shoshana kordova

By Shoshana Kordova

Navot Ben Barak, 26, sips chai at an Indian restaurant in Israel, watching a quorum of men hold a prayer service across the narrow alley as elderly Jerusalemites shop for eggplant and zucchini at a vegetable stall a few feet away.

Five years ago, few would have imagined that young and hip transplants to Jerusalem like Ben Barak and his friends would be sitting around a table in the middle of one of the city’s most well-known institutions – the Mahaneh Yehuda produce market, or “shuk” – leisurely talking about apartment-hunting. But although Mahaneh Yehuda has long been considered a dirty, neglected and noisy place where poor housewives would purchase what they needed to feed their families, the market is not just about produce anymore, and its clientele is hardly limited to scrimping housewives in kerchiefs.

“It’s fun here,” says Ben Barak, his long brown hair held back in a ponytail. “I can sit here an entire day, just being in the shuk.” Ben Barak, who is from the northern Israeli town of Rosh Pinah and is planning to study shiatsu, made his way to Mahaneh Yehuda to check out the restaurant – Chandra – after he heard about it from other Israelis who, like him, had gone backpacking through India when they finished their mandatory army service.

The last five years have seen the opening of about half a dozen cafes and restaurants and several stores selling high-quality wines, cheeses and spices scattered throughout the main thoroughfares and many connecting side paths of the market. Another half a dozen boutiques and trendy shops sell clothes, housewares, jewelry and beads; one is attractive enough to entice a bride, her blonde hair doused with silver sparkles, to pose for wedding pictures.

The balance between tradition and innovation – the old face of the locals seeking cheap, quality produce and the vendors who sell it, and the new face, represented by customers like Ben Barak and the restaurant he patronizes – is one of the most striking features of Mahaneh Yehuda’s burgeoning gentrification. Veteran produce sellers say there has been a noticeable increase in the number of foreign tourists and Israeli customers whom they tend to classify as “yuppie” or “bourgeois,” and the vendors are almost universally enthusiastic about the influx.

“If you don’t try, you can’t succeed,” says Nissan Cohen, who has been selling produce, mostly fruit, at Mahaneh Yehuda for 45 years. “People who never knew the shuk are looking at it differently.”

In the 1950s and ‘60s, the market was known as the place where many of the customers were elderly, relatively poor Mizrahi (literally “Eastern”) Jews – those who come from Arabic or Muslim countries. These buyers would  scout out the stalls for the cheapest onions and pita bread to bring back to their families, while the Mizrahi and Arab vendors would try to out-shout each other to advertise their wares. Chickens were slaughtered in the market and sold fresh.

Today, though, luxury items and basic staples intermingle with ease, as do sidelock-twirling religious men and tank top-clad secular women, tourists from France and America and immigrants from Russia and Ethiopia, and of course, Arabs and Jews. An Arab woman in a brown and white veil carries her shopping down the covered walkway connecting Agrippas and Jaffa streets, between the hummus and glistening olives for sale on one side and the sequined cushions and tall black vases displayed on the other. A heavy ultra-Orthodox man in a white shirt and black hat peers into a shop selling colorful cloth handbags and stylish scarves that sidle up against the pomegranates in the next stall. A man carrying dozens of pitas on a large wooden board on his head deposits his burden at a stall selling baked goods, and a café customer sits silently engrossed in his laptop. 

“Three shekels bananas!” one vendor calls out. “Halva! Come taste!” shouts another, as he hawks about 15 varieties – including coffee, nougat and chocolate – of the classic Mideastern confection made of sesame seeds. Inside a spice shop selling fresh ginger, dried shitake mushrooms and tea infusions made of dried flowers, the blend of scents is so headily intense that the vendors advise a sneezing white-haired shopper to step outside the store and into the covered walkway. That walkway runs parallel to another, uncovered one, and the two are linked by several alleys with names like Peach Street, which had previously been in the throes of neglect but are now replete with goods from avocado and persimmons to designer dresses and cappuccino.

Mahaneh Yehuda used to be so derelict that its walls were crumbling and rotting garbage was piled high, pushing people away from the market and toward the clean aisles of the supermarkets, says Uri Amedi, who directs the Jerusalem Lev Ha’ir (“Heart of the City”) Community Council and helped pave the way to giving the market a facelift.

“If the Western Wall is the soul of the city, the spirituality, then the shuk is maybe the heart of Jerusalem, everyone’s shuk,” says Amedi. “It really succeeds in attracting people from all groups: Arabs and Jews, left and right, ultra-Orthodox and secular. I think this is the only place in Jerusalem where you can see the entire demographic population of the city in one space.” Mahaneh Yehuda boasts “exceptional colorfulness, which essentially preserves the delicate balance between the yuppie population of Jerusalem and the veteran population,” he adds. “Whoever wants to touch Jerusalem and understand what Jerusalem is and feel Jerusalem, I think they go to the Mahaneh Yehuda market.”

