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Jerusalem remains, of course, a city of wildly diverse communities. There are not just Jewish Jerusalem and Arab Jerusalem but official Jerusalem of the Knesset and the monolithic government ministries, commercial Jerusalem of the Bank Leumi le-Israel, and intellectual Jerusalem of the 15,000-student Hebrew University and the renowned Israel Philharmonic Orchestra. The city's Jews come from some 70 nations (70% of them from Muslim lands), and every nationality has its own neighborhood. The wealthy Reha-via section, where all Prime Ministers live, was settled largely by early refugees from Nazism, and German can still be heard there. In the Nahlaot district, one little synagogue is for Kurdish Jews from Iran, and another little synagogue standing right next to it is for Kurdish Jews from Iraq. In the ultra-Orthodox Mea Shearim Quarter, one of the first to be built by settlers emerging from the walled city in 1860, the streets have to be shut down with police barricades every Sabbath. Otherwise, passing drivers may be stoned by teen-agers wearing long side-curls, who view such traffic as a violation of religious laws. Many women here ritually shave their heads and wear wigs, and posters proclaim that Israel can have no ruler but the Messiah.
Christian communities are no less diverse. The White Russians congregate in the bulb-domed convent church of St. Mary Magdalene, near the Garden of Gethsemane, but there is also a Soviet-run order of Russian Orthodox monks, which is reputed to include the KGB agent for Jerusalem. The entire southwest corner of the Old City belongs to the black-frocked Armenian clerics, who live behind high stone walls and lock all their doors to the world at 10 p.m.
To preside over such a conglomeration requires lots of money, and like most mayors, Kollek does not have enough.
Indeed, Jerusalem's finances would make a less visionary mayor start cutting back. Local taxes, the highest in the country, raise only one- third of the municipal budget of $150 million; the rest has to be wheedled out of the national government. But Kollek is a master fund raiser in Europe and America (his Jerusalem Foundation has dispensed $50 million), and he has been known to scoff at a half-million-dollar check as "not enough."
Kollek's efforts also require constant negotiation. Before 1967, many houses in the Old City had no sewers or running water, for example, but to install new plumbing means rooting around amid buried archaeological treasures. Every official innovation tends to be regarded with dire suspicion not only by Arabs but by ultra-Orthodox Jews.
"Look at those TV antennas!" cries one of Kollek's aides, standing near the top of the Damascus Gate, next to a sign that points out the slots for boiling oil to be poured on attacking knights. She gestures across the medieval rooftops, where aerials grow like greenbrier. Kollek is trying to persuade the inhabitants to take down their antennas and hook up to a central aerial. But this would cost about $200 a set, and tax money cannot be used for such a purpose. Special funds have to be raised. "The Arabs are still