Hadassah Medical Center

I'm also working with the these three churches and also working with the Israeli Defense Force.

But I have been there at the Eretz Crossing, E-R-E-Z, which is the northern border, and I have seen dozens, yea, hundreds of Palestinian men, women, and children leaving Gaza in order to go to Tel Aviv Medical Center, Hadassah Hospital, for medical care.

And the medical care was free for the Palestinians.

And so this whole idea of a genocide, and Dom, you're exactly right.

Hebrew University had been there since 1925.

Hadassah Medical Center since 1939.

Both had to relocate.

Both were inaccessible for years.

He wants particular attention paid to the Mount Scopus convoys.

The Hebrew University and Hadassah Hospital sat up on that hill inside an Israeli enclave surrounded by Jordanian territory, and roughly every two weeks a convoy went out from West Jerusalem through the gate to supply the place and rotate the people guarding it.

So? How was a convoy organized? Who traveled in it? What could it carry? How were the vehicles and the cargo inspected? What route did it take through Jordanian controlled land? And what happened when it arrived? And then the human layer.

is asking for contemporary accounts from people who actually made these journeys descriptions of inspections disputes delays the peculiar experience of traveling from one part of your own city to another part of your own city through hostile territory under international supervision And the broader question underneath all of it, the strange everyday life of the place.

Mount Scopus.

826 meters up.

The original Hebrew University campus and Hadassah Hospital, which opened in 1939, designed by Eric Mendelsohn.

After 1948, those become an internationally protected Israeli exclave inside Jordanian-controlled territory.

We are in area C. It's 100 meters difference.

And who owns that villa? It's an Arab doctor who's a gynecologist in Hadassah Hospital.

And he bought this because the European Union enables you to buy lots for very cheap.

And he built this house as his vacation house.

tiles hanging on the wall, bearing brilliantly colorful dreamscapes.

Years later, I would learn that these were the work of Marc Chagall, based on the stained glass windows he made for the Hadassah Hospital in Jerusalem, representing the twelve tribes of Israel.

and that they were a common sight on the walls of Jewish homes from the 1960s onward.

I didn't know any of this, but I loved looking at them, and I'm certain I had a more transcendent experience staring into the mind of Mark Chagall than I would have had concentrating on the prayers.

You know, I'm always reminded of a conversation that I had with Shlomo Mor-Yosef.

You remember he was the general manager of Hadassah Hospital.

And he lost his brother in the Yom Kippur War, and he told me that a year later he was applying for medical school in Beer Sheva.

And I asked him, "How badly do you want it?" And he said, he answered them, "I know that I should say I want it badly, but after you lose a brother-"