WHEN THE ISRAELI GOVERNMENT ANNOUNCED PLANS LAST March to build 1,600 new homes in East Jerusalem, it prompted a furious reaction from both the Palestinians and the United States. I wasn’t following the story closely, but a subplot that surfaced a few days after the announcement plunged me unexpectedly into an episode of family history that I hadn’t thought about for years.
At issue was a synagogue, the Hurva, that had been the Jewish Quarter’s main religious building until it was destroyed in 1948. After lying in ruins for sixty years, it had been rebuilt and was about to be officially reopened. Although the New York Times called it “a case of unfortunate timing,” many Palestinians saw an explicit link between the settlements in East Jerusalem and the new synagogue. Hamas called for a “day of rage.” Fatah accused the Israelis of “playing with fire.” Arab Knesset members warned of a third Intifada. Three thousand security personnel were put on alert for the opening ceremony.
Why the rebuilding of a synagogue in the Jewish Quarter should have become part of the settlement dispute was a little puzzling, but it was the architectural rather than the political aspect of the story that interested me at first.
In 1973, my father, Denys Lasdun, an architect who had designed several prominent buildings in England including the Royal National Theatre, was commissioned to design a new synagogue on the site of the Hurva ruins. For several years he shuttled back and forth between London and Jerusalem, working on the plans.
He wasn’t the first architect involved. Louis Kahn had done designs for the building before he died in 1974. Kahn and my father had both served on Jerusalem mayor Teddy Kollek’s international advisory board, the Jerusalem Committee, set up after the Six-Day War. The choice of these modernists indicates the nature of Kollek’s aesthetic ambitions for the building and the city. This was to be a statement: a showpiece for a reunited, progressive, globally minded Jerusalem.
But nothing came of either Kahn’s or my father’s plans. What had been built instead after all these years was something so far from Kollek’s vision as to amount to a direct repudiation of it. It was a copy, an exact replica of the Ottoman original.
The synagogue was destroyed not once but twice, and has spent more of its life as rubble than upright. It was first built in 1700, by Polish emigrants. Money for the construction was borrowed from the Arab community, but after a few years the congregation defaulted on its debt and creditors tore down the building, at which point it acquired its present, fateful name; hurva is Hebrew for “ruin.”
Another synagogue was built on the site, completed in 1864 by followers of a Lithuanian rabbi known as the Vilna Gaon, a revered figure in orthodox Judaism. This building, a domed structure designed by the Turkish sultan’s own architect, dominated the skyline of the Jewish Quarter and came to be regarded as the official religious center of Jewish Jerusalem. Theodor Herzl and Ze’ev Jabotinsky spoke there. The first British high commissioner of Palestine, Sir Herbert Samuel, paid a ceremonial visit in 1920. And in 1948, during the Arab-Israeli war, it was shelled by the Jordanian army.
Here the story becomes stranger. There is a prophecy attributed to the Vilna Gaon that states that three versions of the Hurva would be built, and that the completion of the third would bring about the rebuilding of the Temple in Jerusalem. Rebuilding the Temple (itself twice destroyed, first by the Babylonians, then by the Romans) is a motif in the climactic scenarios of all kinds of cults and sects, Christian as well as Jewish. We are in the realm of baroque eschatology here, but there is probably no spot on earth where religious fantasy has more combustible potential than the small area of Jerusalem encompassing the Temple Mount and the Jewish Quarter. The Vilna Gaon’s prophecy was cited by Hamas and Fatah as a principal reason for denouncing the Hurva in its present, third, incarnation. In the light of this prophecy, they claimed, the rebuilding of the synagogue constituted a threat to the two landmarks currently occupying the Temple Mount (or al-Haram ash-Sharif, as Muslims call it): the Al Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock.
As far as I know, neither Kollek nor Kahn nor my father knew about the Vilna Gaon’s prophecy. They were all fairly worldly types, and the political discourse was relatively secular in those days, even in Jerusalem. But whether they knew it or not, they were all engaged for a time in an endeavor that seems, in retrospect, to have had a distinct tinge of the apocalypse about it.
I visited the Victoria and Albert Museum’s architectural collection last September, to look at the Hurva papers in my father’s archive. The archivist had set out the files in the Architecture Study Room, an airy space with glare screens on tall windows and scholars working at long tables in a civilized hush that made me nostalgic for London (I left twenty years ago). The memories brought back by the archive itself were equally fond, but more turbulent. My father’s insistence on complete artistic control over all aspects of the jobs he took on, combined with the fact that most of these jobs were large-scale public buildings, with politicians and other interfering types on the steering committees, made for a generally embattled atmosphere around him. I had left home by the time he got Kollek’s commission, but the archive proved that the Hurva job was no exception. Old fights reconstituted themselves from the papers in the thick file boxes; old storms boiled back up among telexes about fee schedules and meetings with city engineers.
