary about their Israeli Brady Bunch–style family. He was the kind of father who'd turn Friday night Shabbat songs into a performance on the main stage at one of Israel's premiere outdoor folk festivals. Soon after Alisa and David got married, they went looking for a new home in Jerusalem. They checked out dozens of places, but nothing seemed to fit. Some homes were too pricey. Others were too small. Then they heard about a little house in Abu Tor that was about to go up for sale.

For David and Alisa, the place on Assael was perfect. First off, it was cute. Built sometime in the 1970s as a backyard addition to an apartment complex, it had a small garden, natural light and an enclosed garage. Secondly, because it was on the dividing line, the price was right. Because they are in Abu Tor, because they are on the cusp of Arab East Jerusalem, the houses on Assael are far cheaper than the ones in the neighborhood across the train tracks in the trendy German Colony.

“I'm so glad most Israelis are, you know, racist,” David said sardonically. “They hear our neighborhood has Arabs. As a result we were able to get something nice, nearly our dream house.”

The place had a big living room with mosaic tile floors and vine-covered windows that sometimes made the place feel like a sheltered cave. Alisa planted purple kale and basil in the tiny garden squeezed between their front door and the blue iron gate leading out to Assael. They filled their home with family photos and mementos from their travels—clay Moroccan cooking tajines and a metal sculpture of Shiva, the dancing Hindu god often associated with yoga. Alisa hung a quote by sixteenth-century Renaissance poet Ben Jonson in their bathroom:

In small proportions we just beauty see; And in short measures life may perfect be.

Assael proved to be the ultimate proving ground for David's beliefs, training and skills.

As he biked to and from his job in the German Colony, where he ran a two-room business helping nonprofit groups raise money, he began to see the divide on his street. It was easy to see where Israeli Jerusalem ended and Palestinian Jerusalem began. The eastern side was a series of flat, low stone houses with stone walls and corrugated tin covered with spray-painted Arabic graffiti scrawled above red crescent moons, blue stars and golden images of the Dome of the Rock. The western side was an unbroken series of locked gates, stone walls and dented, metal electric garage doors. Unofficially, the place where the border fence once rose still marked the edge of Jewish Abu Tor.

Where others saw a yawning divide, David saw potential common ground.

This place,
he thought,
could be utilized much more as a bridge for coexistence.

David imagined coexistence block parties and bilingual social workers coming to Assael to organize street art competitions.

Of all the places in Jerusalem where it could grow naturally,
he thought,
this is one of them.

As a community organizer, David looked at living in a “mixed” neighborhood as an opportunity. “Obviously there are some degrees of risks and potential negatives, but both of us kind of took a certain degree of responsibility for trying to make sure that possible negatives would actually work out to be a positive,” he said.

David had a special calling card he used to break the ice: a joke he knew—that worked best in Arabic—with a punch line that went, “The big dog is just a dog, but the little dog is a son of a bitch.” More often than not, it did the trick. David kept the joke in his holster of icebreakers and pulled it out on Assael Street as he got to know the neighbors. David accepted every invitation he could to visit families living on the other side of the street. He went to the Bazlamits to congratulate Zakaria and Nawal when they returned from Hajj in 2006. David's subtle offers of respect didn't go unnoticed by the Bazlamits.

David watched as the other visitors kissed Zakaria's hand when they greeted him as
Haji
and figured he'd do the same. It was a small gesture from their Jewish neighbor that the Bazlamits remembered for years. When Zakaria passed away a few years later, David went by to sit with the family and pay his respects. For David, it was the least he could do.

The Mayor of Assael Street

By the time David and Alisa moved to Assael, the west side was entirely walled off. Almost everyone with a house on that side of Assael could come and go without actually walking out to the street. David and Alisa's home was one of the few with a door leading out to Assael—and they made sure to use it.

“We're not the kinds of people who barricade ourselves,” David said.

David was always looking for ways to break through the suspicion on the street. When the Bazlamits got into the dispute with Carol in 2006 over the Hajj graffiti painted on her wall, David and Alisa thought things might have gone down differently if the neighbors had spoken to each other.

“If that had happened to our wall, I don't think it would have been a problem,” Alisa said. “I suppose if they had drawn Hajj pictures on my wall, I probably would have handled the situation in a different way.”

David and Alisa knew the language divide fueled mistrust on both sides. Visitors would sometimes ask them if the Arabic graffiti on the street was hateful.

“People come and ask: ‘What does it say? Kill the Jews?'” Alisa said. “When you don't have information, it can be deadly.”

David saw Carol's confrontation with the Bazlamits as a perfect example of why neighbors needed to find common ground.

“For [Carol], that act was a gross invasion of privacy and an attack on her property,” he said. “It was violation of the ABCs of respectful living together. And she wasn't able to go to them and say: ‘Jeez, you didn't ask me, you really shouldn't have done that, I want you right away to please paint over it.' They would have done that and they would have said: ‘We really didn't know' or whatever, but for [Carol] that was it. She just lost it. With all due respect, she had a decent reason to lose it. She wasn't totally unreasonable.”

David had other hopes for that wall. He wanted to see it become a canvas for some authorized street art—legally sanctioned coexistence graffiti. The cement wall was a perfect little billboard in the middle of Assael Street. It would be one of the small dreams deferred time after time by tensions that swept across Jerusalem.

In time, though, David and Alisa's efforts paid off. Their neighbors could see that they were making an effort. But Reiki and hand kisses only got you so far. David decided he should do more. If he wanted the street walls to represent something besides hostility and suspicion, he needed to step up his game. In 2011, with his wife's encouragement, he decided to run for a seat on the city's community council, an advisory group made up of neighborhood advocates. If he won, David would have the power—and, maybe, the money—to implement his vision. David took the campaign seriously. First, he tried but failed to convince one of the other two candidates to drop out so they wouldn't split the secular vote and lose to the ultra-Orthodox contender. So he had to go door to door to get support and explain his plans. On election day, David won 62 percent of the vote. He became the official community advocate for Abu Tor. Now all he had to do was put his ideas to the test.

“I've been walking around with a vision of what needs to be done for ten years,” he said in 2014. “I say to myself: ‘Why didn't I do this a long time ago?' All of the sudden I found myself in a position where I was more than just one person.”

Technically, the district David represented ended right outside his front door—up to the spot where the barbed wire used to define the edge of Israel. The families on the eastern side of Assael were represented by another council member, someone living in lower Abu Tor. David's district was meticulously gerrymandered to exclude most of the Arab residents of Assael. The line ran down the center of Assael, curved around the Arab homes on the other side of the street, and enveloped a street dominated by a controversial religious Jewish compound that was a popular target for Molotov cocktails and rock attacks when tensions rose.

David decided to ignore it. He wanted to be an advocate for all of Assael Street, not just the Jewish side. But how? It took David quite awhile to come up with a plan. Eventually, he turned to the Jewish families of Abu Tor with a question: Are you interested in building better relations with our Arab neighbors?