The market has expanded through the years, and it now takes up slightly more than 600 square yards, with each stall only 12 square yards each, although some owners combine contiguous stalls for a larger space. The main section is essentially a rectangular grid whose entrances can be easily identified by the border police officers in olive-green uniforms. At the beginning of the week, when business is fairly slow, the open-air walkway seems large and airy and can be traversed in a couple of minutes. But on Fridays, when the shuk is most alive as shoppers scurry to make their purchases before the city essentially shuts down for the Sabbath, vendors push tables into the open-air walkway to hawk burekas filled with spinach or potatoes, or to sell bright orange flowers from plastic buckets. An ultra-Orthodox man in a long coat blows a shofar (ram’s horn) on late Friday afternoons to remind shoppers that the stalls must close before sundown. In the warmer months, people sit at tables outside the only ice cream parlor in the shuk, conveniently situated at the corner of the open walkway, and watch the hubbub around them.

Mahaneh Yehuda began on an empty lot at the end of the 1800s, more than half a century before the 1948 founding of the state of Israel, as a disorganized assortment of Arab villagers selling fruits and vegetables to Jewish residents of neighborhoods that were then being built outside the walls of the Old City. One of those neighborhoods was called Mahaneh Yehuda, which eventually lent the market its name. The Turkish authorities who ruled Palestine at the time showed scant interest in bringing order, shelter or infrastructure to the chaos of the impromptu market, writes Nirit Shalev-Khalifa, author of a book about the area called “In the Heart of Jerusalem.” But over time, entrepreneurs began buying plots of land to set up their own stores, and now the stalls are privately owned.

Even in its early days during the Ottoman Empire, Mahaneh Yehuda brought together different types of people. Shalev-Khalifa quotes an area resident of the era named Gavriel Cohen as writing: “The buyers were Jews and the vendors were Arab peasants from the villages near Jerusalem, and thus did the members of the two nations stand, side by side, something that gave the shuk a special character. Jewish housewives tried to speak Arabic and the male and female Arab peasants tried to flog their wares in Yiddish.”

The recent influx of more upscale stores has expanded the amount of different groups that interact in the shuk. At Bordeaux, a designer clothing boutique located next door to a fish stall, nose-ringed owner Efrat Ben-Arza brushes off an ultra-Orthodox man who pops in to ask how she got all her hair into the braids that sprout from her scalp and reach below her shoulders. “I was born that way,” she retorts. Soft rock plays from a radio nestled under a dress rack and a box of chocolate pralines sits on her desk near the display window. Ben-Arza animatedly explains that, in early October, she moved her store to the shuk simply because she loves the market and wants to work in a fun environment.

Ben-Arza argues that stores like hers aren’t pushing out the more traditional shoppers, just bringing in new ones and giving the regulars yet another reason to keep coming back. “This is Jerusalem – it’s both this and that,” she says. “There are plenty of people who came for tomatoes and left with pants and a shirt. It makes everything more interesting.”

She turns her attention to two women who walk in to ask about the white lace dress hanging in the window, on the other side of which sits a hunched old woman surrounded by cartons of eggs. “It’s handmade by a terrific, special designer,” Ben-Arza informs the shoppers. Another woman recently bought it to use as her wedding dress, she tells them, managing to sound enthusiastic rather than cloying.

Yaffa Ben Yair, 47, puts down several bags of groceries before trying on the NIS 859 shekel (about $200) dress, in black. “I come to the shuk every week,” Ben Yair tells me in front of the gilded mirror that takes up much of the store’s back wall. Like many Israeli women, she has close-cropped hair, and the combination of lacy dress and no-nonsense hairstyle strikes a somewhat dissonant note. She first started shopping at Machaneh Yehuda at the age of 12. She continues to buy her vegetables here and now also searches for eveningwear in the market, even though she now lives in a suburb outside Jerusalem.

All told, the gentrification of Mahaneh Yehuda has caused a rise in the amount of people going to the market and a “significant” increase in trade volume, says Asaf Vitman, CEO of the Eden Company, which was established by the Jerusalem Development Authority and the Jerusalem municipality to revitalize the city center. Vitman won’t provide details of the increase, but says that despite the influx of cafes, restaurants and stylish shops, more than 90 percent of the market remains dedicated to selling the produce, fish, meat and baked goods traditionally found at Mahaneh Yehuda.

Indeed, many of the vendors are the same ones who have been there for decades, or their sons and grandsons. And the traditional Mahaneh Yehuda patrons still constitute the majority of frequent shoppers, according to a survey conducted last year by the Czamanski Ben Shahar financial consulting company. Nineteen percent of shuk shoppers who go to the market at least once a week earn significantly more than the average monthly salary in Israel, while 59 percent of high-frequency visitors earn significantly less than the average monthly salary, the survey found. The rest of the shoppers fall somewhere in the middle.

It is no coincidence that it is primarily politicians from the conservative Likud party, which has a strong base among the working class, who flock to Mahaneh Yehuda at election time. The market has also been repeatedly targeted by terrorists - a factor that has kept some shoppers and tourists away in the past.

The high-end stores and the cafés and restaurants – some of which are open in the evening, after the produce stalls shut down for the day – are gradually transforming the market into a fashionable destination, shoppers and store owners say. Mahaneh Yehuda is becoming a place to be, not just to buy; somewhere to go out at night, not just somewhere to do errands during the day.