The main conflict concerned Kollek’s insistence, for PR purposes, on presenting the scheme as a joint effort with an Israeli architect. Liaising with a local architect is normal on any overseas job, and my father was fine with that, but he drew the line at actual collaboration. there can be no question of design by committee, he thunders by telex to Jerusalem. A formula is agreed on, but then the Jerusalem Post demotes the Israeli architect in an article on the project. Kollek blames my father, and a memo records a chill in relations: “TK was barely civil presumably because he was cross about press reference.” A day later my father phones Kollek to discuss the matter: “TK exploded that he was not interested in phone calls about this sort of thing and that he found DL a most difficult man to deal with.” “DL,” my indignant father has his secretary type, “is not prepared to tolerate any further outbursts from TK of this nature and the job must now be regarded as problematical.” Ronald Dworkin, the American jurist and a friend of my father’s, is brought in as an informal intermediary: “Dworkin and wife just back from Jerusalem. They had looked at Hurva site and talked to TK…. While TK admits S [the Israeli architect] may not be the greatest architect in the world, he must present the authorship as one of ‘collaboration.’ ” Bobbing on this choppy sea is the unfortunate “S,” a Mr. Schen- or Schon- or Schoenberger (nobody can get his name right), who falls sick a year into the conflict and resolves it, inadvertently, by dying.
My father was Jewish, but he had grown up in an assimilated household, converted to Christianity, lapsed, and even though he always publicly identified as a Jew, his real religion was architecture, with Hawksmoor and Wren for his Old Testament and Le Corbusier for the New. At any rate he knew little about Judaism and next to nothing about synagogues. To learn about the traditions he talked to rabbis and historians and brought in a young scholar, Robert van Pelt, for weekly lunchtime meetings. While van Pelt talked about temples, altars, bimahs, and arks, my father would furiously scribble notes and diagrams on the paper tablecloth. At the end of each meal the tablecloth—wine stains, crumbs, and all—was handed to the office secretary, and the following week a sheaf of neatly typed notes would be presented to van Pelt, who was required to read them and (my father being somewhat tyrannical about record-keeping) sign them.
The tablecloths aren’t in the archive, but the notes are, and along with the other advisory memos they chart the evolution of the design, which went through two main phases. The first, referred to as the “stratified scheme,” was a close echo of my father’s prior work, especially the National Theatre, in which long strata are used to tie the building visually to the city around it, the new reaching out into the old. The resemblance was strong enough for him to have worried that he would be accused of repeating himself, and he evidently asked his advisers to supply historical precedents. “Hurva looks like Theatre,” one of them writes, “just as Palladio’s churches share features with his villas.” Enthusiastic lines in my father’s soft-leaded pencil stripe the margin next to this unabashedly grandiose note, but in the end the design didn’t satisfy him and he scrapped it, a year’s work tossed, embarking instead on the “vertical scheme” that formed his final plan. Four pairs of thin, square, stone-faced towers stand sentinel over the four sides of a slab-roofed central space containing the ark and bimah. Van Pelt noted an affinity between its basic form and that of ancient Jewish altars. He brought my father pictures of these curious rectangular structures with their four “horns,” and these seem to have encouraged the new approach.
My father wasn’t easily satisfied by his own work, but I remember that he was pleased with the Hurva design. Kollek seemed happy too. Three years into the job, he writes warmly, “You know that the Hurva is one of my dreams.”
Sitting in the archive, I couldn’t help but hear the valedictory note in that, as if Kollek already half knew it wasn’t going to be built. But he had approved its construction; he had even conducted a cornerstone-laying ceremony with the president of Israel, and by 1982 was only waiting for the go-ahead from the housing minister, who in turn was waiting for approval from the prime minister.
This never came. The trips, the telexes, the quarrels and reconciliations, the whole four-year agon of debate, reflection, and revision turned out to have been a waste of time. The prime minister at the time was Menachem Begin, and Begin had his own ideas for the synagogue. A clipping in the archive files from the Jerusalem Post makes it clear that the project is going to be shelved. What Begin wanted was a replica, and he had no intention of letting his housing minister sign off on anything else. Nineteen years after his death, the will of this deeply conservative figure appears to have prevailed.
