City in Flux

Across Jerusalem, hardly a stone is left unturned — or undrilled. Public transport is being reimagined, with bridges that will arc over highways, new access roads threading into busy intersections, and the light rail steadily extending its reach until it will eventually crisscross the entire city from end to end.

Near the Old City walls, the Mamilla redevelopment hums with shoppers meandering through restored stone arcades, where boutiques and cafés open onto polished plazas. At the city entrance, the Jerusalem Gateway project is transforming the stretch between the Chords Bridge and the Central Bus Station into a cluster of high-rises, office towers, and a high-speed rail hub that will place Jerusalem firmly on the global business map.

Even in outlying neighborhoods, urban renewal projects are taking over entire streets as aging four-story walkups give way to glassy towers and mid-rise buildings. For decades, those neighborhoods maintained the modest vertical profile of post-1950s construction, all covered in the famous white Jerusalem stone. But that profile is fast being replaced, as across the length and breadth of the city — from Kiryat Yovel and Kiryat Menachem to Katamonim, Arnona, Armon Hanetziv, Talpiyot, and Givat Shaul — construction cranes have become as common as lampposts.

Newly-built developments are setting new standards and introducing amenities that were once rare in these areas — landscaped courtyards, smart elevators, and underground parking — while drawing in new demographics alongside long-time residents.

From the Ground Up

One of the people shaping the new skyline is Akiva Zuravin. If you’ve walked past Jerusalem Estates, the luxury living center built on the former Schneller military compound at the beginning of Malchei Yisrael street, or if you’ve heard buzzing about Ir Olam, the vast mixed-use quarter whose foundation is rising on the site of the old Angel’s flour mill at the edge of Kiryat Moshe and Givat Shaul, you’ve seen his mark on the city.

But the way he tells it, his approach to building began long before he ever set foot on a construction site.

Zuravin, who recently marked his 50th birthday, moves with a quiet, deliberate energy. Fit and slight of build, he is in demand on many fronts, yet he remains fully present, his focus undivided. That centeredness traces back to his upbringing in a home where Torah was the bedrock. His father was Rav Efraim Zuravin a”h, a close talmid of Rav Aharon Kotler. Rav Zuravin, who passed away in 2010 at age 69, moved to Israel with his wife Hadassah in the 1960s, founded and served as rosh yeshivah of Knesses Beit Aharon, and was chief editor of the Shottenstein Shas. Several years before his passing, he moved back to Lakewood where he served as head of Kollel Ahavas Torah V’Chesed.

In a family where Torah scholarship was the natural path, Akiva showed an interest for technical pursuits from an early age. When he was just eight, he was already a fixture at the neighborhood hardware store in Har Nof, happily sorting and packing screws — the same screws he would later use to build succahs for neighbors and tackle odd jobs after cheder. When he was still in yeshivah, he’d already become a part-time shiputznik, doing renovations and small-scale building.

“The bochurim were still sleeping while I was out getting my Arab workers,” he says, noting that through his teen years, his father made sure that he remained in some kind of Torah learning framework.

“My parents raised us according to chanoch lanaar al pi darko, which, considering my father was a rosh yeshivah, was pretty forward-thinking back then,” Akiva shares. “Tatty would take an active interest in what I was doing, even though I realized later that those things really held little interest for him. He did it for me — to show me that what I did mattered. My parents told me, ‘Whatever you do, just make sure you do it in the best way possible. No cutting corners.’ That moral compass always stayed with me. Maybe that’s why I’m still a perfectionist in all my projects, even though I could compromise on quality — who would even know?”

As a child, Akiva attended Leuchter’s cheder in Bayit Vegan, which integrated more secular subjects. “I’m sure it wasn’t easy for my father,” Akiva shares, “but he understood that it was a better fit for me. Over forty years ago, my parents had the courage to do what was right for their child instead of worrying about what people would say.”