“It has become another place for recreation, and that’s to the good,” says Israel Kimhi, an urban planner at the Jerusalem Institute for Israel Studies, where he is responsible for research related to Jerusalem. “It adds more variety.” He dismisses the possibility that the produce-sellers will ultimately lose their stalls to the boutiques and cafes, saying, “There will continue to be vegetables there, because that’s a tradition that passes from father to son for many years.”

Indeed, many old-time vendors are enthusiastic about the changes, but there is some concern over the market’s new look. Nissim Bibi, who is 67 and has been selling produce at Mahaneh Yehuda since he was 13, acknowledges that the cafes and restaurants have brought newcomers to the market, but draws the line at the designer clothing stores.

“It doesn’t fit in,” he says. “It’s a fruit and vegetable market. Someone who comes to buy fruit doesn’t come to buy a 400 shekel [$93] shirt.”

The renovations that led the way to the gentrification process began about 20 years ago, says Amedi. The vendors formed an organizing committee, and the drainage system was upgraded, acid-resistant stones were put in and a roof was installed over part of the market to protect against the wind and rain of winter and the hot sun of summer. Instead of letting the garbage gather throughout the day, blue-uniformed janitors make regular rounds of the market, sweeping trash into a cardboard box or wheeling around a cart piled with boxes that give off a whiff of fennel.

The J.D. Café is one of the more recent signs of the changing market. Like several of the owners of the new wave of businesses,  Jackie Yoan – who, along with her business partner, opened the café about five months ago - comes from outside the almost exclusively male fraternity of long-time vendors. She recently moved from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, and wants to bring that city’s “going out for coffee” mentality to Mahaneh Yehuda with her.

The café does not just bring in customers who otherwise might not have come to the market; it is a customer itself. Yoan, who is 43 and serves as the café chef, says she barely keeps any uncooked food on hand, so that everything will be fresh. “If I finish it,” she says, “I run to get more.”

Some shuk veterans were “in shock” when the café opened, but treated her warmly all the same, says Yoan, bedecked in a diamond “J” necklace and an ankle-length maroon apron. She was attracted to the city because “something in the air of Jerusalem has stayed virginal.” Much like the market itself, Yoan is trying to create a balance between her stated intentions of leaving the local culture intact and “trying to bring in more life, so it will be more fun.”

She has Eli Mizrahi to thank for laying the groundwork that helped bring customers to her café. Unlike Yoan, Mizrahi is part and parcel of the shuk. He heads the Mahaneh Yehuda vendors association and owns two eateries in the market. One is a restaurant called Zahko, which opened about two years ago and has received favorable reviews in the Israeli papers. It is right outside the Iraqi market, which lies a short distance away from the main rectangle of the shuk and receives its name from the vendors’ country of origin. The restaurant sits amid clubs where old men gather day after day to play backgammon and cards. But by night, a younger crowd gathers in Zahko to eat high-priced items like entrecote steak and foie gras, perhaps with a side of its “shouk salad” or “market-fresh flatbread.” 

Mizrahi’s other eatery, an eponymous café, is more significant: As the first café in the shuk, it served as a major catalyst for change when it opened four and a half years ago. Mizrahi had noticed that the market was “fading” for many years, and opened his cafe on a side alley in the middle of the shuk in an effort to reverse the slide.

It needed triggers to bring in a new population,” says Mizrahi, 55. “The new stores revived alleys that were pretty desolate.”

“As soon as people realized that buying food in the shuk is really attractive and that it’s worthwhile to come,” he says, “it really created a revolution that I hope will continue.”

On a recent midweek afternoon, the coffee bar and tables at Mizrahi were filled nearly to capacity, with about 15 people. Like some of the other cafes and restaurants in the shuk and the city at large, Mizrahi has tables set up both indoors and outdoors. The small, square wooden tables on the outside are on a slightly raised platform, where ordinarily a vendor – like the one with cuts of meat on display on the other side of the alleyway – would stand behind a counter to sell his goods. Instead, a young woman holds a cigarette in hand while speaking to her companion in French and a bespectacled gray-haired man sits inside, at the coffee bar, with a Hebrew crossword puzzle and an espresso. On the wall behind him are French Valrhona chocolates and baking ingredients, like orange extract, that can be hard to find in Israel.

On another wall inside the café hangs a self-referential, almost ironic, photograph: a colorful wide shot of Mahaneh Yehuda. The picture serves both to tie the café to its surroundings, by metaphorically bringing the traditional market inside the space carved out for a coffee break, and to distance the two, by reproducing an image of the shuk as though it were a receding object that must be captured by the camera before it slips out of recollection, even though the real thing is just outside the café entrance. Indeed, as new Mahaneh Yehuda habitues like Navot Ben Barak and Jackie Yoan mingle with old-time vendors and veteran shoppers, the shuk that was once limited to produce and basic staples is indeed becoming a place to be memorialized by the click of a camera. But at the same time, Mahaneh Yehuda is far from forgotten: It is being taken along on a caffeine-charged ride into the future.