A Street Divided: Stories From Jerusalem’s Alley of God

by Dion Nissenbaum

  “It’s private,” she said one evening at their house when she came home from work in late 2014. “I don’t want to share this with anyone.”

  Like her brother, Abeer bristled at the suggestion that her father had embraced an Israeli identity.

  “Why are you talking about these things?” she asked her mother and brothers. “It’s private.”

  When pressed to talk about their lives on Assael Street, Abeer got visibly angry and walked out of the living room. Her mother chased after her and the two got in a heated argument before asking their visitors to leave them alone. Abeer wanted nothing to do with people picking apart her family’s lives. Her father had been misunderstood. It seemed like their family had been forever scarred, physically and emotionally, by Abu Fadi’s decisions. If any of them were ever going to have a chance to define their lives for themselves, they had to get out from under Abu Fadi’s shadows.

  “He’s dead,” said Abeer, who appeared to be on the brink of crying as my Palestinian colleague and I left the family home for the last time. “What else is there to say? Abu Fadi is dead.”

  Note

  *The names of Abu Fadi and his family have been changed.

  Six

  The Peaceniks

  It took the hands of a healer to secure a breakthrough in modern-day Israeli-Palestinian relations on Assael Street.

  Alisa Maeir-Epstein could see that the psychological walls dividing East and West were thick and high. Alisa knew she would have to summon all her energies to bring some healing to Abu Tor.

  A rare window of opportunity had opened: Alisa had a chance to bridge the divide by using her New Age Reiki healing skills to infuse her Arab neighbor’s body with soothing energy.

  It was as if her life had led her here, to this dead-end street on the front lines of Jewish-Muslim relations.

  Before she arrived on Assael in 2005, Alisa lived a nomadic, spiritual life. She’d ventured into the most remote valleys of Pakistan to live with a marginalized tribe in the shadows of the Khyber Mountains. She spent countless nights on the Red Sea desert beaches in Egypt with Bedouin friends, not far from Mount Sinai—the rocky range where Moses received the Ten Commandments.

  Alisa had traveled north to Israel’s captured Golan Heights to offer prayers at the Middle East’s version of Stonehenge: a mysterious 5,000-year-old monument of concentric stone circles that some consider one of the earth’s “energy fulcrums.”

  But the most significant journey came when Alisa was in her 20s. While exploring America one summer, Alisa found her way to South Carolina where she sought spiritual guidance from an East German healer, a Reiki Master, who showed her how to use the power in her hands to heal.

  Renate Sorensen wasn’t what Alisa expected to find when she went looking for a spiritual guru. Renate was in her 50s and frumpy. She wore large, thick, purple-rimmed glasses and talked about spiritual energy with a quiet, lyrical German accent. Her hair shot out at different angles—like an ungroomed cat. She wore unflattering button-down sweaters over checkered shirts.

  “She looked like a funny old lady, walking down the street with a big pocketbook to buy cottage cheese,” Alisa said. “But she turned out to be this incredibly enlightened, great being.”

  Alisa didn’t exactly command a room with her physical presence either. She was about five feet tall, with a petite frame that made her look younger than she was. She kept her thin, silverish hair cut pixie-short, then started dying it blond as she got older. But she’d served as an officer in the Israeli military and knew how to take care of herself in a way that only a woman who has traveled around the world alone knows how to do.

  Renate taught Alisa something else: the skills she needed to tap into universal spiritual energy—the Reiki—and use her hands to heal the sick. A Buddhist monk developed Reiki in Japan in the 1920s as a way for people to fill up on that invisible energy when it got low. He taught Reiki students how to “lay their hands” on a patient and infuse them with healing power. Alisa learned how to use special hand movements to clear the body’s chakras—the body’s spiritual energy spots. Reiki devotees raved about it. The International Center for Reiki Training basically says Reiki teachers can perform miracles. It’s a claim not that uncommon in a place like Jerusalem. Reiki treatments, the center says, create a “wonderful glowing radiance that flows through and around you.” Reiki “treats the whole person, including body, emotions, mind and spirit, creating many beneficial effects that include relaxation and feelings of peace, security and wellbeing. Many have reported miraculous results.”1

  It made sense to Alisa. She’d felt the invisible energy flows. So it seemed logical to her that, with proper training, she could harness that power. Anyone could tap into it. But the ability has to be passed from teacher to student in a Reiki “attunement” ceremony. When Alisa was ready, Renate “attuned” Alisa so she could tap into the healing powers. After lots of lessons and practice, Alisa became a young Reiki teacher.