• • •
The pomegranates are ripening in Jerusalem. They hang over dusty gardens in the modern neighborhoods, and everywhere you go in the Old City there are juice stalls piled high with them. When the vendors cut them in half and crush them in their antique juicers, a thin, astringent liquid trickles out. It is very refreshing in the intense September heat of the crowded alleys but it also, I am told, lowers your blood pressure, which possibly accounts for the faint dizziness I have been feeling since I arrived.
This may also be an effect of being continually thrust up against questions that, as the Anglo-American offspring of two semi-Christianized Jews, I don’t find easy to answer. What are you? Why are you here? To the Israelis I meet, I seem to be a source of particularly uneasy curiosity. Do I follow the British media (too hard on Israel) or the American (too soft)? My interest in the Hurva arouses vague dismay: is this going to be another embarrassment, like the disastrously named Museum of Tolerance, the proposed site of which turned out to be a Muslim cemetery?
Before I visit the Hurva itself, I climb up to the high roof of the Austrian Hospice, just inside the Damascus Gate, to view the dome on the skyline. It rises, shallow and unadorned, on the horizon; a distinctly Judaic presence among the crosses and crescent moons, though not, it seems to me, a particularly assertive one. It’s much smaller than the three other cupolas: the Holy Sepulchre, the Al Aqsa, and the Dome of the Rock. Later I look at it from the Temple Mount. From there its dome does look a little more imposing, a sort of pale eye periscoping up above the Jewish Quarter. But on purely physical grounds it seems a stretch to regard it as any kind of threat to the mosques.
Louis Kahn’s scheme, a vast, dark, slope-walled Egyptian temple held up by mighty stone pylons, with a processional walkway leading all the way across the Quarter to the Western Wall, would have loomed menacingly over the city. Kollek himself, though he admired the design’s grandeur, was taken aback by its scale. “Should we in the Jewish Quarter,” he muses in a letter, “have a building of major importance which ‘competes’ with the Mosque and Holy Sepulchre…?” Kollek’s diffident tone reflects the hesitancy that many Israelis felt at that time, between the two paths laid before them by the 1967 victories: triumphalism and restraint.
My father’s plan would have kept to the footprint of the original structure. As I imagine its slim towers out there among the rooftops and minarets, I can’t help thinking that his version of the building, his last major commission, would have looked pretty good.
But it was perhaps just as well for him that it wasn’t built. One day, a few years into the project, he took me aside to show me a letter he’d been sent. It consisted of a photocopy of an article about his design, with the text blacked out, and handwritten words scrawled over the pictures. danger jews about was the first phrase I read. There were drawings of swastikas equaling Stars of David, sexual insults, and outright threats: if you design this you will die premature death. And there was that peculiarly nasty conflation of the roles of victim and oppressor that seems to distinguish anti-Semitic taunts from other kinds: HITLER WAS RIGHT TO GAS JEWS, on the one hand, and THIS IS JEW ECONOMY DIRTY PEOPLE ONLY KNOW HOW TO MASSACRE PEOPLE, on the other. al quds. not this was written at the top along with the name jaweed karim, presumably the sender.
I came across this letter in the archive and found it as disturbing as I had thirty years ago. My father had been shocked by it, naturally, and worried about how my mother would react (he decided we shouldn’t tell her), but he didn’t dwell on it, and it didn’t cross his mind (or mine) to give any serious thought to what might have been the underlying grievance. Certainly, there was no discussion in his office about the political implications of the job: it simply didn’t strike anyone as contentious.
Reinventing Jerusalem, a recent book by the British scholar and conservation architect Simone Ricca, makes the provocative case that the post-’67 reconstruction of the Jewish Quarter wasn’t a restoration project so much as a calculated propaganda exercise that used demolition, expropriation, selective archaeology, and architectural trompe l’oeil to create the illusion of a much more substantial historic Jewish presence in the Old City than there had ever been, thereby justifying the Israeli takeover of East Jerusalem. As such, Ricca says, the reconstruction became a major source of inspiration for the settler movement that evolved soon after. Kollek, in Ricca’s analysis, turns from enlightened visionary into a more dubious figure, hoodwinking the world into accepting that what he was doing was authentic restoration rather than the blatant manufacture of spurious heritage. The Western Wall’s transformation into what Ricca calls “the central altar of the Israeli state” was a direct result of this exercise (before ’67, the Wall had nothing like its present ceremonial significance). As for the Hurva, the idea that a single center ever existed for the city’s fractious Jewish community was an invention of the secular “Ashkenazi elite” (the book’s villains) who saw the project as a further opportunity to harness religious energies to a nationalist cause.
