Moses Montefiore

'There was an exciting battle for it during the auction, with a bidder in the room competing against a telephone bidder in the final stages.'

CIFWatch

Postcard from Israel: Nachlaot

By Hadar Sela

The picturesque Nachlaot neighbourhood in Jerusalem started out as what we might call today ‘social housing’. From 1875 onwards benefactors such as Moses Montefiore began building new neighbourhoods outside the walls of the Old City to house the growing Jewish population and relieve some of the overcrowding and squalor of the Jewish Quarter. Thus, Nachlaot is in fact a cluster of fused neighbourhoods, with each one originally having a specific ethnic character and its own synagogue.