Mural

• Walking down Rehov Yafo from Shouk Mahaneh Yehudah (http://jerusalemblog.blogspot.com/2006/02/unexpected-february-entertainment.html and http://jerusalemblog.blogspot.com/2006/06/shesek.html and http://jerusalemblog.blogspot.com/2006/06/abundance.html ), past the bus stop and before Davidka Square, ahead of you to your right, you will see a five-story high mural, drawn to look like photographs on a bulletin board.
• On the left, are girls and women from the Alliance Israelite Universelle school, founded toward the end the nineteenth century to provide an education that combined Torah study with vocational training. For the girls, work with textiles was important to the curriculum. The school promised they would produce cloth as good as that from Damascus.
• On the right are the men and boys, who learned metalworking and other trades. One picture shows a workshop for painting and sculpture, but I have not yet discovered anything about those classes.
• French was the language of instruction.
• The same organization (Kol Yisrael Hkhaverim or Kiahkh) opened schools elsewhere in the Ottoman Empire and in Morocco.
• At the time, Jewish religious leaders warned that a secular education would draw children away from religion. Parents liked the school, it had an excellent principal, and its students learned well, so it succeeded. In one picture the girls, smiling for a class photograph, are bare-kneed in what look like 1940s school uniforms.
• One of the school’s two buildings was torn down. Its gate sits in the middle of a wide part of the sidewalk, about a half a block farther down Yafo, across Kiahkh Street. Set Paralell to Yafo, the gate is easy to miss. The other building is now a vocational school for haredi men.
• The mural is the work of http://www.cite-creation.fr/ Lyon, France. (See also http://jerusalemblog.blogspot.com/2006/07/trompe-loeil.html ).

Copyright 2006 Jane S. Fox