On the Street: From Party to Protest

Jerusalem’s juxtapositions were crystallized for me over 24 hours this weekend. The distorted mirror images: Friday afternoon, a street full of fists pumping and people shouting with joy during a party of dancing 20-somethings. Saturday afternoon, a street full of fists pumping and people shouting with anger during a Haredi protest attempting to block cars from driving on Shabbat.

Friday’s party took place on Shushan street, which lines one side of City Hall Plaza, and was formerly home to Jerusalem’s only gay bar. (For a great doc about this bar and the multicultural Jerusalem LGBT scene, see City of Borders.) The space has since been bought by Ido, one of its former bartenders, who we will be profiling on Jerusalem: Unfiltered. Ido has renamed the bar Hakatze (The Edge), but kept its infamous Monday night drag shows, and has expanded the lineup to include a variety of independent live music acts and other performances.

Ido’s efforts at livening up the grey Shushan alleyway didn’t stop with the bar, and once you start looking, you can see the results everywhere on the block in the form of street art and recycled sculptural installations on walls, rooftops, and literally crawling up the sides of buildings.

Another fruit of Ido’s labor was Friday’s street party, which featured elaborately costumed “human sculptures,” parking meters turned into bar tables, performance art, craft vendors, raucous gypsy music, and hundreds of young partiers. Those who insist that Jerusalem is a “dead city” clearly haven’t been to one of these events.

Almost exactly 24 hours later, it was time to get to the root of the wailing I had been hearing from my room, a full city block away from its source, each Saturday evening since my arrival. The Haredim don’t like to be filmed any time (as you may recall from my adventures in one of their neighborhoods last summer), let alone on Shabbat, when both work and use of electronics are forbidden. However, The weekly Haredi protests at Strauss and Hanevi’im streets were getting louder and louder, and I simply couldn’t ignore them.

I therefore hired an Israeli camera man, Ruby, to help me navigate the situation, and he suggested that we find a suitable rooftop from which to film and stay out of trouble. In order to reach said rooftop, however, we had to walk right into the belly of the beast. (Did I mention that he wore a leather jacket and heavy boots to protect himself from spit or worse?) As we approached the crowd of protesters, their collective wail of  Shaaaabes! Shaaaaaaabes! overpowered all other sounds. The noise resembled a herd of bleating sheep, but even more a mourning cry. Ruby explained that the protestors  actually were mourning in a way, for the other Jews who were breaking Jewish law by driving on the Sabbath.

Haredim and Police face off

It was not a very big crowd, but their voices were loud powerful. The chants were broken up only by protestors banging on cars that attempted to pass through the intersection, and screams of “Nazi!” directed at cops who dared push them out of the way from the moving vehicles. With a slightly feigned confidence, we made our way through the crowd, ducked into a building adjacent to the protest, and climbed the stairs to find the door to the rooftop open. Score!

From above, Ruby began filming the stream of black fedora hats and brown fur ones. We were not there for 15 minutes when one of those black-hats–with a body attached to it–joined us on the roof. He threatened to bring the rest of the guys up there if we didn’t leave, and then began shouting Shabbes! Shabbes! at us.  Naturally, we obliged, only to move on to the roof next door, which happened to be accessible only through the apartment of a secular, female tenant who happened to be watching the entire proceeding herself and beckoned us up after we waved from the street.

In the end, I didn’t ever really feel physically threatened, but the rhythmic wail of Shaaaabes! Shaaaaaaabes! has become stuck in my gut in the hours since, and Jerusalem’s juxtapositions are fresher than ever in my mind.