From the 'stone wars' of the 30s to 'Cafe in the Alley': 100 years of war over the Sabbath in Jerusalem

'If you open the cinema box office before sunset on Saturday night - you will be murdered.' This was the content of a threat letter received by a cashier at the 'Edison' cinema in Jerusalem in the summer of 1950. The police suspected that those behind it were people from 'Neturei Karta'. It is unclear if it was the same cashier when, six years later, hundreds of demonstrators from 'Neturei Karta', led by Amram Blau, besieged the cinema plaza. The demonstrators were furious about the opening of the box office an hour before the end of the Sabbath, broke into the line of ticket buyers, tried to prevent the sale, and shouted insults at the 'Sabbath desecrators'.

The confrontation escalated quickly, and when police officers rushed to protect the ticket seller, several demonstrators attacked him and bit his hands until he needed assistance. The event ended with a forceful dispersal and the arrest of 15 demonstrators. The 'Edison' cinema, which was one of the symbols of the capital's cultural life, is no longer there. 70 years and only hundreds of meters separate the place where it operated from 'Cafe in the Alley'. The Sabbath storms and the struggles over the character of Jerusalem have hardly changed - except for the location and the participants.

In recent Sabbaths, Jerusalem is boiling again. The current center of the storm is a small neighborhood cafe that decided to open its doors on weekends. The scenes outside look as if they were taken from an endless period play: ultra-Orthodox demonstrators arrive, shout, try to break in, and protest against the desecration of the capital's holiness. Opposite them stand secular residents seeking to protect individual freedom and freedom of occupation in the city. This is another scene in a play that has been going on for almost a hundred years.

The stubborn battle for the character and nature of the Jerusalem Sabbath began as early as the British Mandate days. On a hot Sabbath afternoon in early June 1931, thousands of people, some estimated ten thousand, gathered around the football field of the 'Maccabi' association in Jerusalem. The atmosphere was heated and charged: opposite the Jerusalem Maccabi team stood the football team of the Armenian community in the city, but the large crowd that surrounded the field from all sides was not made up of sports fans. These were members of the ultra-Orthodox community in the city, who rushed to the place to protest against the desecration of the Sabbath, following several weekends in which football matches were held in the Holy City to their displeasure.

The National Committee tried to maneuver and compromise between the parties, but to no avail. The head of the National Committee, Yitzhak Ben-Zvi (later the second president of the State of Israel), and with him Rabbi Ostrovsky, a member of the committee, entered the field itself and pleaded with the Maccabi players to give up the game for the sake of domestic peace. But the athletes, who were frustrated by the repeated requests to prevent them from activity on weekends in the name of encouraging physical culture, rejected the appeal outright. In the newspaper 'Doar HaYom' it was written that 'the Maccabees demanded them to leave and not interfere'.

The game started, but was hardly played: thousands of demonstrators broke onto the grass, and British police officers on horseback charged into the crowd. Severe riots developed on the spot, in which demonstrators were arrested and injured. Rabbi Ostrovsky was furious at the behavior of the police, who he claimed attacked like 'predatory animals' on demonstrators who only shouted 'Do not desecrate the Sabbath', and promised the Maccabi members that 'all of Judaism will rise against you and tear from you the holy name 'Maccabi''.

The echoes of the difficult confrontation left scars in the Jewish Yishuv. The editor and writer Itamar Ben-Avi was pained by the events, and in his newspaper 'Doar HaYom' compared what was happening to the fratricidal war that brought about the destruction of the Second Temple, phrasing it in harsh words: 'After thousands of years of wandering and after years of revival, here has fallen upon us again the fruit of the curse of our ancient days... the shame of Hebrew Jerusalem in its prime'. The internal Jewish struggle in the capital even led to Christian clergy photographing the scene to send the pictures to European newspapers, while the newspaper 'Al-Jami'a al-Arabiyya', which was identified with the Jerusalem Mufti, called on the Arab public to boycott the 'Zionist Maccabees who desecrate the honor of their religion' and join the Orthodox Jews who are fighting them. Later, a point-specific compromise was indeed formulated that allowed 'playing football on Sabbaths' under strict restrictions - including no sale of tickets and sweets at the field, no arrival of vehicles, and limiting the game to only two hours - but the principled struggle was never resolved.

With the establishment of the state and throughout the following decades, the Sabbath wars in Jerusalem continued. The status quo, intended to regulate the relations between religion and state, was under constant test and became a vast field of friction. In the 50s and 60s, Shabbat Square and the nearby Geula Square became regular centers of confrontation. On many Sabbaths, military vehicles, ambulances, and private cars were pelted with stones, roadblocks were set up, and innocent passersby suffered severe beatings - like a 16-year-old boy who rode a bicycle in 1960 and was severely beaten, or a student who smoked a cigarette near the square in 1954 and was beaten until he lost consciousness.

In the 60s, the confrontation over transportation on the Sabbath moved to Shivtei Yisrael Street and the area of the Mandelbaum crossing, which separated the two parts of the divided Jerusalem. In November 1963, the newspaper 'Al HaMishmar' reported that young ultra-Orthodox men pelted with stones a bus and a taxi of tourists that passed on Shivtei Yisrael Street. The intensity of the protest was so great that, in an exceptional step, the demonstrators deviated from their custom and pelted vehicles with stones even on weekdays, in protest against government decisions on traffic arrangements on the Sabbath. In those days, the leader of 'Neturei Karta', Amram Blau, stood out in the field, marching with his followers on Shivtei Yisrael Street. Daily fights developed on the streets: secular young women were subjected to shouts of 'Pritzes', and ultra-Orthodox and secular children conducted 'stone wars' in the open fields, equipped with pot lids as shields, while in the yeshivas they wore steel helmets.

Even after the unification of the city in 1967, the 'Jewish wars' continued. 'Al HaMishmar' reporter Dalia Shahori revealed that a long line of streets leading to Shabbat Square and Mea Shearim were completely closed to traffic on Sabbaths by the police and the municipality, without the issue being discussed or approved in the city council and without the approval of the Ministry of Transport. Minister of Transport Yitzhak Bar-Yehuda admitted that the closing of the axes was done illegally, but the authorities, led by Mayor Teddy Kollek and the police, preferred to establish facts on the ground and calm the spirits through quiet and law-evading street closures, in order to prevent severe friction in the united city.

The demonstrators did not remember the mayor for that gesture. In October 1983, at the height of severe confrontations surrounding the struggle over driving on weekends on the Ramot road, Teddy Kollek arrived for Sabbath prayer at a synagogue in the Bukharim neighborhood. When he left the building, he was surrounded by about 200 ultra-Orthodox who knocked him to the ground, spat on him, and threw tomatoes and stones at him. The struggle around the road began in the late 70s and included blocking roads, stone-throwing, and arrests. In those days, rare voices of reconciliation were also heard, such as that of Minister of Education and Culture Zevulun Hammer, who came out in a public article and called to avoid violence: 'No struggle for the Sabbath justifies bloodshed and not physical sabotage... violent attack is a bad and forbidden act, just as Sabbath desecration is forbidden'. But the spirits did not calm down; in the 80s and 90s, the struggles moved to Bar-Ilan road, and later to the opening of the Karta parking lot on weekends.

Now, as the demonstrations, shouts, and physical confrontations take place outside 'Cafe in the Alley', another chapter is being recorded in Jerusalem history - a history of struggles, demonstrations, arrests, political agreements, and waves of violence in the deep conflict over the character of the Sabbath in the city and its identity.