PERSONAL ESSAYA Christmas story from Jerusalem, 1958, at gunpoint
Photo-illustration by Midjourney
Christmas didn’t matter to the brash young Israelis I rubbed shoulders with every day. It meant nothing to the new immigrants from Morocco, Turkey and India in my Hebrew Ulpan class. The Jordanian soldier manning the barbed-wire border that cut through Jerusalem that winter of 1958 cared nothing about pine trees or Santa’s elves.
But Christmas meant something to me, a 21-year-old Jew from Milwaukee, who was taking a year off from college to search for his people and himself. Alone and living in an unheated rented room in Jerusalem, I found myself sick with longing for home and the warmth of the holiday season, especially Christmas Eve, when families gathered and the eyes of children gleamed bright with anticipation. It wasn’t my holiday, but each year I felt the generosity of spirit it called forth.
At home, I was one kind of outsider, looking in from the street at the brightly lit trees, blazing fireplaces, families feasting at table. In Jerusalem I was another kind of outsider altogether, with no one who would understand or care that I was missing Christmas in America. That we were so close to Bethlehem, where the holiday began, and yet so far, because Bethlehem was in Jordanian territory and thus off-limits to us in Israel, only made it harder.
Feeling forlorn, I set out on the cold afternoon of Dec. 24, 1958, to visit the one American friend I had in Jerusalem, a young woman named Shoshanna spending the year at Hebrew University who I’d met on the ship from New York to Haifa that summer. Shoshanna was lovely and intelligent, with excellent Hebrew, and quickly found herself at the center of a circle of friends.
I was renting a room in Jerusalem’s Baka District, near the No-Man’s Land border with Jordan. The landlords were a family of Bulgarian Jews, refugees who had trailed behind Israeli troops as they advanced into Jerusalem in 1948, and claimed as their own a large stone house from which an Arab family had fled in terror.
Shoshanna lived about a mile away on the hilltop of Abu Tor. It was an elegant house that had also belonged to Arabs before the 1948 war. One blue-domed room in the house remained unlived in, Shoshanna explained to me, because some believed it marked the burial site of Abu Tor, a leading general in Saladin’s war against the Crusaders. This house, at 14 Aminadav Street, was a gathering spot for students, poets and artists, a place where something was always happening, so it seemed a likely place to find the warmth of good company, and maybe a few Americans like Shoshanna who would understand what I was missing
Going up to Abu Tor, a hill that was half-Israeli territory, half-Jordanian, I had to pass under the eyes of a Jordanian machine gunner. I dodged through the fluttering white sheets and wet army uniforms hung on clotheslines on the Israeli side of the border — uniforms of the Israeli troops who stared back at the Jordanian machine gunner from behind their own sandbagged bunkers.
I arrived to find 14 Aminadav abuzz with excitement. Even with my beginner’s Hebrew, I understood that Shoshanna and her friends were planning to attend Midnight Mass at the Benedictine Abbey of the Dormition, a monastery on the site where Christians believed that the Virgin Mary fell into a deep sleep and was taken bodily up to heaven and reunited with her risen son, Jesus.
The truce line of 1949 had rendered the Abbey one of the few Christian holy sites on the Israeli side, since Jordan controlled the Old City. On Christmas Eve the Abbey opened its doors to guests for Midnight Mass, and it drew young Israelis and foreign students curious about this mysterious event.
It seemed the perfect cure for my Christmas Eve Blues.
As we climbed along the road that led up Zion hill, I looked up at the clear night sky, and softly began to sing, “O holy night…”
“The stars are brightly shining…” Shoshanna sang back, half-laughing.
“It is the night of the dear Savior’s birth…” A male voice joined in, singing in an English laced with the throaty sounds of his native Hebrew “r’s.” We all laughed like vainglorious troops in a conquering army.
At the Abbey’s gate, we joined a crowd of young Israelis. Silent monks in white vestments guided us along a spiral of stone steps to an upper gallery overlooking the abbey’s glittering mosaic floor. There were perhaps 100 of us, faces eager with curiosity, eyes dazzled by the scene unfolding on the church floor below.
Mass began at the stroke of midnight. The abbey was lit by what seemed like 1,000 candles glowing from every corner, illuminating image after mosaic image of mother and child. Then came the processional of monks, the hemlines of their white robes sweeping across the mosaic patterns in the floor. They chanted in Latin, crossed themselves, bowed, and dropped to their knees before the gold-touched image of Mary and the child Jesus above the main altar.
Looking down from the gallery, we visitors sat transfixed by the beauty of the spectacle. We understood not a word of the Latin Mass or the rituals, but we gazed down in wonder on the swinging incense censers, the jeweled chalice filled with wine, the round white wafers dropped with sacred words on each expectant tongue. We heard the solemn joyfulness in the chanting of the monks as they celebrated the miraculous birth.
Hours passed like minutes. Around 3 a.m., there was no sign of the Mass ending anytime soon, but I realized that Shoshanna and her friends had left — and that come morning I would have to be back in class at the Ulpan, where Christmas was just another day. . I began my long walk home, descending the hill from the Abbey of the Dormition, passing the shuttered Jerusalem railroad station, and the unlit marquee of a movie theater, then through the German Colony to Baka.
To reach the home of my Bulgarian family, I had to cross an open field with railroad tracks running through it. A mist had begun to rise from the ground, and when I was halfway across the field, I heard a menacing voice cry out from the darkness in Hebrew: Tafsik! Stop! And then in Arabic, Tawakuf!
I thought I was about to be robbed, or maybe worse. My house was only 100 or 200 yards away. My only instinct was to run for it, and I will never know what kept me from bolting, but as I stood there frozen in place, I began to make out the figures of eight, maybe 10 men emerging from the mist. As they came into clearer view, I saw that my stalkers were Israeli Border Police, with each man training his Uzi submachine gun directly on me.
Hands up! The patrol commander began to interrogate me, at first in Hebrew, but then in English as my Hebrew faltered under stress. I explained that I was an American, studying Hebrew at Ulpan Etzion, and living nearby in Baka. He believed me enough to let me lower my hands and produce my wallet with my Wisconsin driver’s license and a student ID. I offered to get my passport from my room in Baka.
The commander said there was no need. He could see well enough that I was who I said I was. But what did I think I was doing, he asked, wandering the streets of Jerusalem at 3 a.m.. Didn’t I know that No Man’s Land in Baka was a hot border, with infiltrators from Jordan trying to cross all the time?
I told him I did not. All I could think when I heard his challenge come out of the darkness was thieves in the night. Run for it.
The commander said it was a good thing I didn’t run. They could have shot me dead. Bad for me. Bad for the Border Police. Bad international incident for Israel.
The other men laughed at such a prospect.
My tongue began to loosen as I felt the danger passing. I told them I was returning home from Midnight Mass at the Abbey of the Dormition.
More laughter from the Border Police. They asked if the monks had tried to convert me. Was I a Christian now?
I explained that I was homesick for Christmas Eve in America, and that it had been very beautiful at the Abbey, the monks all swept up in celebrating the miraculous birth. It was a beautiful story, I said, a story for everyone, Mary and Joseph, no room at the inn, the shepherds, the animals, the birth of Jesus in a manger, the bright star, the three kings bearing gifts…
The commander cut me off, and said maybe I too had received a little gift from the Border Police.
Yes, I thought. In divided Jerusalem, early on a Christmas morning, the gift of my life.
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