  Reiki has long been dismissed by Western medicine as New Age hocus-pocus, but Alisa believed in it. She had seen its power. Now Alisa had the chance to put all her training to use in Jerusalem.

  It wasn’t what she expected to be doing with her life: Alisa was a reluctant spiritual warrior.

  She’d spent much of her life wandering the planet, exploring its hidden corners and contemplating the world’s mysteries; she’d always been restless. Perhaps it was because she was a “military brat,” born on a US Air Force base in central California to an Air Force doctor and a civilian psychologist who moved around. Maybe it was growing up in the Bronx, a New York neighborhood filled with different accents and friends who were always on the move. Whatever the case, Alisa seemed most at home when she was somewhere else.

  Like many Jewish Americans, Alisa’s life straddled Israel and the United States. On July 20, 1969, the day Apollo 11 landed on the moon, 13-year-old Alisa arrived with her family in Israel, where they settled into their new lives. The move was jarring for Alisa, who thrived on New York City’s miniskirt, rock-music culture and chafed at being thrown into a more sedate all-girls religious school in Israel.

  “I was going to be a New York Jewish-American princess,” she said. “When I got to Jerusalem, it wasn’t like that at all. I wasn’t glad at the time, but my parents did me a great service moving to Israel.”

  Alisa studied Jewish history and geography at Jerusalem’s Hebrew University before returning to the United States to get a master’s degree in education from Harvard in 1982. Then she veered off the traditional path to get an alternative degree in holistic education. She studied psychology and art, movement and meditation. She’d found her true path.

  “Touchy-feely,” she said. “That’s my stuff.”

  “What Am I Doing Here?”

  Alisa found her home in Israel, but she still felt unsettled. She felt a spiritual connection to the land and an emotional one to the country, but Alisa couldn’t understand why she was so rooted in a place that seemed to thrive on perpetual turmoil. On one particularly emotional visit to her “spiritual rabbi” in South Carolina when she was seeking some guidance through her 30s, Alisa asked Renate the simplest of questions: “Why am I here?”

  “I am somebody who pursues spiritual development and meditates and all I want is for people to be in peace,” she told her mentor. “What am I doing in Israel?”

  Alisa felt the weight of the Middle East conflict taking a spiritual toll. She was tired of having to wear psychological armor, even on the best of days, in Jerusalem. She was wondering if she was meant for something else. Renate told Alisa that living in the Holy City was her calling.

  “They need people like you there,” Renate told Alisa any time she thought about leaving Jerusalem. “That’s your destiny: to be in a place of strife.”

  It was hard for Alisa to accept.

>   “I find it very difficult on an emotional level to be there sometimes,” Alisa told her teacher. “Why do I need to be in this place where it’s so difficult for me emotionally, to be where people have such hatred, and, if there isn’t a right reason to fight, they go out and make one?”

  “Places like that need people like you,” Renate replied.

  Eventually, Alisa came to see her new life on Assael as part of her spiritual journey.

  “Maybe on some deep level, I believe; I’m not sure, but I believe, maybe that’s why I’m here,” Alisa said one day between sips of organic green tea. “Maybe that’s what I’m doing on this street.”

  By nature, Alisa was an extrovert. She seemed to flourish when she put her values to the test. So when the opportunity presented itself, Alisa put her healing hands to work on her Palestinian neighbor.

  The opening came one afternoon in 2006, soon after she’d moved with her family to Assael, when she saw a woman picking lemons in a well-tended orchard across the way. Alisa always wondered about the homes on the eastern side of Assael. This place stood out because it was the only one with a big orchard. The deep lot, a rare open space on the hillside crowded with homes, was sprinkled with orange and lemon trees. The rectangular two-story stone house rising above the trees was set back from Assael and slightly down the hill. Alisa looked down from the street at her Palestinian neighbor picking fruit. The woman in the yard, her hair covered in a plain scarf, caught a glimpse of Alisa watching her from the street above and offered her some lemons. Alisa gratefully accepted—and not just because the ones in her own yard weren’t ripe. The woman, Ihsan, invited Alisa into the house for coffee where she introduced her sister-in-law, Khulood Salhab. Alisa didn’t really speak Arabic and her Arab neighbors didn’t know much Hebrew. They couldn’t say much more than shalom and salaam to each other, so they had to rely on other ways to connect. They struggled through their first conversation and turned to Khulood’s English-speaking daughter for help translating.