Do Your Best

For someone of Rav Efraim Zuravin’s stature, one might find that level of acceptance and encouragement surprising, although his own background sheds light on his broad approach. Born in Baltimore in 1939, Efraim Zuravin was the son of a respected urologist. When his father contracted a severe case of pneumonia and hepatitis, his medical colleagues advised a sabbatical year. During a scouting trip upstate, he met a local rabbi who told him, “If you want your children to stay Jewish, don’t move here.” The rabbi recommended “a nice town in New Jersey called Lakewood.” Before long, the family moved to Lakewood, having found a house on Forest Avenue, just steps away from Rav Aharon Kotler’s flagship yeshivah.

On Simchas Torah, Efraim, then just 11 years old, came to the yeshivah with his father and brother, and met Rav Aharon for the first time. It was the start of a relationship that shaped his future.

Rav Aharon would spend the week fundraising in New York and return home on Thursday afternoons. As Rav Aharon’s car pulled up, the young Efraim would rush out to chase away the many stray dogs that had gathered, making sure the Rosh Yeshivah could enter safely. Rav Aharon would hang up the marei mekomos for his weekly shiur klali, delivered every Motzaei Shabbos, on a bulletin board and Rav Efraim would take it home after the shiur. When his mother asked what he needed it for, he replied simply, “When I grow up, I’ll understand it.”

Rav Aharon, for his part, was equally devoted to the young boy who’d been planted next door. At the time, Rav Aharon asked one of his close talmidim, Rav Hillel Zaks, to take the young bochur for walks around the lake on Shabbos and share stories of his grandfather, the Chofetz Chaim. Rav Hillel carried out that request faithfully for three years.

Although Efraim initially attended public school, at age 14 he transferred to the Chofetz Chaim yeshivah in Baltimore. Since the family had since decided to remain in Lakewood, he boarded with his aunt. In 1955, at just 16, he returned to Lakewood, becoming the youngest bochur in Rav Aharon’s yeshivah. Years later, when Rav Efraim already headed Yeshivas Knesses Beit Aharon in Jerusalem, Rav Shneur Kotler entrusted him with editing his father’s shiurim, subsequently published as Mishnas Rabbi Aharon.

Years before, Rav Shneur Kotler and Rav Zelig Epstein, rosh yeshivah of Shaar HaTorah in Queens, suggested the shidduch between Efraim and Hadassah Hopfer. From his hospital bed, just weeks before his petirah, Rav Aharon didn’t forget his talmid and inquired about the shidduch.

In the 1980s, Rav Efraim’s clarity and scholarship earned him the role of senior editor of the Schottenstein Shas. At first he hesitated, concerned it might weaken the ameilus baTorah of Torah learners. At the time, he consulted with Rav Yosef Shalom Eliyashiv, Rav Chaim Kanievsky, and Rav Aharon Leib Steinman, each of whom encouraged him to complete the project, saying that the generation needed it.

In Rav Efraim’s final days after a long illness, Akiva was present when a visiting talmid came and asked Rav Efraim what he thought lay at the root of the parenting challenges that are so prevalent. He replied simply: “We need to think less of our own kavod and more about the well-being of our children.”

Akiva was also influenced by his maternal grandfather, Professor Rabbi Shmuel Hopfer. A former talmid of Yeshivas Mir in Europe, Rabbi Hopfer immigrated to the US, where he supplemented his Torah learning with college studies, becoming a physicist and patent holder.

“I spent a lot of time in my grandparents’ home in Bayit Vegan,” Akiva says. “My grandfather encouraged my projects. When I was in yeshivah and wanted to open a printing press, he gave me the funds and taught me about money management. From him I learned another of my most valuable lessons: ‘Whatever you do,” he told me, ‘never, ever lie — not to your customers, and not to yourself.’ ”

Those principles remained with Akiva when, as a 20-something enterprising young kablan, he cofounded the building company ISA Group in 1999 with his partner, with his partner, Shalom Griva (ISA stands for Israel, Shalom, and Akiva) Rav Efraim blessed the venture with three conditions: pay salaries on time, give — at the very least — maaser to tzedakah, and always be honest, even under complex circumstances.

Double in Value

For years, Akiva and his partner were busy with the nuts and bolts of the building contracting business, from messy renovations to apartment additions. As a self-proclaimed perfectionist, Akiva learned every part of the building process, because he always wanted everything done perfectly, and what day worker would do the work better than him?

Slowly they expanded, taking on projects that eventually caught the interest of investors from abroad.

