Museum "Old Yishuv Courtyard" - private collection that holds the memory of the life of the Jews of Jerusalem in the era of the Ottoman Empire and later. It is a museum of the old way of life - in these times strange, partly incomprehensible, sometimes even repulsive, but very interesting.

Yishuv referred to the entire Jewish population of the Land of Israel, that is, in what is now Israel before the formation of the state on it. Strictly speaking, it is necessary to distinguish between the old Yishuv - Ashkenazi religious community, formed in Jerusalem in the XIX century - and the new Yishuv, which was formed after 1882, when stretched to Palestine from Europe Jewish immigrants secular views. Over time, this opposition erased, under the old Yishuv became aware of all the Jews who lived in Palestine before 1948.

The museum is located in a historic building on a narrow, more like a corridor, street Ohr Chaim. House of more than five hundred years. According to legend there in 1534 I was born the famous Kabbalist scholar and Rabbi Isaac Luria. In Hebrew it is usually called in abbreviated Ari, so the museum building is also often referred to as the home of Ari.

Weingarten family owns the house - the owners themselves lived here in one of the rooms until 1948, when the Jewish Quarter fell during its siege Jordanian troops. Residents were captured. After the Six Day War in 1976 Weingarten back here and created the historical and ethnographic museum.

A collection of his amazing to Jerusalem, where each stone remembers Goals: is furniture, utensils, tools that bypass ordinary family "only" a hundred - a hundred and fifty years ago. Life Ashkenazi held in extreme poverty, it has been devoted to the study of Torah. The family usually huddled in a single room. The museum recreates the interior of the premises: miserable "stoves" from kerosene cans, tin washbasin, copper utensils. A luxury item - an iron bed: a asked the neighbors to the time that a woman could give birth to her. Nearby in a small room - a secret synagogue: the Ottoman Empire forbade Jews to build temples.

Rooms are located in close courtyard, which was boiling everyday life: here prepared and washed, near the children play. WC in the yard - the only one in the whole house, not far - a bunker where collected rainwater. Unsanitary conditions prevailed, the infant mortality rate was high.

In XX century the standard of living has risen slightly: in the museum have a sewing machine, a device for wringing laundry, unusual hand grinder with a heavy wheel, the flywheel. Under the ceiling is already hanging electric light: with the arrival of the British in Palestine, here entered the blessings of civilization - electricity, water.

Ari House allows you to experience the atmosphere in which Jewish settlers live, to assess the hardships they faced. And one more event famous buildings: in 1948 on the threshold of his house owner, the chief rabbi of the Jewish Quarter Mordechai Weingarten leaving Palestine, the British gave the key to the Zion Gate. For the first time since the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans key to the city back to the Jews.