In the 1970s, a Jewish soldier in the U.S. Army was stationed in Jerusalem and wound up in an extraordinary real estate deal. In the years after the capture of the Old City in 1967, the Western Wall plaza was cleared and new buildings were erected adjacent to it. One of the apartments in these buildings, designed by architect Moshe Safdie, was built in 1973, and five years later the American soldier purchased it for “hundreds of thousands of dollars” – a huge sum in those days.
