Jerusalem Street Poetry

• Poems appeared inside bus shelters and on light poles up and down the streets of Rehavia. The city posted them, not for foreign tourists (except those few who can read Hebrew well enough to appreciate a poem) but for the people of Jerusalem, the people of the neighborhood. Hebrew poetry throughout the ages has been allusive, and modern Hebrew poetry alludes to three thousands years of written words.
• Yesterday a guide from the Ben Tsvi Institute led a group from poem to poem, reading each aloud, recalling the echoes, and evoking connections with Jerusalem and Rehavia. Poems danced images of bright Indan fabrics, stones, and staircases where the light lasts only for a minute.
• Each time I walk with a guide, I learn a little more about the city. Why is Ussishkin St in the middle of poets and other thinkers from Spain’s Jewish Golden Age? And why is Yehuda Halevi not honored in Rechavia by a street among his contemporaries? The story goes that Ussishkin, then head of the Jewish Agency for Israel, pulled enough strings to have the street where he lived should be named after himself. As he lived on Yehuda Halevi Street, that poet no longer has a street to his name. They say that Ussishkin used to dust off the street signs.
• In Madison, US presidents are near Vilas Park while Universitypresidents stretch to the west. In Jerusalem writers from the Golden Age are in Rehavia.
• Israelis rarely give credit to the British for anything they did during the Mandate, but Britain does get credit for the best city planning of modern Jerusalem. They decreed no development in the valleys. They also declared that buildings in Rehavia (almost all of them apartment buildings) should have gardens around them. Because of that, Rehavia streets are lined with green, at no taxpayer expense.
• See also http://jerusalemblog.blogspot.com/2006/02/unexpected-february-entertainment.html

Copyright 2006 Jane S. Fox