Court blocks state funding for organization seeking to Judaize East Jerusalem’s Silwan

Nir Hasson reports in Haaretz on 19 October 2026:

A Jerusalem court last week blocked the transfer of millions of shekels from the Heritage Ministry to a right-wing organization to establish a Jewish heritage center in Silwan, East Jerusalem, dealing a setback to efforts to Judaize the Palestinian neighborhood.  The Jerusalem District Court canceled the transfer of funds to the right-wing organization Ateret Cohanim.

The heritage center was planned for the Batan al-Hawa neighborhood of Silwan, a focal point of Ateret Cohanim’s efforts to establish a Jewish presence in East Jerusalem. The organization bases its claims to the area on the fact that a small community of Yemenite Jews lived there about a century ago.

About 25 years ago, Ateret Cohanim gained control of the historic endowment that had acquired the land for the Yemenite community by having members of the organization appointed as its trustees. Since then, it has worked to evict hundreds of Palestinian residents from the neighborhood.

Judge David Ziller accepted the petitioners’ argument that Ateret Cohanim’s goal of Judaizing East Jerusalem conflicts with the purpose of the endowment that owns the property, which is intended to help the needy. Ziller canceled the tender for the project and ordered Ateret Cohanim to pay the petitioners 25,000 shekels (about $8,000) in legal costs.

About a decade ago, the organization succeeded in evicting five Palestinian families from a building that had served as the Yemenite community’s synagogue, the only surviving structure from the Jewish neighborhood. Ateret Cohanim and the government subsequently announced plans to establish a heritage center in the building, and the Heritage Ministry approved about three million shekels for its renovation.

Ir Amim, an Israeli NGO focused on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and Silwan residents petitioned the District Court, arguing that the transfer of public funds was unlawful. The petition, filed by attorneys Yuval Adler, Luna Halloun and Carmel Pomerantz, argued that the project violated the terms of the Benvenisti endowment, a late 19th-century Jewish religious endowment in East Jerusalem, and raised a conflict of interest.  In his ruling, Ziller wrote that “the possible influence of Ateret Cohanim’s interest on the endowment’s decisions regarding the use of the synagogue building and its rental specifically to Midreshet Yerushalayim,” a subsidiary of Ateret Cohanim, “is not merely a theoretical concern.”

Ir Amim described the ruling as a victory in the struggle against the eviction of Palestinian residents from the neighborhood.

“The court ruled that this is not a theoretical concern of conflict of interest, and that it cannot be dismissed that the connections of the endowment’s trustees to the settler organization shaped the plan for establishing the visitors’ center,” the organization said in a statement.

“For years, Ateret Cohanim has used the endowment to evict Palestinian families from their homes in the neighborhood, while simultaneously attempting to turn an evacuated property into a tourism venture connected to the organization. The ruling halts this plan and clarifies that the endowment’s assets cannot be managed according to Ateret Cohanim’s interests.”

The project has now been halted for the second time. In 2020, it was frozen following a separate legal proceeding initiated by Ir Amim, after the Justice Ministry determined that establishing the center conflicted with the endowment’s purpose.

In 2022, then-Justice Minister Gideon Sa’ar and then-Jerusalem Affairs Minister Ze’ev Elkin announced that they had reached an agreement with the endowment registrar under which the center would be operated by an outside organization rather than by the endowment itself. When it emerged that the designated operator was a subsidiary of Ateret Cohanim, Ir Amim and neighborhood residents filed the latest petition.

This article is reproduced in its entirety