Written and living evidence of the history of Jerusalem's Old City provides evidence a contentious building located near the Jaffa Gate and known as the Petra Hotel was in Jewish hands until 1931.
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The Jewish Ateret Cohanim association recently entered the facility after purchasing it from the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate 20 years ago. Although the acquisition received all the necessary legal authorizations, Palestinian and ecclesiastical elements are now waging an international pressure campaign to prevent any Jewish presence at the site.
Historical research, however, shows that the hotel was owned by two Jewish families throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries.
During the British Mandate, the hotel was a magnet for both Jewish and British leaders. In 1918, the cornerstone of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem was laid there. Weddings were also held and the hotel was frequently visited by dignitaries who arrived in the city, including High Commissioner of Palestine Herbert Samuel, Israel's first Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook, and others.
The 1929 riots ultimately led the hotel's owner at the time, Yerachmiel Amdursky, to abandon the facility. Amdursky's granddaughter, Zippora Ansbacher, confirmed this to be the case in a conversation with Israel Hayom.
Ansbacher, whose husband Mordechai was a witness at the trial of Nazi official Adolf Eichmann and served as the first chairman of the Yad Vashem Holocaust museum has a number of items, such as plates bearing the hotel logo and a newspaper ad for the hotel, that his family had kept from what had been known as the Amdursky Hotel.
"Mother was born in a hotel in the Old City hotel – Room 13. She took me to see it. I know the hotel. It operated until 1929. There was terror everywhere and in Hebron, and then he [Yerachmiel] decided to leave the hotel.…. My father recited the Kiddush [blessing to sanctify the Shabbat]. The guests are seated at round tables. Suddenly, we hear 'Aleihum, aleihum [mob cry in Arabic] and a lot of noise. And people approached with sticks, batons."
"Grandfather was startled but asked people to stay where they were and said, 'I'm going downstairs' …. When they saw him, he told them in Arabic: 'You're going upstairs over my dead body.' And then they walked back and it was quiet in the area. That is what I know about that night. He returned, and sang the Shabbat hymns with the people. But to himself, he said, 'On Sunday or Monday, I am leaving,'" she said. The hotel's move out of the Old City appears to have been carried out around two years later.
Ansbacher's account is supported by a series of findings as well as research into that period. A sign reading: "Amdursky's Hotel Restaurant" can be clearly seen in pictures taken of the site and dating to the early 20th century.
A postcard dated 1906 describes the hotel as a "central hotel adjacent to the Tower of David." A number of newspaper ads as well as contemporary literature also confirm the existence of the hotel as one maintained and operated by Jews.
Geographer and Hebrew University of Jerusalem Professor Emeritus Ruth Kark demonstrated that the original hotel was established in the first half of the 19th century by the Amzaleg family upon making aliyah to Israel from Gibraltar. There is evidence the family maintained ownership of the property until 1895, with it being reopened as the Amdursky Hotel in 1903.
Deputy Jerusalem Mayor Fleur Hassan-Nahoum, herself an immigrant from Gibraltar, has embarked on an international media campaign to fight back against attempts to prevent the hotel's transfer to the Ateret Cohanim organization.
"Gibraltarian Jews' contribution to the establishment of the Jewish presence in the Old City is significant, and the construction of the structure in which Hotel Petra now resides is a special discovery for me as the daughter of Gibraltarian Jewry and as someone who has had the privilege of being the daughter of the former Prime Minister of the British peninsula," Hassan-Nahoum told Israel Hayom.
"The lie led by ecclesiastical elements regarding the supposed change to the character of the Jaffa Gate from Christian to Jewish incites and damages the delicate fabric of relations in the city and all those who want to live in peace and in good neighborliness throughout Jerusalem."
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