John Phelps, a Gentile photographer, came to Israel to cover the war through his lens. The highlight, for him, were the photos he documented in the Jewish Quarter at its fall. John finished filming and returned to the United States to continue his work as a photojournalist. Years later, he said: "I came home, took all the film from the war and just put it in a drawer. I didn't want to remember anything of the sights of horror and pain that were there, in the Holy City.".
The 11 days he documented the neighborhood and its fall were the center of his life.
25 years have passed. Teddy Kollek, the mayor of Jerusalem, learned of the never-developed photos in the photographer's archive. He contacted him and convinced him to develop the historic photos, which document the fall of the quarter, the surrender, and the explosion and burning of the synagogues.
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John was convinced, developed the photos - and began a special project: he set out to search for the people in the photos. He then wrote a book that has become extremely rare today: 'The Will to Live.'.
Here we have brought you a wide selection of his photos, including an explanation of what happened and what preceded the photos.
Jordanian Legion soldiers gather all residents of the Jewish Quarter in the area of shelters and the Rothschild compound.
The girl in the photo is Rachel Levy from Atok. She was 7 years old when she set out towards Shaar Zion alone after her family had already moved on. When she met with the photographer years later, she said that she did not remember the photo or the photographer. What she did remember was the terrible crowding at Shaar Zion, at the exit to the new city.
An elderly couple, whom he photographed leaving their shelter with only two small bags, in which he concentrated all their earthly possessions. They did not shed tears or cry. They went to the new city with the knowledge that they would return here.
He sat and waited in the square. All his possessions were concentrated in one bag. For him, the world had stopped. The legionnaires were busy searching for the soldiers and weapons, and he waited for the entire public to gather in the square, until the evacuation of the Old City.
Here, in this square, all the residents who had not been taken prisoner were gathered: women, old people and children, who had to fend for themselves. "The Legion soldiers surrounded us, they didn't let us go back to the houses to get things, and only the nurses from the hospital tried to calm the wounded and the children," one of the refugees said years later about those moments.
""Matilda! Matilda!" That's how I heard my mother screaming to my grandmother, to try to find her amidst all the pressure at Shaar Zion. She shouted to my mother to move forward because she was coming. And I'm a scared child who doesn't see anything where we're going, I only knew that now the shots were fired, the ruin was destroyed, and we were on our way to Katamon, to live there for the time being, my father had gone into captivity. These are excerpts from the memoirs of Pua Stein in her book 'From the Coup' about the fall of the quarter.
""Bring everyone who can stand on their feet." This is what Abdullah, the commander of the Jordanian Legion, shouted after discovering that all the fighters who fiercely defended the Jewish Quarter numbered less than thirty men. "I would have come to you with sticks, if I had known that was all the strength you had," he said as they transferred the prisoners to Jordan.
And this is the courtyard of the shelters, so famous, where the great men of the previous generation grew up and lived, starting with Rabbi Shmuel Salant, Rabbi Chaim Sonnenfeld, the Admor from Shaddiqi, who prayed in the ruins. And the courtyard looked desolate, empty, the Arabs entered the houses and began to loot them, and smoke rose from all sides. The old city fell.
Shaul Tuval, the commander of the BdNA in the district, was photographed being led on his way to the Legion headquarters to sign the surrender document. The Jordanian commander refused to sign with him or conduct negotiations with him, since he was not an official. Tuval, who spoke good Arabic, tried to stall for time, but to no avail.
Meanwhile, Rabbis Hazan and Mintzberg were sitting at the Jordanian headquarters in the Muslim Quarter, after raising a white flag to signal the surrender of the quarter. They arrived at the headquarters to negotiate the evacuation of the dead and wounded, but the Legion commander refused to sign the surrender with them, claiming that they were civilian elements. He wanted to sign only in front of the fighting command force.
This is Rabbi Weingarten, who is also being led to the Legion headquarters in the Muslim Quarter, on his way to submit the surrender to the Arabs and hand over the Jewish Quarter to them. But the Arab commander was waiting for the commander of the fighting Jewish forces to arrive.