Zuravin first captured attention in 2015 with Jerusalem Estates, a landmark project comprising 13 luxury residential buildings within the massive 150-year-old Schneller Compound in the heart of the Geula neighborhood. Originally established in the mid-19th century as an orphanage, the Schneller site later served as a British Mandate army base and, after 1948, as an IDF training and logistics center. Its collection of stone buildings — each with a distinct architectural style reflecting its varied uses over the decades — has since been repurposed by the Jerusalem municipality. To date, some serve as schools, one is a museum, and others have yet to be allocated.

Bordering Malchei Yisrael Street, Jerusalem Estates, with its precise stonework and measured grandeur, is located within walking distance of shuls, chassidic courts, and the bustling chareidi commercial hub. Entry is through a stone gateway, where a security guard checks arrivals before they pass through to the individual buildings. Between those buildings (and around the other building projects that fill out the former Schneller campus), pockets of landscaped green spaces — rare in this part of Jerusalem — offer benches and shaded corners for residents and visitors. Inspired by the traditional Jerusalem courtyard, the layout is a modern-day flow between shared and private spaces.

“When we won the tender for the Schneller compound, we won both lots, although at the time our plan as to just built one lot — that was what we had the means for,” Akiva recounts. “My investment partner at the time was Rabbi Yaakov Rajchenbach a”h, a huge supported of Torah institutions and noted baal chesed from Chicago. It was an opportunity we weren’t sure we could handle, so Reb Yaakov and I went to Rav Chaim Kanievsky for an eitzah. We explained that we only had the means to develop one of the lots, but Rav Chaim was emphatic that we should build both. ‘You must build as many apartments as possible for Jews from the Diaspora, because Mashiach is coming and they need a place to live,’ he told us.”

As far as the luxury aspect of the project is concerned, which tends to raise eyebrows, Akiva states that for him, quality is not necessarily defined by opulence — even if the marble-floored, two-story lobbies rival those of the city’s finest hotels. Rather, he says — this time as a builder who knows quality work — it’s measured in the visible and invisible details that preserve the value of a home over time.

Some of those details are aesthetic, like the choice of a costly stone, usually reserved for public buildings (also used for the Waldorf Astoria hotel). Its color shifts with the light, glowing golden in the afternoon sun. The stonework, too, is in a class by itself, with 50 different cuts across the facades. Other details are structural, like the painstaking method used to mount that stone, a slow and labor-intensive process that few builders would agree to, but that Zuravin insisted upon to guarantee insulation and longevity. The windows and doors also reflect this philosophy: aluminum on the exterior for a uniform facade, wood on the interior for warmth, beauty, and comfort. Convinced that no independent contractor would follow his exacting specifications with all the unique features, Zuravin turned to his own construction company, D. Daniel, to execute the work — a move that allowed him to control every stage of the process.

The popularity of Jerusalem Estates lead to a wave of upscale projects across the city and beyond. Today Zuravin has projects all over Israel, including Tzefas, Kiryat Bialik outside Haifa, and Rechasim, the latter especially close to Zuravin’s heart.

“As children,” Akiva Zuravin says, “we spent every Succos near Yeshivas Knesses Chizkiyahu in Rechasim, and that experience is engraved on my soul. On Chol Hamoed, we’d hike around the surrounding mountains, the very place where we later built the Mitzpeh Hashachar project. I feel like the connection was really forged from back in my childhood.”

Zuravin says his projects are more than money-making endeavors: Each project is a chance to connect his work to the values he grew up with and to the community around it. One example is his partnership with Matnat Chaim, the lifesaving organization to promote kidney donations, founded by Rabbi Avraham Yeshayahu Haber a”h and perpetuated by his wife Rachel since Rabbi Haber’s passing from Covid in 2020.

When Rabbi Haber was arrested for organ trafficking in 2018 — a witch hunt initiated by those in the Health Ministry who couldn’t abide the fact that he had revolutionized transplantation in Israel, shortened the waiting time for transplants, and created a three-fold increase in the number of annual transplants — Akiva offered his assistance throughout this challenging period. In the end, with wall-to-wall consensus and universal praise for his lifesaving activities, the prosecution walked back every accusation. After Rabbi Haber’s passing two years later, Akiva built Matnat Chaim’s new offices.

