What do you think?
Rate this book
For Jerusalem: A life
for jerusalem the life of teddy kollek. a true lovely biography and all the sacrifices made by the man.
269 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1978
1 person is currently reading
12 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
April 21, 2013
Very interesting combination of the history of the State of Israel & Jerusalem. It was published in 1978 so it is a little funny to read about what he expected to happen in the future.
January 16, 2025
According to Goodreads, only 11 people want to read this book, and only one person is currently reading it at the time of this writing, and that one person didn’t include me. So, admittedly this isn’t going to be something you’ll rush out and grab in that heart-palpitating way you do when a new book comes to your attention that you just have to read. That’s ok. My reasons for reading this are mostly silly, but they matter to me. I was fresh off my two-year mission for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints in October 1979. I had gone home from BYU one weekend, and my parents and I watched news reports that depicted Spencer W. Kimball, president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints at the time, walking arm-in-arm with Jerusalem Mayor Teddy Kollek. This felt like some kind of pre-millennial moment of high importance to the 21-year-old me, and I never forgot my mother’s audio description of the images of President Kimball and Mayor Kollek companionably walking through what is today the Orson Hyde Memorial Garden. Who was this guy, Kollek, I wondered at the time, and did Mayor Kollek and President Kimball indeed develop a rapport? Or was it just an act for the cameras?
When the National Library Service for the Blind and Print Disabled, a division of the Library of Congress, released this book for download in the spring of 2016, I eagerly downloaded it, sure I’d get to it in mere days. Those mere days turned into eight years and eight months, but finally, this book gets the attention it deserves.
First, the writing style is excellent. This feels like an informal memoir told by Kollek and his son. Admittedly, it’s dated, and when I learned that Kollek copyrighted it before he and President Kimball even met, I wondered whether I should read it at all. I gave the first three chapters a bit of a trial run, and I stayed with it largely because it’s an easy and fascinating read.
Kollek served as mayor of Jerusalem for 26 years, and he died in 2007. The early chapters focus on his early years in Hungry and Austria. He was a terrible student, and his father apparently slapped him around in frustration over his awful grades. But Kollek had caught the Zionist bug, and it bit hard. He became a socialist like most of the Zionists of his day, and he was ardently committed to the cause early on.
He and his wife, Tamar, avoided marriage for as long as they could. Being good socialists, they bought the idea that marriage was a despicable, outdated institution. Eventually, they married, and the books early chapters detail Kollek’s association with British officials who oversaw Palestine in those days. He writes of his easy and open association with gentiles, insisting that he didn’t have the suspicions and fears many of his colleagues had when dealing with them.
That lack of suspicion and fear would prove useful when he essentially becomes a fundraiser for the new independent state of Israel. I was at once appalled and fascinated to read about the illusive steps Kollek and his associates took to get arms past FBI blockades. They finagled an aircraft carrier at one point, but the Americans basically said, “You’re not moving that out of Baltimore,” and they didn’t. They had to sell it for scrap and get their money back.
There are additional chapters on Kollek’s close association with Israel’s first Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion. His descriptions of Ben-Gurion were more than a little intriguing. The guy seemed like a misanthropic, abrasive person, but he apparently knew how to lead.
There are several chapters that look at the unification of Jerusalem in 1967 and the housing issues that accompany the creation of settlements. He shows you how thorny is the issue of the ownership of Jerusalem. This left me wondering whether Israel might someday find peace with most of its neighbors while the issue of Jerusalem itself becomes a nasty tug-of-war that even has the potential to go nuclear—who can say.
I mentioned at the top of this review that it was that TV newscast about Kollek and Spencer W. Kimball that gave me the impetus to read this. I had to smile because there’s one tiny, brief reference to carving up small plots of land on the Mount of Olives for use by various Christian denominations who want to put up parks or gardens. I didn’t expect more, since Kollek and his son wrote the book before the TV news program I watched ever aired.
This was a decent biography you’ll likely get through quickly without feeling the need to skip things. I couldn’t help but smile when I learned that the narrator finished his narration of this in November 1978, some 11 months before the news event that made me want to read it. Oh, well, you can’t win’em all.
When the National Library Service for the Blind and Print Disabled, a division of the Library of Congress, released this book for download in the spring of 2016, I eagerly downloaded it, sure I’d get to it in mere days. Those mere days turned into eight years and eight months, but finally, this book gets the attention it deserves.
First, the writing style is excellent. This feels like an informal memoir told by Kollek and his son. Admittedly, it’s dated, and when I learned that Kollek copyrighted it before he and President Kimball even met, I wondered whether I should read it at all. I gave the first three chapters a bit of a trial run, and I stayed with it largely because it’s an easy and fascinating read.
Kollek served as mayor of Jerusalem for 26 years, and he died in 2007. The early chapters focus on his early years in Hungry and Austria. He was a terrible student, and his father apparently slapped him around in frustration over his awful grades. But Kollek had caught the Zionist bug, and it bit hard. He became a socialist like most of the Zionists of his day, and he was ardently committed to the cause early on.
He and his wife, Tamar, avoided marriage for as long as they could. Being good socialists, they bought the idea that marriage was a despicable, outdated institution. Eventually, they married, and the books early chapters detail Kollek’s association with British officials who oversaw Palestine in those days. He writes of his easy and open association with gentiles, insisting that he didn’t have the suspicions and fears many of his colleagues had when dealing with them.
That lack of suspicion and fear would prove useful when he essentially becomes a fundraiser for the new independent state of Israel. I was at once appalled and fascinated to read about the illusive steps Kollek and his associates took to get arms past FBI blockades. They finagled an aircraft carrier at one point, but the Americans basically said, “You’re not moving that out of Baltimore,” and they didn’t. They had to sell it for scrap and get their money back.
There are additional chapters on Kollek’s close association with Israel’s first Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion. His descriptions of Ben-Gurion were more than a little intriguing. The guy seemed like a misanthropic, abrasive person, but he apparently knew how to lead.
There are several chapters that look at the unification of Jerusalem in 1967 and the housing issues that accompany the creation of settlements. He shows you how thorny is the issue of the ownership of Jerusalem. This left me wondering whether Israel might someday find peace with most of its neighbors while the issue of Jerusalem itself becomes a nasty tug-of-war that even has the potential to go nuclear—who can say.
I mentioned at the top of this review that it was that TV newscast about Kollek and Spencer W. Kimball that gave me the impetus to read this. I had to smile because there’s one tiny, brief reference to carving up small plots of land on the Mount of Olives for use by various Christian denominations who want to put up parks or gardens. I didn’t expect more, since Kollek and his son wrote the book before the TV news program I watched ever aired.
This was a decent biography you’ll likely get through quickly without feeling the need to skip things. I couldn’t help but smile when I learned that the narrator finished his narration of this in November 1978, some 11 months before the news event that made me want to read it. Oh, well, you can’t win’em all.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews