Beit Hakerem - The last secular holdout in Jerusalem
February 20, 2008 Israeli Culture War, Culture Wars, Holy Wars: The Clash within Civilizations No Comments
Two Ultra-Orthodox Men In Jerusalem
Tamar Rotem, Beit Hakerem - The last secular holdout in Jerusalem - Haaretz, Feb. 20, 2008
It took about a decade for the small north-Jerusalem neighborhood of Givat Hamivtar to change its skin. Now, after most of its well-to-do secular households have been replaced with ultra-Orthodox families, the metamorphosis seems almost complete.
For Yael Bar-On, the decision to leave was made four years ago, when it came time to enroll her 6-year-old son for elementary school. That presented a problem, because by then, the Bar-Ons were among the few remaining secular families in the neighborhood.
“The population of young couples with children had slowly disappeared,” she recalled recently. “Only the older residents remained. The neighborhood’s kindergarten and its secular schools just kept losing students.”
Increasingly, the families replaced those who departed came from Ramot Eshkol, the Haredi neighborhood to Givat Hamivtar’s west. Since the latter half of the 1990s, many relatively well-off people from Ramot Eshkol began buying homes in the secular neighborhood.