Saints' Sanctuaries In Israeli Development Towns: On A Mechanism Of Urban Transformation

Abstract

Since the 1970s new sacred sites for Jewish saints have been established in a number of Israeli development towns. In this paper this phenomenon is interpreted as a mechanism by which some of the social and cultural qualities of those urban settlements are being transformed. Development towns, which were planted in the periphery of the country by the central organs of the young Israeli state during the 1950s, turned into residual communities, i.e., into localities populated by people heavily dependent on government aid and subject to external manipulation. From the 1960s, however, these towns have been the site of growing local political activism and an emerging sense of local identity. It is proposed that the interplay of these opposing sets of factors has formed the preconditions for the establishment of holy sites in development towns. The establishment of one sacred site in Northern Israel is depicted in detail in order to illustrate the mechanisms underlying the machinery of sanctifications.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 34 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.