Iberian Religious World, Volume 1 : Between Sepharad and Jerusalem : History, Identity and Memory of the Sephardim by Alisa(Author) Meyuhas Ginio

Author:Alisa(Author) Meyuhas Ginio [Meyuhas Ginio, Alisa(Author)]
Language: spa
Format: mobi, azw3
Published: 2014-09-29T07:49:15+00:00

202

Chapter 3

The Meyuḥas Family in Kefar Ha-Shiloʾaḥ

The discussion in this chapter deals with Sephardi Jews in Jerusalem who, with the changes and transformations in the times, became immigrants in their native city, even though they never left it and focuses on the test case of the Meyuḥas family. Of note is that Meyuḥas family members, even though they belonged to the Sephardi Old Yishuv, were pioneers in going beyond the walls of Jerusalem: they settled in Kefar Ha-Shiloʾaḥ-Silwan and built their home there, in the 1860s. The Arabs, inhabitants of the village, called the name of the Meyuḥas house: Dar Abu Manḥas.321 The family left Kefar Hashiloʾaḥ in the early years of the British Mandate.322 Avraham Ben-Yaacob, in his book Jerusalem Within the Walls: The History of the Meyuḥas Family, offers a number of possibilities to explain the motives for family members to go beyond Jerusalem’s walls and build their houses outside them. He came to know these op-tions from interviews he conducted with a number of people from the Meyuḥas family. Some said they abandoned the Old City as the result of a feud between part of the family and the Rishon Le-Zion, while others said that since several family members traded in grain in Transjordan, it happened that they reached the city gates after sunset and found them closed and locked. Consequently, they decided to find themselves a place to live outside the walls. One family member, who was a ritual slaughterer, slaughtered animals in Kefar Ha-Shiloʾaḥ

since there was no abattoir in the Old City. As he had to come to the city in the early hours of the morning, he preferred to live in the village outside the city.323

These explanations refer to the occupations of the family members in commerce in grain and in kasher ritual slaughtering. In time, other individuals from the family joined them, including Rabbi Raḥamim Natan Meyuḥas, father of the writer and educator Yosef Bar”an Meyuḥas, mentioned above. In the latter’s memoirs, he wrote how his father had told him that they were about to move to dwell in Kefar Ha-Shiloʾaḥ:

You have become a village boy, for we are moving our home from now on into the village of Ha-Shiloʾaḥ near the city. We shall live there and we shall inhale the light and air. We will no longer drink the turbid well water Family, 235–40. Rabbi Moshe Meyuḥas stayed in Calcutta and Bombay for several years, and within a short time traveled twice to Jerusalem and back to India. During these journeys he also visited European cities: Paris and London.

321 Ben-Yaacob, Meyuḥas Family, 15–21.

322 Ibid., 20.

323 Ibid., 18.

Immigrants In The Land Of Their Birth

203

and no longer eat bought vegetables. For fresh spring water will be our water and with our own hands we will plant vegetables and eat

[them]. My father’s words, in all their simplicity, at that time were an unfathomable riddle. Village, spring, fresh air, our own planting, was there any way then for Jerusalemites to understand the meaning of these

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