Moroccan Quarter - Demolition

Demolition

Three days after Israel seized the Old City during the Six Day War, on the evening of June 10, 650 inhabitants of the Moroccan Quarter were told to vacate their homes on a few hours notice. Workers under the guard of soldiers then proceeded to demolish the quarter, consisting of 135 houses, the al-Buraq mosque, the Bou Medyan zaouia and other sites, with the exception of a mosque and a zaouia which were demolished two years later. Also destroyed was the Sheikh Eid Mosque, which was one of the few mosques remaining from the time of Saladin. Some of the residents refused to leave until their houses began to fall down, and an elderly woman died soon after she was discovered in the rubble.

The demolition was set into motion by Mayor of Jerusalem Teddy Kollek, who also wrote about it in his 1978 autobiography. In a letter to the United Nations, the Israeli government stated that the reason for the demolition was that the Jordanian government had converted the neighborhood into a slum area. The speed at which the quarter was demolished has been explained with the huge crowd of Jewish worshippers expected, who would be able to pray at the wall for the first time in 19 years.

Almost a year later, on April 18, 1968, the Israeli Ministry of the Treasury officially expropriated the land of the quarter for public use, along with the Jewish Quarter, and offered 200 Jordanian dinars to each family which had been displaced.

After the destruction, the section of the Wall dedicated to prayers was extended southwards to double its original length from 28 to 60 meters, while the original facing open area of some four meters grew to 40 meters: the small 120 square meter area in front of the wall became the vast Western Wall Plaza, covering 20,000 square meters over the ruins of the Moghrabi Quarter. The site of the Moroccan Quarter is now a large open plaza leading up to Western Wall, in use as an open-air synagogue.

In the post-1967 period, many of the neighborhood residents returned to Morocco with the assistance of King Hassan II, after the destruction of the quarter. Other families from the neighborhood fled to Shuafat refugee camp and elsewhere in Jerusalem.