Dear Jerusalem Arts Committee,

 

Re: Grant Proposal for Theater Performance entitled "Miflezet/Monster"

 

I.

 

Jerusalem was still a small village when the dead bodies began turning up. One, two. Then seven and eight. It was late 1966 and all the bodies were male. The authorities did their best to contain the spread of panic and of rumors, gory and false, but they could not control the need of city residents to make sense of what was happening. Whispers, from East to West, from alley to synagogue, from market to mosque, centered around two main themes: that all the corpses were castrated. And that the culprit, hiding here, somewhere in the city, might not be human at all. They called her MIFLEZET. 

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MAYBE: a pregnancy is a loaded gun. 

I CAN TELL YOU THIS NOW:  For two years, in my early twenties, I worked as a counselor at a secret shelter for pregnant women in Jerusalem. I was relatively new to the city those days.

HOLD UP A SIGN: Welcome to the underbelly of Jerusalem.  

THE WOMEN: Rich, poor, middle class. Moslem, Jewish, Christian. Religious and secular. Israeli, Arab, citizens, legal immigrants and illegal refugees. Ages 13 to 36. They all possessed wombs that worked. They all, for mostly ominous reasons, had to hide their pregnancies from the world. 

A PREGNANCY IS A SECRET ABOUT A SECRET: the director of the shelter used to say. Beneath the city's mythic cloak of holiness were the stories behind these pregnancies.

THE STORIES: Sex, power, race, rape, religion, money, and sometimes even murder.

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