Havatselet Street

Markers like the photograph-on-stone signs I first saw on the walls of the little stone houses in the Nakhalaot across from the Mahaneh Yehuda market are appearing elsewhere in Jerusalem. Walk up Havatselet Street and look at the walls for snippets of history. Note the office-supply shop that's been there for many decades. Near the top, where a bridge over your head connects one part of turn and look back down the street.the Hadassah Technical College to another, turn and look back toward Zion Square (named, I'm told, after the Aion mocie theater that used to be there). Not the renovated ironwork.

Turn back and continue to the top. On your left is an eye clinic in the building of an eye hospital from a hundred years ago. It's worth walking into the yard.

Turn left off Havatselet and watch for a forlorn looking wooden door on your right. Through it is a happy place in a building that seems to have aged for over a hundred years without renovation inside or out. Here children brought to Israel for heart surgery stay with their mothers before the operations and while recuperating after release from hospital. When I visited there were babies and toddlers from Gaza and Iraq. I wondered whether their parents had trouble when they returned home, but Gazans have grown used to getting hospital care in Israel and the Iraqis were Kurds.

Copyright 2013 Jane Schulzinger Fox