A Walk With the Ghosts of Jerusalem's Old City

For as long as the Holy Land has been holy, pilgrims have made their way to Jerusalem.

They have come to offer their sacrifices to God, or to bear witness to his suffering. They have come to pray and contemplate their own place in God's creation, and they have come to buy cheap souvenirs, including T-shirts freshly made with the emblem of their colleges back home.

The point is, they have always come.

But since October 7, they haven't.

"Work stopped instantly," after Oct. 7, said guide Dvir Hollander of Just Jerusalem Tours, sitting in his kitchen at Kibbutz Ramat Rahel, just outside Jerusalem. A fixture leading tours of the Old City for many years, Hollander has spent the last nine months largely at home, picking cherries and teaching tennis.

The Islamist terrorists from Gaza who killed 1,200 people in Israel—and kidnapped 251, including Ofir Engel, Hollander's teenage nephew—were accompanied by rocket attacks that reached far into the country, with some aimed at Jerusalem. Rocket attacks on other parts of Israel have long been common, but because Jerusalem is holy ground for Muslims, too, relatively few missiles are aimed there.

Major airlines don't fly in warzones, so flights were canceled by the thousand and for many weeks. Even now, nine months after the attacks, commercial flights are relatively few and very expensive.

For people like Hollander, who count on a slice of the $6 billion Israeli annual tourism pie to provide for their families, it has been devastating.

And in Jerusalem's Old City, a strange new sound has emerged instead of the usual cacophony: quiet. In place of the typical din of tourists and religious pilgrims, the listener can hear shoes on stone in the middle of the day.

For those who have never visited, the Old City of Jerusalem is a warren of narrow streets so dense that you need an expert guide like Hollander on your first few visits. Going in through one of seven 500-year-old gates by yourself is to become instantly disoriented. For the first time visitor, the signs are few, the maps pinned to the walls are fewer, and the array of trinkets for sale in the million stalls that line the streets is dizzying.

When they're open.

I had met Hollander two years before, and while he'd been lean then, it was clear that he'd lost weight since. He insisted it was just the extra time for exercise, but he exuded both depression and a steel will to keep it at bay.

He'd made a few trips to the Old City since Oct. 7, he said, but not many. For him, it's a place of work more than a place of worship. Hollander misses the income, of course (a half-day tour is a few hundred dollars), but there's more to it. He's one of a relative few Jewish Israelis who meet and work with Muslims every day, becoming something like friends, he said. He has a symbiotic relationship with the Arab merchants who make up so much of the Old City's commerce, and he's greeted warmly as he walks through—handshakes, slaps on the back, grins.

"I miss the people I like. They miss me," Hollander said as he took this reporter for a walk in the shuttered spaces.

But it's Israel, so, of course, it's not that simple.

"October 7th is in the background, you know, but it's not there," he said. "You don't see it, right? You just see the person that you knew for all these years. So, for me, if tomorrow morning the tourists would come back, nothing would change."

Some stalls, stores and restaurants were open, but a quick conversation with anyone selling anything in the Old City reveals a desperate situation–both financially and existentially.

Abu Seir is a chef who owns an eponymous patisserie that serves coffee, tea and baked goods near the New Gate (which is not new).

"I can hear the sheik praying the sermon," from a mosque blocks from my café, Seir said. Normally it would be completely drowned out.

"People are afraid of the Old City," where Jews, Christians and Muslims are all jammed together in the ancient walled city, which measures just one-third of a square mile.

Business is off more than 90 percent, he said. A single table was taken on a recent visit to Seir's cafe. The other 20 seats were empty at what he said is usually a busy time.

Seir was born in the Old City, a rarity. Only 36,000 people live there, divided among Muslims, Jews, Christians of various sects, and Armenians, though the ethnic Armenians are also traditionally Christian by faith.

A ceramics shop passed down over several generations of the Karakashian family has also lost at least 90 percent of its business, taking on debt for the first time to keep the 100-year-old store open. In the back of the store is the workshop where family members and employees work to turn out more pots, furniture, and hand-painted tiles for which there is no market.

Stores, including Omar Shaban's, that sell souvenirs are among the most common lining the covered streets. Artifacts (a term used loosely) for sale include Judaica, Christian symbols and clay oil lamps, supposedly just like our ancestors used to light.

And, of course, T-shirts imprinted with anything you like.

Shaban, who identified himself as a Palestinian Muslim, offered his store as a place of refuge, explaining that his culture's rules of hospitality called for him to offer protection to those within, regardless of ethnicity or creed—even against terrorism.

Standing out front of the empty shop, he drew on a cigarette in the 92-degree heat, complained about the attacks that had cost him so much business, and that, in his view, had accomplished nothing.