  Khulood was disarmed by her new neighbor’s willingness to come into her house for coffee. She couldn’t remember the last time someone from the west side of the street had come over for a friendly visit. Usually, Khulood kept to the Arabic-speaking wives she knew on the eastern side of the street. Those women didn’t look down on her for covering her hair and wearing long, formless dresses—as some of the neighbors on the opposite side of the street seemed to do. Alisa seemed right at home from the start. Khulood was charmed by her petite new neighbor with her funny American accent. She wasn’t sure whether Alisa would ever come back, so she didn’t think about it too much after she said good-bye.

  But Alisa kept reaching out, kept stopping by, kept saying hello. Though they didn’t share a common language, they used a mix of English, Hebrew, Arabic and hand signs to get to know each other. When one of Khulood’s English-speaking kids was around, the mothers would rope them in to translate.

  Eventually, like the wives and mothers on Assael who had first met when the barbed wire came down 40 years earlier, Alisa and Khulood found common ground at the kitchen table.

  One day when Alisa came over to visit, Khulood was cooking maqluba, a mainstay in Palestinian homes, made with layers of spiced lamb or chicken simmered in a pot under rice and vegetables that are flipped maqluba—upside down—when served. The smells of cinnamon, cardamom, allspice and pepper steaming in the kitchen swept through the house.

  “I really want to learn how to make maqluba,” Alisa told Khulood.

  “Oh, it’s easy,” Khulood said. “Yallah, let’s do it.”

  While they cooked, Khulood’s shields came down. She confided in Alisa that she was having some aches and pains that weren’t going away. Alisa knew how to help: Reiki. Khulood was skeptical. But her kids and her husband encouraged her to give it a try. So Khulood and her eldest daughter walked over to Alisa’s house one afternoon to see what it was all about.

  Khulood took off her head scarf, a sign of how comfortable she felt with her neighbor, and lay down on Alisa’s Reiki treatment table.

  With an Arabic-Hebrew dictionary placed next to her aromatic oils, Alisa placed her hands on Khulood. She infused her body with universal energy, giving her more strength to heal.

  It seemed to work.

  When she got home Khulood felt better. Lighter.

  “It was a bit strange,” she said. “But it felt good.”

  Khulood was sold. She went back for more Reiki treatments. Then her oldest daughter figured she would give it a try. Then her only son went around to see if Reiki could help him get rid of his migraines. The intimacy of the connection with the Salhabs gave Alisa some hope that people could find common ground, no matter what political, religious, cultural or linguistic differences there might be. It reinforced her belief that she was on the right path, that there was a larger reason she had found her way to Jerusalem, to Assael.

  “I’ve always felt that it was very hard to be here, but this was my destiny, and there was a reason that I was here, beyond my personal Jewish family history,” Alisa said. “It was deeper. Like I was sent here spiritually.”

  From Street Worker to Street Fighter

  If Alisa was the spiritual warrior of Assael, her husband, David, was the street fighter.

  “I believe change has to come from within, from spirit,” Alisa said. “He believes in political and social action.”

  David Epstein grew up in a blue-collar Pennsylvania town where he was entranced by the brand of Social Justice Judaism he saw unfolding all around him. He was captivated by the Jewish rabbis marching with Martin Luther King Jr. in Alabama and antiwar activists who were giving the Establishment the middle finger. When he got to Brandeis University (alma mater of yippie activist Abbie Hoffman) in the late 1960s, he marched in Boston’s anti–Vietnam War protests and lived by the motto “don’t let school get in the way of your education.” He grew shaggy dark hair and a stringy beard that made him look a bit like Cuban revolutionary and anti-establishment icon Che Guevara.

  When the US military called his name for the draft, David cited his religious objection to what he saw as unjust American aggression in Vietnam and refused to go fight for his country, declaring himself a Conscientious Objector. Instead, David studied Hebrew at Brandeis, joined the campus Nonviolent Direct Action League and got thrown in jail for blocking a bus carrying military draftees heading to training camp. When one American soldier decided to go AWOL to protest the war, David stood guard with other activists in a building where they offered the soldier “sanctuary” from arrest. One of his fellow antiwar activists at Brandeis was Katherine Ann Power, a quirky student who distinguished herself by walking shoeless and braless around campus. David and Katherine both served on the student council and marched together in rally after rally.

  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 win
ning 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.