Ein Karem

Ein Karem spread across a terraced valley in the hills southwest of Jerusalem, watered by the spring of Ayn Maryam. Tradition holds it to be the birthplace of John the Baptist, and its skyline gathered churches and convents — St. John the Baptist, the Visitation, the Sisters of Zion — beside the village mosque and its minaret. With 3,180 people in 1945, Muslims and Christians together, it was the largest village in the Jerusalem subdistrict, prosperous with olive groves, vineyards, schools, clubs, a pharmacy, an open-air cinema, and a mineral-water bottling plant.

Some of its people fled after the massacre at Deir Yassin, two and a half kilometers away, in April 1948. The village itself was captured during the ‘Ten Days’ between the war’s two truces: Israeli forces stormed the heights above it before dawn on 18 July 1948, and Ein Karem fell by morning. By year’s end, new Jewish immigrant families were moving into its houses, and the village was folded into the municipality of West Jerusalem.

Ein Karem is one of the very few depopulated villages whose fabric came through the war nearly whole. Today its limestone houses, churches, and lanes form the Ein Kerem neighborhood of Jerusalem — an artists’ quarter and pilgrimage site — while its mosque stands neglected and its Muslim cemetery lies overgrown. The settlements of Beit Zayit and Even Sapir were built on its lands in 1949, and the descendants of its displaced people, scattered in 1948, remain barred from returning.

Sources

• Ayn Karim — Palestine Remembered
• Ayn Karim — Interactive Encyclopedia of the Palestine Question (PalQuest)
• Palestine Open Maps