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Parking battle in Jerusalem

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Correspondent Linda Gradstein reports on tensions between ultra-Orthodox and secular Jewish residents of Jerusalem. One recent flashpoint is a local parking lot. Listen

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LAURA LYNCH: I’m Laura Lynch, this is The World. Ultra-Orthodox Jews clashed with Israeli police in Jerusalem today. It was the third day of riots following the arrest of an ultra-Orthodox woman accused of starving her son. Tensions have been rising recently between Jerusalem’s ultra-orthodox community, and the city’s secular residents. One unlikely flashpoint is a parking lot, as Linda Gradstein reports from Jerusalem.

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LINDA GRADSTEIN: Hundreds of ultra-Orthodox Jews have come to protest the opening of the Jerusalem parking lot, as they have every Saturday afternoon for the past month. The protest starts with yelling and soon escalates. The demonstrators throw stones and police respond with tear gas. Over the past month, dozens of police and demonstrators have been wounded. Ben is a 23-year-old demonstrator who refused to give his last name.

BEN: Because the Israeli government is ruining the holy Sabbath and we came to protest that. Here’s the place where they’re ruining it, by the parking lot, car parking lot. By opening it on the Sabbath.

LINDA GRADSTEIN: He says that Jerusalem is a holy city and should be reserved for Sabbath-observing Jews.

BEN: The government’s trying to make it a tourist attraction, an irreligious city, or at least not religious when it gets in their way.

LINDA GRADSTEIN: Others nearby, like 58-year-old Yoram, say ultra-Orthodox Chasidic Jews have a right to live their life any way they want in their own neighborhoods. “But when it comes to public areas,” he says, “everyone should make his own choice and the parking garage should stay open.”

YORAM: Those chasides, they need to have their own space and we need to have our space and not to interfere one space to another space.

LINDA GRADSTEIN: For very observant Jews, the Sabbath, which lasts from sundown Friday to darkness on Saturday all work is prohibited, and so are many mundane activities. For example, it’s forbidden to use electricity, unless a timer is set before the Sabbath, or to spend money. To the ultra-Orthodox, the thousands of tourists who flock to the Old City on the Sabbath, eating in non-kosher restaurants and shopping in Arab stores, are desecrating the Sabbath. Jerusalem city council, Rachel Azaria, says that before the parking lot was opened, a city council committee, including ultra-Orthodox members, found a compromise to avoid desecration of the Sabbath as much as possible. The parking lot attendant is a Muslim and no fee is charged. But still, she says, that compromise was unacceptable to part of the ultra-Orthodox public. Azaria, who herself is an observant Jew, says it has as much to do with politics as religion. She says that for the past 15 years, the ultra-Orthodox had a veto power over any changes in Jerusalem. For the past five years the mayor himself was ultra-Orthodox. Before that, the ultra-Orthodox were a key player in then mayor Ehud Olmert’s coalition until Olmert became Prime Minister. Last year, a new liberal secular high tech entrepreneur named Nir Barkat was elected. In his coalition, the ultra-Orthodox do not have a veto power. Azaria says the ultra-Orthodox are testing the new mayor.

RACHEL AZARIA: After 15 years they have a mayor that is not willing to bend head over heels and to find a solutions that always work for them. He made it clear to them. The ultra-orthodox, first of all, they’re used to getting everything they want at the end of the day by violence, it’s hard for me to say that, but that’s the truth for many years in Israel.

LINDA GRADSTEIN: A spokesman for Barkat said the mayor considers the issue closed and the parking lot will stay open. The ultra-Orthodox population in Jerusalem is also growing. The total population of Jerusalem is about 760 thousand, which is about two-thirds Jewish and one-third Arab. Ultra-Orthodox make up one-third of the Jews in the city, but almost half of next year’s kindergarten students are ultra-Orthodox. Azaria says they’re also encroaching on secular neighborhoods in the city, and then demanding that all residents of that neighborhood stop driving on the Sabbath and that women dress modestly in the streets. Stuart Schoffman, a senior fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem, says the argument over the parking lot is an argument over whether Jerusalem should be a modern city.

STUART SCHOFFMAN: You have this very unusual population of people who look, who dress as if they were living in 17th or 18th century Poland, wearing the same kind of clothes all year round, sometimes referred to and not necessarily unkindly, as the men in black. And they live in a deliberately insular culture of their own so as to be exposed or to be exposed as little as possible to the influences of secular society.

LINDA GRADSTEIN: In past confrontations, the ultra-Orthodox have usually won. But this time the mayor says he won’t back down. For the World, I’m Linda Gradstein in Jerusalem

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