SWEDISH IN JERUSALEM

Many a modern time traveller to Jerusalem has wondered about the pair of hightopped boots and the large oil skin fishing net hanging on the wall of the beautiful American Colony Hotel. The tourists become even more curious when they discover a display of old Swedish carving tools in the magnificent lobby through which everybody from Ingrid Bergman to John Le Carre have passed through. Positive proof that Swedes have really been here can be found in the gift shop where brown-tinted postcards from Old Jerusalem depict farmers in Swedish garb toiling in the Palestinian sun. Who were these Swedes and what were they doing in Jerusalem?

It all began with the deeply religious lawyer Horatio Spafford and his Norwegianborn wife Anna who started to help homeless people in Chicago after the Great Fire in 1871. When their four daughters drowned in a mid-Atlantic ship collision, Anna and Horatio decided to move to Jerusalem to seek solace for their souls. When their plans became known others asked to join
the pilgrimage and the group founded the first American Colony in the holy land.

Their reputation spread all around the world and when Anna had a speaking engagement in Chicago a group of South Side Swedes returned with her to Jerusalem to help. In 1896 38 farmers in Nås in Sweden sold their farms for a pittance and travelled to Jerusalem with their fishing boots, oilskin hats, rakes, wooden shovels and farming equipment to join the American Colony.

The Swedish Nobel Prize winning author Selma Lagerl6f tells their epic story in the books Jerusalem and The Holy City. Now filmatized by Danish director Bille August the movie Jerusalem with an all-star cast is being compared to Troell's The Emigrants.

The Swedish farmers from Nås immediately put their skills to work. The men began farming on the slopes of Kedron Valley producing excellent crops of grains and vegetables. Swedish farriers shod the Turkish cavalry horses and a dairy was started in what is today the Cellar Bar of the American Colony Hotel. When the women were not working as nurses in the Colony hospitals, they made sweaters, stockings and woolen and cotton underwear. The men who hade made horses and other handicrafts during the long Swedish winters started to carve spoons, ladles, rakes and figures. The popular donkeys and camels in olivewood that you can buy to this day were their adaptations of the classic Dala horse.

The Swedes became the artisans of the city. Eric Mattson who arrived from Nås with his family as a small boy, became a photographer of renown and it is his pictures (in the National Geographic and now in the Library of Congress in Washington) and film footage that documented this bygone era.

Throughout all the strife in the region, the Colony always stubbornly ministered equally to all. That is why a school was established in the Muslim quarter near the Dome of the Rock, where the tunnel created such controversy recently. Here Anna Spafford's 18-year old daughter became the headmistress of a :unique school for Moslem women. When a 4-day-old baby whose mother had died on Christmas Eve in 1925 was delivered to the Colony, the School was turned into a Nursing Home, still operating today.

The Colony that ran several schools and four hospitals at the end of World War II still supports many Jerusalem institutions. The American Colony Hotel that was once the lodging and headquarters of the colony is still owned by descendants of Anna Spafford and her second husband Frederick Vester. You still find many Swedish names at the Protestant cemetery and all around Jerusalem you still come across descendants of the Swedes who left everything to come closer to their Christ.