Religious Shoppers Skirt the Issue, Bolster Sales in Once-faltering Mall

There is a boutique near the central bus station here, the Jeans Club, that is doing a flourishing business these days after floundering for the past couple of years.

But anyone searching for a pair of jeans had better look elsewhere, because for the past year the Jeans Club has not sold a single pair of pants.

In fact, there is not a pair of jeans for sale in the entire shopping center where the store is located.

Long-sleeved blouses have replaced tank tops. Long, modest skirts have displaced minis.

Since last January, the entire Center 1 Mall, a hub of 40 shops, has devoted itself solely to a fervently religious clientele. And business has never been better.

“The vast majority of women who shop here now are religious, so we cater to them,” said store manager Irit Harnoy matter-of-factly.

“We no longer sell pants or bodysuits, but that’s O.K. The religious people are very nice and I’m happy to stock what they want to buy,” she said.

Built by the Yona hotel chain in 1987, Center I was originally designed to attract a wide range of customers, religious and secular, Jewish and Arab, in this busy section of the city, said Avi Ben-Arush, the shopping mall’s manager.

“It did for a while,” said Ben-Arush. “But then business slowed down.”

“Part of the problem was the intifada,” said the mall’s sole Arab storekeeper, who runs a large souvenir shop. “The center has always relied heavily on tourists, and the intifada has hurt the tourist industry.

“We also used to have a lot of wealthy Arabs from, say, Bethlehem, who would come to the mall and spend a lot of money,” he said.

“Those days have been over for a long time,” the shopowner said.

In 1992, with most shopping centers hurting for business and heightened concerns that a new mall across town, then nearing completion, would lure away customers, management decided to take a gamble.

“We knew we needed to find a niche in the market, something special,” recalled Ben-Arush. “The center sits between a number of very religious neighborhoods, so it seemed like a natural choice.”

Once the decision to change was made, management had to figure out exactly how to go about it, he said.

“We wanted the mall to have a certain atmosphere so that religious shoppers would feel comfortable here,” he said. “On the other hand, we did not to drive away secular customers.

“Finding the balance hasn’t always been easy,” he conceded.

Three women’s sportswear stores that would have had no future vacated the premises, as did a cosmetics salon.

Then all the center’s eateries underwent the strictest possible kashrut conversion.

Now, a quadruplex movie theater, one of the newest in Jerusalem, is about to be transformed into a wedding hall that caters to the Orthodox community.

While the manager maintains that “no one was forced out, we did have to make a deal” with some storeowners before they would leave, he said.

“I couldn’t tell someone, `Don’t sell jeans.’ But those who remained took it upon themselves to sell things religious people want to buy,” Ben-Arush said. “Nobody is selling things that are offensive to the religious.”

Jerusalem City Councilman Ornan Yekutieli, a former deputy mayor and a proponent of the rights of the capital’s secular residents, had less sanguine recollections.

“When the process started, many of the shopowners were forced to leave. In one case, the owner of a women’s clothing and lingerie shop arrived at the mall and found her store’s window covered with newspapers,” he recounted.

“There was also pressure on people who didn’t play the right kind of music,” he said.

The music “used to be David Bowie. Now there’s a lot of classical music and slow tunes,” said Efrat Cohen, a young, jeans-clad waitress at the Ne’eman Cafe.

But the change does not bother her, she said. “I really like the religious community. They’re good customers. If the food is good, they say so.

“This is especially true of the Americans who come,” she said. “And there has been a big increase in the number of American yeshiva students in the past year” at the cafe, which offers a 10 percent discount to the students.

Not everyone shopping at the mall is observant.

“It’s convenient for me to come here” for a bite to eat, said a soldier at the Ne’eman Cafe. But, she said, she does her shopping at the other mall or in the center of town.