Strolling through the halls of Jerusalem’s Beit Tovei Ha’ir assisted-living facility on a recent morning, I felt myself being suddenly transported from the comfortable chairs of the bright, spacious lobby and taken to a darker, more difficult time – April of 1948, when the Old City of Jerusalem was under siege by the Jordanian Arab Legion.
I could almost hear the sounds of mortars, machine guns, and falling masonry as the outnumbered Jewish defenders bravely defended the Jewish Quarter’s citizens.
My flight of imagination was not caused by the ingestion of any hallucinatory materials but by a fascinating audience with Puah Shteiner, author of Forever My Jerusalem, her account of living through the siege of the city as a seven-year-old child in 1948, which was first published in 1983 in Hebrew as Mitoch Hahafecha (“out of the upheaval”). In 1987, the book was issued in English.
Shteiner, who moved to Beit Tovei Ha’ir last year after spending the previous 48 years living in the Old City, spoke with In Jerusalem in honor of the observance of Jerusalem Day, which marks the reunification of Jerusalem on June 7, 1967, corresponding to the 28th day of the Hebrew month of Iyar. The walls of Shteiner’s spacious apartment are adorned with pictures of some of the leading Zionist rabbis of previous generations, such as Rabbi Zvi Yehuda Kook and Rabbi Moshe Zvi Neria.
Today, the number of eyewitnesses to the events of the Six Day War of 1967 is dwindling, and those who can recall and retell the events of 1948 are fewer still.
The 85-year-old Shteiner speaks firmly and clearly, and has clear recollections of her childhood, when her last name was Min Hahar.
Her family has deep roots in Jerusalem. Shteiner’s parents, like their parents and grandparents before them, were born in the city.
Her father, a fifth-generation Jerusalemite, was descended from Rabbi Eliezer Bergman, one of the first Ashkenazi Jews to settle in the city in the 19th century.
Bergman was a founder of the Kollel Holland-Deutschland Landsmanschaft. This organization built Batei Mahse, the first modern housing development within the Old City walls in the latter half of the 1800s. Part of Shteiner’s family was forced to leave Jerusalem before and during World War I due to the difficult conditions in the city. However, she, her parents, and siblings returned to the Old City in 1945 and lived in a rented apartment in Batei Mahse until the fall of the Jewish Quarter.
In 1977, Shteiner and her husband and children returned to live in the Jewish Quarter, and shortly after, she decided to write her recollections of the three years she had spent in the Old City as a child.
“When I returned to live in the Jewish Quarter, I saw the explosion of tourism, both foreign and from within the country,” she said, “and I would listen to what the tour guides were telling the visitors. They would stand in the square of Batei Mahse, and they would say what happened, but it was mostly dry facts. They primarily spoke about the fighters. They were not telling the story from the perspective of the residents.”
Shteiner began writing her account first with pen and paper, then with a typewriter. “This was the first time I had tried to write a book,” she said. “I wrote it while I was pregnant with my seventh child.
“I used to tell my children that I would write a book when I had time to write, but when summer vacation began, my husband took the children to their grandmother.” The arrangement gave her the peace and quiet she needed to devote herself to writing that summer.
The Hebrew version of the book was published shortly before the observance of Jerusalem Day in 1983.
Over the years, Forever My Jerusalem has remained a popular book and has been reprinted many times. It remains quite readable more than 40 years after its release. Shteiner has a unique ability to retell the historic events of her youth in a way that makes it accessible for all ages.
A child’s view of siege
Shteiner, her parents, and her siblings lived in a tiny apartment in the Old City. She writes, “The apartment we rented in Batei Mahse consisted of a spacious living room and a tiny, three-by-six-foot [smaller than 1 m. x 2 m.] kitchen. Primitive outhouses were at the end of the courtyard and were shared by all the building’s residents. I had never seen a bathtub. We bathed standing up in the laundry tub, with water we had heated in a pail on our Primus – the simple kerosene stoves then in use in the Middle East.”
Shteiner said that despite the cramped quarters, she enjoyed a happy childhood with her friends in the quarter. Her colorful depictions of life in the mid-1940s, from Abu Ali, the water drawer who brought water to the neighborhood, to the inspirational visits to the Hurva Synagogue with its domed ceiling, bring the period to life. “One of the beautiful memories of my childhood is praying in the old Hurva Synagogue,” Shteiner said.
After the UN passed the Partition Plan on November 29, 1947, the Jewish Quarter was placed under siege, cut off from contact with the rest of the country, except for convoys that traveled under British protection and brought food and medicine to the quarter’s residents.
By May 15, 1948, the day after the State of Israel was proclaimed, the Jewish Quarter was completely cut off, and fewer than 2,000 residents were left, including the aged and children, together with 200 young Jewish soldiers. On May 19, the Jordanian Arab Legion arrived and began a sustained artillery barrage until the residents surrendered on May 28. All the males were taken to Transjordan as prisoners of war. Women, children, the aged, and the wounded were evacuated to the Katamon neighborhood, which had recently been captured.