It is a complex, nuanced book; very thorough and, in the way of much academic writing about post-’67 Israel, rather merciless. It refrains, icily, from any attempt to enter the Israeli state of mind at that moment of seemingly miraculous victory over enemies who, if their rhetoric was to be believed, would very much have liked to destroy Israel altogether. How far it succeeds in undermining the legitimacy of Jewish Quarter reconstruction in general and the Hurva project in particular, I am not sure. Ricca makes much of the Jordanian army’s claim that they blew up the synagogue in 1948 only after warning the Jewish command, via the Red Cross, that they would have no other option unless Jewish forces withdrew from the building, which they were using as a stronghold. This is well documented. What he doesn’t mention is the equally well-documented fact that by 1967 the Jordanians had demolished or defaced all but one of the quarter’s fifty-three other synagogues. And he omits the words of the Jordanian commander after the final retreat of Jewish forces following the destruction of the Hurva:
For the first time in a thousand years not a single Jew remains in the Jewish Quarter. Not a single building remains intact. This makes the Jews’ return here impossible.
Visitors are not warmly encouraged at the new Hurva. They may enter during prayers, or at appointed times in tour groups restricted to the women’s gallery and the walkway around the dome. A gated lodge guards one main entrance, and a locked stairway bars the other. Between prayers the place functions as a school for its Misnagdim (non-Hasidic ultraorthodox) congregation, which would have surprised my father. “The orthodox Jews will mostly use their own synagogues,” he wrote in a memo. “Hurva will be mostly for state occasions and tourists.” From time to time, men in black velvet yarmulkes, white shirts, and sharp black suits are admitted through a side door, which closes firmly behind them. Security is of course a serious matter in this city, though I notice you can wander freely into the restored Sephardic synagogues down the road.
But the architect, Nahum Meltzer, is going to give me a private tour. Having strolled by the building a couple of times, I am expecting someone as crisp and starched as the congregants, so it is a surprise to find a disheveled, gray-haired man in a worn plaid shirt waiting for me. In addition to working on restoration projects, Meltzer has designed modern buildings, including an addition to the Knesset. By an odd coincidence, he once worked for my father in London. I warm to him quickly, all the more so because he seems to know in advance everything I am going to think about the synagogue, and not to mind too much. “It doesn’t aspire to be architecture,” he says with a melancholy smile before we set off. “Think of it as a bastard child of the Byzantine and the Ottoman.” It amuses him that the original of this Jewish landmark was designed by a Muslim.
He offers to show me some of his favorite spots in the Old City before we go into the synagogue, and we take a meandering route past crumbling Mamluk palaces, into the serene Crusader church of St. Anne’s, and back along the Via Dolorosa, squeezing past groups of pilgrims bowed under heavy crosses. The Christians here seem to inhabit a different universe from the Jews and Muslims; spatially contingent but projected from another time, their dramas and massacres occurring elsewhere, in the deep past or future. A different kind of temporal confusion occurs as you enter the Jewish Quarter. The buildings are modern, but faced in the ancient-looking sand-gold Jerusalem stone that is statutory for all new construction. It is easy on the eye but creates a slightly unreal, stage-set atmosphere. The human element adds to the effect. Kollek’s “Ashkenazi elite” apparently had a secular population in mind when they rebuilt the area, but that group was quickly superseded by various Haredim sects, whose eclectic period gear—Prince Albert frock coats, silken knee breeches, side locks, and shaven heads under kippas topped by rakish black hats or massive beaver crowns; the whole (erroneously named) “Polish Count” look, complicated by tassels and tallits and leather-strapped phylacteries, and worn on a motor scooter or while chatting on a cell phone—effects a total collapsing of eras.
Most of the Old City is too densely settled for its buildings to be experienced in the round. Even the monumental Church of the Holy Sepulchre is something you piece together from angled glimpses. The Hurva, in its previous incarnation, was similarly crowded-in, but the replica stands with its back to an empty piazza, looking both averted and exposed. It, too, is faced in Jerusalem stone, but of a whiter shade than its neighbors, which makes it look eerily new, while its form—the plain dome supported on a squat cube of four wide arches, with a chunky tower at each corner—is clearly old, so that the eye doesn’t at first know what to make of it.
We enter through golden doors. Students blink up from their texts; mildly affronted, it seems, by our presence, until they realize one of the intruders is their esteemed architect. Respect is shown, but Meltzer tells me quietly that relations have been strained ever since he talked to the press about the congregation’s less than welcoming attitude toward the public.
We look around the tall white interior with its painted panels and stained-glass windows. Meltzer points out where stones from the original ruin have been incorporated into the new concrete walls. He tells me about the artisans who carved and gilded the elaborate bimah and made the cast-iron balustrades. The craftsmanship looks very fine, but I am uncomfortably aware of how much my father would have loathed it all.
