Mordechai Weingarten

Mordechai Weingarten (Hebrew: מרדכי ויינגרטן; 1896–1964) was a Jewish community leader in Jerusalem during the British Mandate. Mordechai Weingarten was born in the Old City of Jerusalem. His family had moved to the Old City in 1813 and lived in the courtyard of the Ohr ha-Chaim Synagogue, on the way to the Armenian Quarter, for five generations. In 1912, he married Esther Toibe Rosenthal (1898-1973), who had also been born in Jerusalem to a family which was long-established in the city. Her family had moved to Jerusalem from Lithuania in 1740 and were the first Ashkenazi Jews to settle in the Jewish Quarter. They had five daughters. Weingarten was the mukhtar of the Jewish Quarter from 1935 to 1948. In this role, he was responsible for the distribution of funding from the Jewish Agency, which by 1948 amounted to £5,000 per month. He maintained an office in the New City and worked closely with the Agency and the Haganah. He provided written assurances to the British authorities that the Haganah commander in the Old City, Abraham Halperin, was a male nurse thus allowing him to take up his post in the Jewish Quarter. On several occasions the eldest of Weingarten's five daughters, Yehudit, was used to smuggle weapons into the Quarter some of which were stored in the family home. As the situation deteriorated at the end of 1947, Weingarten advocated co-operation with the British authorities and opposed the Haganah's presence in the Old City. His relationship with the Jewish Agency broke down in February 1948, when the Haganah took charge of food distribution in the Jewish Quarter. Some weeks later Weingarten was apparently involved in the arrest by the British of Abraham Halperin, who was returned to the New City. On May 13, 1948, as the British Army left...