"כאן תקום השכונה שלנו": השכונה שלא קמה ממזרח לירושלים בתקופת המנדט הבריטי

Abstract

British authorities in Palestine encouraged the development of Jerusalem beyond its municipal boundaries, based on their understanding of its future trends. Under Ottoman rule, new neighborhoods were built in proximity to the center of town and with a certain degree of geographic contiguity with the neighborhoods that preceded them. In contrast, the British Mandate built neighborhoods in remote locations, spread over extensive areas. These neighborhoods had no contiguity with any previous settlements, and were planned based on available land. These "Garden Suburbs" established a new form of urban sprawl that surrounded central Jerusalem from the south (Talpiot together with Admat Amos and Givat Eliyahu, which were in the planning stage) and the west (Rehavia, Bayit VeGan, Beit HaKerem, Kiryat Moshe and Givat Shaul). Until the beginning of the Mandate period, the area east of Jerusalem remained almost devoid of Jewish habitation. Members of Agudat HaDayarim (The Tenants' Society) sought to fill this lack, and worked to establish a garden suburb for Jewish residents on the lands of the village of Abu Dis, east of Jerusalem. The existence of a Jewish neighborhood in Abu Dis is almost completely absent from the research literature, which focuses on neighborhoods that withstood the test of history. Much of the information about this neighborhood was permanently lost when the home of the society's secretary was hit by heavy shelling during the War of Independence and their archive burned. Additional documents that survived were preserved in the Israel State Archives, the Central Zionist Archives and the Jerusalem Municipality Archive. These form the basis for our research. The article exposes the story of the neighborhood that never came into being and therefore did not earn the right to be recorded in the chronicles of Jerusalem, but nevertheless is of considerable historical value.