In a parade, so that he would have something to be proud of and against which force he was fighting, the commander of the Arab Legion ordered all the prisoners to stand straight. But the picture shows how most of those photographed did not fight at all. They were included in the captivity only to increase the fighting force, for the glory of the Arab. In the end, 300 people were taken prisoner, most of whom were not from the fighting formation, and thus this was the first violation of the surrender agreement. The surrender was finally signed by Moshe Rosenk, then 23 years old, who had been the commander of the forces for a short period, after the previous commanding force had fled and he was left alone. The agreement included the handing over of weapons to the Jordanians, all the fighters would go into captivity, and the residents would leave within one hour of organizing for the new city.
Here in the picture you can see the moments of chaos, in which the residents of the shelters were, while waiting for the rabbis to go and submit the surrender document. "The shooting stopped... We didn't know what was happening to us, the children immediately went outside to play, and the mothers were all afraid that the shooting would start again from a crazy legionnaire. They wouldn't let us go away, but we, who hadn't seen daylight for several weeks, didn't give up and stayed to play, until we received the order to evacuate the neighborhood.".
With greater speed than the Exodus from Egypt, we packed what we could take, mainly clothes, and hurried towards the gathering point in Rothschild Square. Almost all the bags were torn open by legionnaires, who looted the little we tried to take with us, towards the unknown place where we would go tonight.
At Misgav Ladakh Hospital, in almost complete darkness, with only a few dozen wounded, the photographer took the photo, under extreme conditions, without lighting or electricity, in which a nurse, left without painkillers, is seen calming and comforting a wounded man who was bleeding on the floor of the room.
We left the neighborhood. On the right, the refugees can be seen marching from the outside of the neighborhood to the collection point on Mount Zion, as the legionnaires, who had already looted the synagogues hours earlier, began to blow them up for their rare contents, including hundreds of thousands of single-copy books in the Porat Yosef Yeshiva, and the Hurva and Tiferet Yisrael synagogues, which collapsed in on themselves, leaving only dust and letters floating in the air.
In a sort of triumphal procession, the legionnaires stood and began marching through the Jewish Quarter, continuing to wreak havoc and destruction on everything that was still standing.
The Tiferet Yisrael synagogue was blown up, but it still stood. In the days that followed, Arabs from the villages arrived and simply dismantled the synagogue to the ground, taking the stones to build their own homes.
This is the synagogue of Rabbi Yochanan ben Zakkai. Here the sage Bashi was appointed and later the chief priest for their generations. The Arabs looted everything, including the floors.
During the fighting, soldiers and residents of the neighborhood were killed. The youngest of them was a 9-year-old boy, who served as a liaison between the military posts and reported on the location of the lagooners. He served in this position due to his short height and the snipers' eyes did not control him. But when he tried to convey information to the extremist position in the Jewish Quarter, he climbed onto a roof, and a Jordanian sniper killed him. He was buried with everyone else in the mass grave. When the neighborhood was liberated in the Six-Day War, he was taken to his final resting place along with all the dead on the Mount of Olives. During the fighting, 39 fighters, 31 residents of the neighborhood, and 150 were wounded.
In this photo you can see the 'Tiferet Yisrael' synagogue, which is currently undergoing the laying of a cornerstone for its restoration, and which still stands in its glory.
And this is a picture from the days when, next to the Western Wall, there was a long, narrow street of the Arab Mughrabi neighborhood.
The photo was taken in the last days before the fighting, days when the atmosphere was tense, but access to the Western Wall was not completely blocked.
This is a picture of the Mughrabi neighborhood, and the Western Wall adjacent to it, as taken from a rooftop in the Jewish Quarter.
In the photo, you can see legion soldiers and Arab residents drawing water from the large cisterns on the Temple Mount.
And this is the Tower of David. A photo taken from the side of the current entrance to the Tower of David Museum.
And this is a scribe who lived in the Jewish Quarter and wrote Torah scrolls, tefillin, and mezuzot.
The destruction was visible in every corner of the new city as well. No one gave up, and in Malha the damage was great. The city was torn apart.
