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Jewish World Review
Jan. 16, 2007
/ 26 Teves, 5767
Shtetl residents get views off their chests by putting them on the wall
By
Michael Matza
JewishWorldReview.com | (MCT)
 ERUSALEM —
Maher Sbeih, 39, threads his super-sized tricycle through the teeming streets of Mea Shearim, Jerusalem's fervently-Orthodox Jewish neighborhood, with practiced care. A battered trike's basket holds hundreds of folded, freshly printed posters, soon to be affixed to the area's stone walls with swipes of Sbeih's long-handled, flour-paste-soaked brush.
Working quickly, sometimes 10 hours a day, he slathers the neighborhood with news, views and updates — death notices, advertisements, religious rulings by local rabbis, and "pashkvils," the generally anonymous broadsides that stir debate in this inner-city village where people reject television as a corrupting influence.
Part town crier, part gossip monger, Sbeih is Mea Shearim's answer to major media, slapping layer upon layer of fresh writing on the walls, where inch-thick peelings provide a cross-section of urban archeology in this last example of the Jewish "shtetls" that existed before the Holocaust in Eastern Europe.
Sbeih, a Palestinian who lives on the outskirts of Jerusalem, works for Yisroel Kletzkin, a local printer who makes a tidy living from traditional printing jobs and from papering the town with pashkvils.
Printing and distribution of 300 20-by-28-inch posters runs about $120. Advertising customers tend to pay in person, Kletzkin said. But every so often the layout for a "pashkvil arrives anonymously in an envelope with a cash payment, delivered by a taxi driver to shield the customer's identity.
Kletzkin said he will print almost any tittletattle except an attack on a private citizen — unless it's signed by a rabbi. Public figures and institutions are fair game, he said, and business is booming.
"The joke," said Ephraim Schwartz, 36, a visitor to Mea Shearim, "is that the walls of this old neighborhood are held together by these posters," whose Yiddish name derives from the French "pasquinade," meaning satire or lampoon.
They hold the community together, but they divide it too.
A woman whose husband won't grant her a divorce may, with the approval of her rabbi, launch a venomous campaign against the man. He, in turn, may go to a competing printer to plaster over her pashkvil with his riposte. A politician on the outs with the community for a particular decision may stir particular ire. Any person or institution viewed as immodest or less than Torah-true can come in for a special roasting.
A recent pashkvil lambasted Magen David Adom, the Israeli ambulance service, for driving the bodies of victims of suicide bombings to the central morgue for autopsies. An autopsy, to an Orthodox Jew, is a desecration of the dead.
But the controversy has done nothing to slow Sbeih and his paste-laden brush in their daily rounds. The pashkvil business — inflaming, informing, outraging — still booms.
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© 2007, Philadelphia Inquirer Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Information Services
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