An Ultra-Orthodox Mayor in an Unorthodox City

JERUSALEM - URI LUPOLIANSKI is the first to admit he runs an unusual city a place considered holy by Muslims, Christians and Jews, who talk about tolerance more than they practice it, at least here.

Jerusalem has all the problems of big cities, with crime, unemployment, garbage. But it has also been the prime location for suicide bombings and other attacks on civilians in Israel: 90 since October 2000, including 34 suicide bombings that have killed 183 people and wounded 1,454.

Then there are the less existential indignities: fistfights among Christian clergy members over sacred turf; ultra-Orthodox Jews spitting on the cross carried by the Armenian archbishop; the demolition of Palestinian houses for zoning irregularities, which Mr. Lupolianski happens to support. And Jerusalem is surrounding itself -- and in some places dividing itself -- with a wall, a concrete security barrier cut by checkpoints that is, in many places, 33 feet high.

But Mr. Lupolianski, 54, is almost as unusual as his city, and he represents a growing power here.

He is Jerusalem's first ultra-Orthodox mayor, a rabbi who has been accused of favoring Jewish interests over Muslim ones, and of favoring other religious Jews over more secular Jews, an unknown but noticeable number of whom are leaving Jerusalem for less religiously heated places like Tel Aviv and Haifa.

Born in Haifa, Mr. Lupolianski is an ultra-Orthodox Jew, known in Israel as haredi, named for a fear, awe or dread of God. He will not shake hands with women, for example, so his aides carefully, politely and even gracefully insert themselves to spare female visitors any embarrassment.

He has 12 children and 15 grandchildren, so far, he said, a not so unusual number among the haredim. Indeed, the haredim make up an increasingly large part of the city's population -- about a third of it, roughly the same as the number of Muslims -- and represent about half the Jewish population. The number of Christians in Jerusalem is tiny, fewer than 3,000, while fewer than 9,000 residents have no stated religion.

Mr. Lupolianski was elected to a five-year term in June 2003. In his campaign, he promised fair treatment to everyone.

"If we take the wrong steps here, we can cause a world conflagration, God forbid," he said in an interview in his office overlooking the milky-tea-colored stones of the Old City. "So people have to behave carefully," he said, here in what he calls "a great human mosaic."

Speaking in Hebrew, he said: "We have to take care of three religions and their interests. But Jerusalem is not just the capital of the people and state of Israel. It's the heart and soul of the Jewish people."

MR. LUPOLIANSKI was recently and widely criticized for trying to stop a gay rights parade in Jerusalem, a parade deplored by the leading religious figures of all faiths here. A court ordered that the parade be allowed to take place, and a young haredi man broke it up by stabbing three participants.

Still, Mr. Lupolianski is best known in Israel not as a politician, but as the founder of Yad Sarah, a charity that supplies medical equipment to those in need, and runs low-cost dental clinics and centers for disabled children.

The big battles in Jerusalem -- over housing, zoning, equal education and land sales -- are small versions of the national struggle between Israelis and Palestinians. Given their nature, some of the disputes are beyond Mr. Lupolianski's purview. The health services and the police, for instance, are run nationally, not municipally.

Uniquely in Israel, Jerusalem, not the state, administers its own educational system, although the state pays the bills. But there are controversies here, too, with suspicions that the mayor is helping religious education more than secular schooling.

One secular school, for example, Yad Beyad, has about 250 students, half of them Jews and half Arabs, who learn in Hebrew and Arabic. But Mr. Lupolianski's administration recently canceled the school's license to educate children beyond the sixth grade, leaving this year's sixth graders without a school for next year. The administration, says, though, that it treated Yad Beyad the same as any school.

THERE are larger issues, too, like the relatively poor garbage pickup in East Jerusalem, home to many of the city's Arabs, and Mr. Lupolianski's zoning and municipal plans office, which appears to be trying to restrict Palestinians in East Jerusalem from building housing, perhaps to limit the number of Palestinians in the municipal boundaries.

Recently, in the Silwan and Issiwiya neighborhoods, there have been cases of forced demolition of homes, sometimes of Palestinian homes built a decade or more ago, because the city authorities said that proper zoning and planning permission had not been granted.

Palestinians like Hind Khoury, the Palestinian minister for Jerusalem affairs, consider the city to be carrying out national policy and trying to plant as many Jews in East Jerusalem as possible while limiting the number of Palestinians there.

Mr. Lupolianski rejects such criticism. "It's not true we're trying to keep Arabs down," he said. "It is true that Arabs from Jenin and Hebron, who are not citizens or residents of Israel, cannot just come and move into Jerusalem as if they were from Tel Aviv."

About Silwan, he said that the issue was houses built on land classified as parkland, and that he would pull down Jewish houses, too, if they were built there. "Would New York allow people to build houses in Central Park?" he asked.

He stopped, then said, "Most of the Arabs here want to be part of Jerusalem and remain here. When I ask them if they would prefer to live under the Palestinian Authority, they say they want to stay here."

As for the separation barrier, Mr. Lupolianski considers it a blessing for helping to stop terrorism. "I call it 'the gate of life,"' he said. "The wall you can later remove, but a life you never replace."

But he also argues for more sensitivity to the Arab population. "I think the government must act, even if it costs more, to give humane living conditions to everyone, no matter which side of the fence they may be on."

Jerusalem, which can feel small and even suburban outside the walls and sites of the Old City, is in fact sprawling, especially since Israel annexed East Jerusalem after seizing it from Jordanian control in the 1967 war. Few countries recognize that annexation, which is why nearly all have their embassies in Tel Aviv.

With an official population of 706,300 people, Jerusalem is Israel's most populous city, with more than 10 percent of the country's inhabitants. It has grown quickly with the state; it had only 84,000 residents in 1948. In East Jerusalem alone there are now about 400,000 people, half of them Jews and their descendants who moved there after 1967, and who are considered illegal settlers by the Palestinians and much of the world.

Perhaps the city's largest quandary is the sizable number of people who are not working. Its large population of ultra-Orthodox Jews includes many who study for a living and do not enter the work force; its many Palestinians from East Jerusalem have endemic problems of joblessness, made worse by security limitations on travel. And each of these communities has a high birthrate.

About two-thirds of the people pay the minimal level of tax, and there is little industry beyond tourism, which is recovering only now after the last four years of intifada.

Mr. Lupolianski rejects the notion that he favors religious Jews, and he said a great virtue of the haredi population was that its families were strong and that they were "very little involved in crime or drugs."

Sometimes he is surprised by his situation. "It's hard to believe that I have to sit, as a religious Jew, with the representatives of the Greek Orthodox Church and the Armenians to try to make peace between them," he said. "But I'm their mayor, and they need to be able to come here and talk to me about their problems."

As a city, he said, "we want to help everyone to preserve their traditions in freedom, so that everyone can dance their dance -- so long as they don't step on other people's feet."