The Arabs destroyed most of the buildings in the Jewish Quarter, including the Hurva Synagogue. “My beloved synagogue, a part of myself, was gone,” Shteiner writes in the book.
Shteiner’s parents recognized the significance of the momentous period in which they lived and tried to make her aware of it as well. Shteiner said that while writing the book, she asked her mother what gave them the strength to survive. “You forget,” her mother said, “that these were great, historic days. Our country was about to be created after 2,000 years. We were ready to do everything for it.” Shteiner said that as a seven-year-old, she was less certain. “I myself was very afraid.”
When Shteiner and her sister were frightened, she recalled, their father would say the “Shema Yisrael” prayer with them, and he would recite the prayer from the “Amida” about Jerusalem – “And to Jerusalem Your city, You will return.” “The Messiah is on the way,” he would tell us. “We, as children, debated how the Messiah would arrive. One said he would come from Mount Zion, while another said he would arrive on a plane.”
Shteiner said that her most vivid memory from the war was when a mob of Arabs broke through a British barrier in the Arab shuk and headed in the direction of the Jewish Quarter. Panicked, the residents of the quarter fled eastward. Together with her parents and family, she ended up in a makeshift synagogue and began reciting the “Avinu Malkeinu” prayer, which is recited on Yom Kippur and other fast days.
The people finished the prayer and waited for the Arabs to arrive. Shteiner’s father, assuming that the worst was about to happen, took them to the courtyard and said, “Girls, I want to speak with you. No one knows what will happen. Tell me now – what is the most important thing in the world?”
“We said: ‘The Torah.’
“‘Know,’ he said, ‘that when you grow up, your father wanted you to marry people who study Torah.’ He said this as a final wish. He was sure this was the end,” she recounted.
Fortunately, the Jewish soldiers repelled the Arab attackers and prevented them from carrying out a massacre of the Jewish residents.
One of the most powerful passages of the book is Shteiner’s account of the surrender of the Jewish Quarter, and the sad procession of the women, children, and the aged residents from the area, carrying whatever possessions they could hold, with the soldiers of the Arab Legion flanking them as they approached Zion Gate.
“We cried that we no longer had the Old City,” Shteiner recalled. “My father was held in captivity by the Jordanians for nine months, and we were taken to Katamon.”
Leaving her home in the Old City was traumatic for Shteiner and her family. “One’s home is a part of the soul of a person,” she said contemplatively. “You may have physical goods, but your home is where you live, and we knew that the Old City was the holiest place, the place closest to where the Temple stood.”
Shteiner recalled writing a composition for her school in Katamon about the destruction of the Jewish Quarter. “It was about two or three pages long, and it was the first time that I had expressed what I had experienced. I asked my mother all kinds of questions about the events that had taken place. Afterward, I asked my mother to read what I had written. She said to me, ‘I didn’t realize what was going on in the mind of a child.’”
Despite the difficulties, Shteiner said, “In the end, we rejoiced, the country came about, with the help of God. Many immigrants came during the war.”
Shteiner and her family remained in Katamon for 12 years and later moved to Bayit Vagan, where her father served as the community rabbi for 40 years. After her marriage, she, her husband, and their family lived in the Mekor Baruch neighborhood.
Return to the Old City
Nineteen years after being expelled from the Jewish Quarter, in June 1967, Shteiner was pregnant and was at her parents’ home in Bayit Vagan when the IDF conquered the Old City in the Six Day War.
“I stood on the balcony with my sister. At that time, many neighborhoods had not yet been built, and we could see the Old City from Bayit Vagan. We saw the Old City and our planes descending, with clouds of smoke. My sister began to cry, and I also started crying. My father was inside the apartment and said, ‘The Kotel is in our hands,’ and he began reciting psalms of thanksgiving. We said to him, ‘Why are you saying ‘Hallel’? They are still fighting? We need to pray.’”
Jerusalem Day is a great day for the Jewish people, Shteiner affirmed. “The redemption is a process,” she said. “Independence Day was an important step, and Jerusalem Day is another step.”
In many ways, the rebuilding of the Hurva Synagogue in 2010 symbolizes for Shteiner the positive steps the Jewish people have been taking. After the synagogue was completed, she took her mother there to visit the new building. “It was very moving,” she recalled. “People asked my mother for her reaction to the rebuilding of the Hurva. ‘It is like the resurrection of the dead,’ she said.”
Shteiner said that the holiness of the Old City remained with them. “Every time we would go to visit our children living outside Jerusalem or go on vacation, when we returned and would see the walls, we felt that we were coming close to holiness. It is something that is not present in any other place.”
Comparing her experiences in 1948 with the current realities of war, Shteiner said that her oldest sister says that what they experienced was worse. “It was a war of life and death, and death was on the other side of the door. Despite that, we had hope. God is with us always, and we can see how He watches over the Jewish people. True, we have had losses, but that is what happens in war,” she said.
If the 85-year-old Puah could communicate with the seven-year-old Puah during the siege of Jerusalem, what would she tell her? With a broad smile, Shteiner said firmly: “There will come a day when we will return. The Jewish people will come back because it is ours.”