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By J. Zel Lurie
 DELRAY BEACH, Florida—Thelma Dorfman of Boca Pointe sent me an interesting article she had published in Viewpoint on her family trip to Israel a week after the Six-Day-War in 1967. Non-Jewish friends had recommended the family stay at the Intercontinental Hotel in Jerusalem. Every public room and guest suite has an incomparable view of the golden Dome of the Rock glistening in the Jerusalem sunlight.
The Intercontinental Hotel had been built by the King of Jordan only three years before. The war had emptied it of tourists. Except for some UN people, the Dorfman family was its only guests. In the week after the Israeli conquest of Mt. Scopus and East Jerusalem, the hotel’s flagstaff still sported the Jordanian flag.
The Dorfmans witnessed the official Israeli takeover. They watched the dramatic lowering of the Jordanian flag and the hoisting of the Star of David.
I too landed in Jerusalem a couple of days after the end of the war. I was on a five-day mission to gather material for a special issue of Hadassah Magazine, which did not normally publish during the summer.
On my first day in Israel I found Zulu, whom I had met in “56 when he was 14 and had followed my 13-year-old daughter on her first trip to Israel. Zulu, nee Zalman, has had a successful career as an inventor but in 1967 he was a young Army officer, ready to help me meet my five-day deadline.
My first task was to get to the Hadassah hospital on Mt. Scoppus which for 19 years had been an outpost of the Israeli army. From 1948 Mt. Scopus had been an Israeli enclave surrounded on all sides by Jordanian soldiers.
At lunch in the Knesset dining room I ran into Robert St. John, the American journalist and biographer, who said that the soldiers on Mt. Scopus were throwing a victory party that evening and he had been invited. He had a car and he would call for me and Zulu at 8.30 p.m.
About 9 o’clock we approached Mandelbaum Gate, the passage into East Jerusalem. Zulu who was in uniform negotiated for us. “They want to know if you are an ezrakh,” Zulu told me. Ezrakh was an Israeli civilian who we learned later were not permitted in East Jerusalem after sunset. I thought it was an Israeli citizen. I told Zulu: tell them no. We are not ezrakhim..
And so we passed into the completely dark East Jerusalem en route to Mt. Scopus. But how to get there?
The streets were black. No traffic. No pedestrians. Not a light in any window. Defeated East Jerusalem had gone to bed. But every house sported the white sheet of surrender hanging from a balcony.
I took over the wheel from St. John. Of the three of us, I was the only one who had been there. Thirty years before, in the 1930s I had been a reporter on the Palestine Post, which became the Jerusalem Post.
I remembered the uphill climb to Mt. Scopus. I figured that if I went uphill at every turn we’d reach Mt. Scopus. I figured correctly. We rode up through Sheikh Jarrrah and turned uphill to Mt. Scopus.
Mt. Scopus was just as dark as the rest of the city. It was also almost completely deserted. The garrison had gone to town to celebrate at one of the restaurants. Our trip and my navigation skills had been in vain.
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Zulu and I visited the empty Hadassah hospital the next day. The soldiers were gone. Zulu was thrilled to find a plaque with the name of the doctor who had delivered him 25 years ago. I was intrigued by railroad tracks which had been laid from one side of the hospital to another. Zulu surmised that they had been used to transport ammunition rapidly when the hospital had been fending off Jordanian assailants.
On Shabbat we joined the tens of thousands who had come from all over Israel to pray at the Wailing Wall. Teddy Kollek. Jerusalem’s mayor, had evacuated the entire Moghrabi Quarter that faced the Wall.
We stood on he hillside, which has been flattened into a plaza and watched the crowd.Three soldier boys, teenagers in uniform. were happily dancing up the hill. They approached an Arab vendor who was selling colorful scarves. They took one and waved it aloft. No thought of paying for it.
“Ma, Meshalmim lathe?” What, pay them? One of them said to me.
I had a different sort of a taste of the arrogant Israeli at the Hadassah Hospital at Ein Karim which was taking care of the seriously wounded. A specialist in hand surgery had arrived from Boston and I had hired a photographer to take photos of the doctors and surgeons at work.
The photographer and I were standing in the doorway taking pictures of a doctor tending a one-legged soldier, when the doctor said disdainfully to the patient; “sheyigmaru at ahtelevisia, ani uchal ligmor.” When the television finishes I can finish my work.
I told the arrogant doctor that the photos were for the Hadassah Magazine and that the 300,00 Hadassah women paid his salary.
The special issue was much appreciated by the 300,000 Hadassah women. Among its features was Elie Wiesel’s interview with the general who had captured the Temple Mount, which was widely reprinted.
Now a few words about the Intercontinental in Jerusalem. It no longer exists.
At first the Israel government hired a European hotel manager who went after American Jewish tourists like the Dorfmans. When I was in Israel in the summer of ‘68 he told me that he had hired a Jewish chef and he invited me to a Shabbat dinner.
The dinner was fine but the gefilte fish was much too sweet for my taste. I asked the chef if he came from Warsaw and he said he did.
Fifteen years later I was staying at a medieval castle outside of Oxford which housed the Jewish research center of Oxford University. There I met a Polish Jew who had published a map that he called the Gefilte Fish Line.
The line begins at the Western border of Lithuania, runs south to the East of Galicia and then skirts Eastward into Russia, On one side you get a decent Lithuanian gefilte fish, like the millions of jars sold here. On the other side, you get an ultra-sweet Polish gefilte fish.
I don’t know how long the Polish chef lasted at the Intercontinental. No American Jewish tourists arrived. The fact that hundreds of Jewish graves in the Mt. of Olives Jewish cemetery were destroyed in the hotel’s construction may have hindered its appeal to the Jewish tourist.
The Hotel was sold. The new owners gave up the Intercontinental franchise and changed its name to the Seven Arches. It is now a 3-star hotel but its view is still 5-star.
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