“Replica sterile unworthy,” goes a handwritten note in his archive. “Context/piazza changed therefore phoney…. Remembering the past is not the same as being in the past.” The use of modern techniques and materials to rebuild a nineteenth-century structure whose modest charm derived largely from its visibly ramshackle construction would have struck him as a singularly meaningless exercise. Arches and domes made from cast, precision-set concrete have a machine-age smoothness that no amount of hand-distressed stone cladding can disguise. (The original dome was honeycombed by clay bottles for reinforcement, and you can make out its bobbled unevenness in old photographs.) The fact that an elevator has been installed inside, and that a tower section from the original has been omitted to give a view to the Temple Mount, adds a note of capricious inconsistency that further weakens any case for “authenticity.”
All this is clearly beside the point. Accurate or not, a replica is what has been built, and the consensus is that it was the only option that ever stood a chance. David Kroyanker, who has written extensively on Jerusalem architecture, told me he didn’t like Kahn’s scheme, adding bluntly, “I didn’t like your father’s either.” Both, in his view, were too provocative—for aesthetically conservative Jews as well as for politically wary Palestinians—to have made it past the planning stage. He praised the meticulous detail of Meltzer’s reconstruction and has given it his blessing. Esther Zandberg, Haaretz’s architecture critic, considers the replica cowardly but, again, the only buildable solution. Though no admirer of Begin, she credits him with understanding that an architectural non-statement would be the only way to neutralize opposition.
History, so far, has proved Begin right. Despite the dire words of Hamas and Fatah, the synagogue’s reopening last March went smoothly. There were small protests away from the site, but the “day of rage” turned out to be a day of indifference. None of the Palestinians I spoke with had any interest in discussing the building. It simply wasn’t a battle they wanted to fight. Call it a sleight of hand, an intervention in the past, but the synagogue has rematerialized as if it had never been destroyed. The mediocrity of the original design acts as a further cloak of invisibility over its pale double. Nobody sees it. Nobody cares. End of story.
But there remains something mysterious about the project. Kollek’s lofty civic ambitions were long ago abandoned, so what has kept it alive all these years? Restoration for its own sake hardly seems sufficient as a motivating force. Could there be any merit in the view of the Hurva as part of some larger, ongoing preoccupation with the Temple Mount? I asked Kroyanker whether, given the curious connection between the two institutions, rebuilding the synagogue might amount to a proxy action for rebuilding the Temple: a kind of architectural gesture of yearning. He answered gloomily that for some people it undoubtedly was. He showed me the catalogue from an exhibition he had curated, called Unbuilt Jerusalem. Along with my father’s and Louis Kahn’s Hurva schemes, the exhibition featured ornately detailed Third Temple models built by local enthusiasts. There is a thriving Third Temple subculture in Jerusalem. Souvenir shops in the Jewish Quarter sell Third Temple table mats, holographic artist’s impressions, even priestly garments. Last April, the director of the Temple Institute tried to sacrifice a goat outside the Hurva, having been turned away from the Temple Mount itself. It is all fairly crazy. High above the Western Wall Plaza, a vast, glass-encased golden menorah stands ready to be installed in the Temple when its hour comes round. “May it be rebuilt speedily and in our days,” goes the legend beneath it. It was paid for by the main donor for the reconstruction of the Hurva.
Perhaps it’s just a literary prejudice of mine to find the notion of any kind of double—architectural as much as human—inherently baleful. But there is no escaping a certain oppressive aura about this new-old building. The locked gates have aroused resentment among the remaining nonorthodox inhabitants of the quarter. The Hurva’s rabbi, Simcha HaCohen Kook, comes from the same prominent rabbinical family as Zvi Yehuda Kook, founder of Gush Emunim, the religious settler movement. His appointment was controversial, even within the Jewish Quarter. I tried to interview Rabbi Kook at the synagogue. A very polite young man with a pistol took my number at the gate, but nobody called.
“I fully believe that we will witness the creation of a religious and spiritual focus for world Jewry,” Kollek wrote to my father in 1979. He appointed a religious adviser to consult on Jewish law concerning sacred ruins, and among the precepts the adviser passed on was one stating that when a destroyed synagogue is to be rebuilt, “its beauty and glory should be increased.” Perhaps there was a moment when such innocently expansive hopes could be seriously entertained in Jerusalem, but that moment has clearly passed.
At Ben Gurion airport I run into Nahum Meltzer again, on his way to visit a son in London. He tells me that plans are afoot for the rebuilding of another historic synagogue destroyed by the Jordanians, the Hasidic Tiferet Yisrael. It, too, will be a replica.