04 January 2006
The body of Teddy Kollek, the former Jerusalem mayor who had died on Tuesday aged 95, lay in state on Thursday in the city he helped to shape. By mid-morning on Thursday, hundreds of admirers had trickled past his casket, which was draped with the Israeli flag and standing on a bier in the courtyard of Jerusalem City Hall. Kollek was to be interred later in the day in Israel's national cemetery on Mount Herzl, beside leaders like David Ben-Gurion, Israel's first prime minister, Theodor Herzl, the founder of modern Zionism, and Nahum Goldmann, former president of the World Jewish Congress. Flags at City Hall were at half-staff, and police were preparing to cordon off streets and taking up position in an unusually heavy presence on the road leading to the cemetery.
When Kollek was elected mayor of Jerusalem in 1965, the city was divided by barbed wire and minefields into two parts, with the western half controlled by Israel and the eastern half by Jordan. With the eruption of the 1967 Middle East war, Israel captured the eastern sector of the city and annexed it. Kollek immediately set about building parks, refurbishing run-down neighborhoods and paving new roads in a city where parts of the street plan date to the Roman Empire. He tried to carve a modern metropolis out of a chaotic jumble of colorful neighborhoods inhabited by Muslims, Jews and Christians. In the mayoral election in 1993, Kollek was defeated by a much younger right-wing candidate, Ehud Olmert, now the prime minister of Israel.
