Repairing Ripped Seams

With neither artifacts nor exhibits, Jerusalem's Museum On The Seam is a museum in the old sense of the word: a place in which to "muse" or think. Before entering the museum, one is struck by its choice of location. A gracious four-storey Jerusalem landmark known as the Tourjeman House, the building was home to wealthy Christian Arabs before serving as a meeting-place in 1949 for the Israel-Jordan Armistice Committee after Israel's War of Independence. Renewed hostilities in 1967 brought it under attack once more, and heavy shelling damaged its ornate facade.

When the guns fell silent, the House was in the middle of reunited Jerusalem and the old Israel-Jordan border became optimistically known as the 'seam' between the two halves of the city. Early in the 1980s, the House was renovated and became a traditional museum, displaying photos and exhibits of life in Jerusalem during the 19 years when the city was divided.

"It was the Oslo meetings in the early 1990s and the beginning of the peace process that triggered the idea of turning this place into an educational center, focusing on peace, coexistence and tolerance," says the museum's educational guide Daniel Luria. "One of its major supporters, in fact, is a non-Jewish German family."

The first site along the museum's meticulously planned route is the scarred bullet-pocked exterior of the building - silent testimony to violent conflict. Inside the doors, excerpts from Israel's Declaration of Independence affirm the country's commitment to equality and justice. The exhibition is then livened up by the first of the museum's multi-media stations, a three-screen presentation of multi-cultural Jerusalem. It is a study in contrasts: faiths and foods, secular and religious cultures, building and destruction, suspicion and coexistence.

The museum moves on through a conceptual representation of the wall that divided Jerusalem for 19 years. "Halt! Border Ahead!!" signs mingle with human curiosity about who lives on the other side of the wall. Nearby, a screen flashes images of recent violence in Israel, from bomb blasts to street clashes, in a section entitled, It Ain't Me! "We all deny responsibility for violence in our society," says Luria. "But each one of us can help avert it."

After an unsettling confrontation with violence in societies elsewhere in the world, we are urged to look for Connections. Solutions to age-old conflicts being tested in Belfast, Sarajevo, Berlin and Johannesburg are shown next to a giant black-and-white mural. "This child is neither Muslim, Christian nor Jew," says a nurse holding up a newborn infant. "He's just a baby."

The final stop is the museum's Hall of Tolerance. It is reached along a corridor whose walls bear the universalist thoughts of twentieth century icons such as Mahatma Ghandi and John F. Kennedy. You can listen to the recorded views of dozens of people - left- and right-wing, secular and religious, men and women - interspersed with kindergarten scenes. "Learning to listen to others must begin right here, in the sandpit," says Luria.

The museum's educational route ends on its roof. Here you can view the reality of the mosaic that is Jerusalem: an ultra-Orthodox area and an Arab one, villas and tenement housing. But there are also hospitals, hotels, malls, parks and concert halls, community centers and a university, all of which are slowly healing the tear in the city's seam.

"No one is saying we should all be the same," says Luria. "People aren't the same. They're different. They want and believe different things. What we have to realise is that it's OK to be different, and that we can live together without feeling threatened, without cowering behind walls of reinforced concrete."