Future Jerusalem

Over the years in the building business, Zuravin has watched it all — sometimes as a competitor, sometimes as an admirer — and positioned his own work within that evolving framework. If Jerusalem Estates was Zuravin’s arrival on the scene, Ir Olam, launched in 2023, is his statement on what comes next.

We’re standing on the edge of the sprawling site of the former Angel’s flour mill, now in the beginning stages of construction, the rhythmic grind of excavation a steady rumble that’s become the soundtrack of the Holy City.

Zuravin gestures toward the skeletal forms. “This will be a mixed-use quarter,” he says, “residential, commercial, cultural — all integrated so that religious families can live, work, and gather without leaving the neighborhood.”

It’s a creative model already proven in other world capitals, although on a much larger scale. There’s Canary Wharf in London, which became a thriving business and residential hub, and New York’s Hudson Yards, which similarly fused offices, retail, public spaces, and high-end housing into a single connected district.

Ir Olam’s design went through a major transition before construction even began. For close to a year, Zuravin worked with an architect, trading sketches and walking the site, trying to translate the vision in his head into plans on paper. But each round left him unsatisfied.

“It just wasn’t coming together,” he says. “I could see what I wanted, but it wasn’t there.” Eventually, he made the decision to start over — a costly choice in both time and money — and brought in Avner Yashar, one of Israel’s most celebrated architects. The switch meant resetting the process, but also opened the door to a concept that would reshape the project entirely.

Yashar’s Jerusalem concept layers rooftop gardens over pedestrian arcades, arranges towers to frame a spacious, open piazza, and filters natural light deep into the interiors — a kind of vertical village in stone. It’s a design that preserves the human scale, and it brought Zuravin’s long-held vision for a self-contained, mixed-use quarter into focus.

“We began by asking ourselves: What would it actually feel like to live here?” Zuravin says, pointing to the area where the retail section will be built. The team sketched out the flow of a day — the walk to the shul, the stop for coffee, the errand on the way home — and built the plan around those rhythms. Architects call it thinking about UX and UI, the user experience and interface of a place. In Ir Olam, that translates into a piazza that naturally draws people in without becoming a thoroughfare, paths that bend toward light and open views, and entrances that give residents a buffer from the public street while still keeping them connected to the life around them.

Ir Olam is not the only mixed-use development in Jerusalem, Zuravin notes, but it’s the only one being shaped specifically for a religious population from the outset. Projects such as MidTown, located between the Machaneh Yehudah market and the Central Bus Station, and Vision in Talpiot cater to a different, less family-oriented demographic.

When complete, Ir Olam will comprise 300 residential units, including 120 set aside for long-term rental. Of course, not everyone will work in the adjacent office buildings, but for those who do, the proximity offers a rare convenience in Jerusalem’s congested landscape. Mixed-use developments are built to maximize time for everyone: Office workers have nearby retail where they can run errands on their breaks, and residents don’t have to travel to access day care and other services.

The possible downside, Zuravin notes, is when the boundaries between the various uses are blurred. “We worked to ensure that residential, commercial, and public spaces remain clearly defined. That means preserving privacy, quiet, and community for residents while maintaining convenience for visitors and customers accessing public services,” he says.

From the upper edge of the Ir Olam site, the view sweeps across Givat Shaul toward Har Nof, Kiryat Moshe, and Beit HaKerem, with the Jerusalem hills beyond. Below, the road drops toward Highway 16 — the city’s newest link to the Tel Aviv highway — while the hum of heavy machinery and movement of crews hint at the scale of what’s taking shape here.

It seems like a postmodern fantasy for new urban living, but do all the old-timers want the border of their quiet neighborhood turned into an ultra-modern, largely unaffordable hub made for tourists, foreign investors, and well-heeled professionals?

Still, in this fast-paced world of bigger and better — of which Jerusalem is very much a part — there’s no putting on the brakes.

“In Jerusalem, it’s not about replacement,” Akiva Zuravin says with real conviction. “Every new building is another chapter in its eternal story. The goal is to add to that story in a way that feels true to its character and worthy of its legacy.”

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 1077)