Nachlaot – The Complete Guide to the Old Lanes and Courtyards at the Heart of Jerusalem

In the heart of Jerusalem, between the city centre and Mahane Yehuda Market, lies a dense web of alleyways that is hard to believe still exists a few minutes' walk from the noise of the modern city. This is Nachlaot – in fact not one neighbourhood but a cluster of some thirty small courtyard neighbourhoods, each built in its day as a self-contained world with its own synagogue, a shared well and a gate that was locked at night.

The Character and History of the Neighbourhood

Jewish settlement outside the walls of the Old City came in several waves, and Nachlaot is the product of the wave that ran from the last quarter of the 19th century to the middle of the 20th. The first neighbourhood in the area, Even Israel, was built in 1875 by members of the Old Yishuv — Jerusalem's long-established Jewish community — who wanted out of the crowding inside the walls. In the decades that followed, more and more courtyard neighbourhoods went up, many of them named "Nachalat" something (Nachalat Achim, Nachalat Zion, Nachalat Tzadok and others) – which is most likely where the name of the whole quarter comes from. Alongside Ashkenazi Jews from Poland and Lithuania, Sephardi and Mizrahi communities settled here – Yemenite, Kurdish and Persian Jews, and Jews from Aleppo in Syria – and every community brought its own synagogue, customs and melodies. The result is an extraordinary concentration of small synagogues, many of them modest rooms inside residential courtyards, scattered across an area only a few streets wide.

After decades of neglect, Nachlaot went through a revival: in 1991 the "Lev Ha'ir" community administration began operating, and by 2000 hundreds of housing units in the neighbourhood had been renovated. At the same time, from the 1990s onwards artists, students and young families began discovering the neighbourhood's appeal – the authenticity, the old Jerusalem architecture and the closeness to the city centre – and it became one of the youngest and most bohemian quarters in Jerusalem, drawing in students from the yeshivas and study halls scattered through it.

What to See and Do

The best way to get to know Nachlaot is simply to wander the lanes with no fixed destination and step into whichever courtyards are open. Among the better-known sites in the neighbourhood are the great Ades Synagogue, founded in 1901 by the community of Jews from Aleppo and famous to this day for its prayers and for its Bakashot – devotional songs in the traditional Middle Eastern style – and the Ohel Moshe neighbourhood and its synagogue, which for many years served as the main Sephardi synagogue outside the walls. Streets such as Shilo and Bezalel, and Agrippas Street, which forms the neighbourhood's southern edge, preserve the low scale and the characteristic Jerusalem architecture – stone houses with arched windows, balconies and tiled roofs.

Food and Cafés

Nachlaot is full of small, intimate cafés, many of them local or community-run, alongside modest bakeries and eating places that serve residents and visitors alike. The neighbourhood feels like a village inside a city, and its food scene blends naturally into its closeness to Mahane Yehuda Market next door – one of Jerusalem's main hubs for eating and going out, which you can simply walk to straight out of the lanes.

Getting There

Nachlaot sits in the centre of the new city, between Mahane Yehuda Market and Jaffa Street, a short walk from downtown and a reasonable walk from the Old City as well. Thanks to that central position, the neighbourhood is easy to reach from anywhere in Jerusalem, whether you arrive on foot from the city centre or from the direction of Mahane Yehuda Market.

Planning a visit to Nachlaot or to the market next door? Take a look at livejlm.com for current updates on events, shows and activities in Jerusalem, so you can combine the neighbourhood with whatever is happening in the city on those days.