Hollander's choice for lunch was kebabs at a hole-in-the-wall shop owned by Muslims who weren't smiling as they turned meat on spits over charcoal. They had perfected their craft long before this eerily quiet meal. The fresh pita, which is not the shop's specialty, was as delicious as the meat. As we ate, no other customers arrived, though one picked up a takeaway order.

After lunch, a quick walk and a quick introduction to Udi Merioz, a painter in the Jewish Quarter who said, "Japan has earthquakes, we have terror." He shrugged, smiled and kept painting, sitting in front of his small gallery.

From there, I was on my own. Hollander gave me "simple" instructions for how to get back to where our tour had started.

"You know," he said, "life is stronger than anything. And you just get along with each other. And that might surprise some people, might upset some people. Hey, not all people feel that way, but that's how I go [to the Old City]."

He smiled a sad smile, shook hands and went on his own way.

Alone in the labyrinth, I made my way to the iconic sites I had originally set out to revisit, the Kotel (Western Wall) and the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, revered as the site of Jesus' crucifixion.

As I approached the Kotel, the sun beat down with an unbearable weight. Still, that couldn't account for the dearth of worshippers at the Wall. Fewer than 100 people filled—or notably didn't fill—the plaza in front of the men's section, so often crowded with worshippers. People staked out their own places at the Kotel—the holiest spot in Judaism—and prayed with unusual personal space.

I tried to eavesdrop, hearing only Hebrew, which is not the way things usually are. Normally, the Wall is a polyglot place as Jews—and others—from around the world come to share their thoughts with God, to kiss an ancient stone and squeeze a paper plea into a crevice.

The one spark on the plaza was a collection of small boys, perhaps 8 years old, wearing silver paper hats made to look like the ornamental crowns placed on the handles of a Torah scroll. Despite the heat, they were dressed in vests, white shirts and undershirts with tzitzit, or ritual fringes, and big smiles. They held books celebrating a religious milestone and the adults around them (all modestly dressed) took pictures.

I took some of my own and made my way back through the shaded alleyways of the Old City, past more shuttered shops toward the Church of the Holy Sepulcher.

The church stands on one of the holiest sites in the Christian faith, and is a place of pilgrimage, regardless of which denomination a person may belong to. The church itself has a high dome and is lined in gorgeous stone, but it's not a big place. Directly under the dome is a small shrine built around the very place where many believe Christ's cross may have stood. Only a few worshippers at a time can fit inside of it.

A priest acts as an usher, and usually is kept very busy with crowd control. In more normal times, thousands of pilgrims line up on any given day to bear witness to the spot, the line sometimes stretching for hours. Nine months of war have left the priest stolidly waiting for visitors at the small stone building-within-a-building's door.

Usually, the variety of languages in the revered place is a true Babel, but on this day only a bit of Italian could be heard, with maybe a hint of Spanish in one corner.

I caught a sliver of English as I exited the building and found a man with a guide badge dangling from his neck. He confirmed Hollander's experience, saying the two people he was awaiting were the first he'd led around for more than six months. Unlike Hollander, he said—with some contempt—that he rarely dealt with the Muslim merchants—or other Muslims—in his endless circling of the city.

It's a kind of purity that's hard to admire.

But even as the Old City stands empty, new tourist destinations have appeared in the south of Israel, where all there is to see is raw sadness and horror. People—so far mostly in small groups—are making a modern pilgrimage to kibbutzim near Gaza, and to Re'im, the Tribe of Nova festival site. They come as an act of remembrance of the people who were murdered, tortured, raped or taken to Gaza on Oct. 7—or, in a more cynical assessment, to gawk at the evidence of evil.

Shachar Gal of Hands on Israel will take you to see the aftermath of the horror, but he's not in any way eager to go. Visiting these sites makes it Oct. 7 all over again, he said.

"I wouldn't have come, because of the trauma," Gal said on the road south from Tel Aviv. "This was a minute ago."

Still, he is a knowledgeable and faithful guide, showing a small group the "sites," which included the Kissufim military base that was overrun by murderers and the overlook of an Israeli Navy base. There was also a stop in the town of Sderot, where an Israeli tank eventually blew up a police station that had been occupied by terrorists.

At the Nova site, Israeli soldiers in their late teens and early twenties climbed down from buses to walk among the memorials to individuals–many their age– killed or captured, grim looks on their faces, guns slung over their shoulders.

Most surprising to me, there was a regular tourist bus, too. Sweaty, middle-aged American men and women walked behind a guide who was explaining the inexplicable. She painted a picture so terrible that it sounded like she must have witnessed the brutality for herself.

Listening just a few seconds more, I realized that she had. She had lived through it all. She had survived and now dealt with her trauma by sharing her experience with others.

My hope is that these new sites won't permanently take the place of Jerusalem's Old City, and that tourists will pulse through its stone heart again soon.

Jason Fields is a deputy opinion editor at Newsweek.

The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.