On April 20, 2026, after 12 years of delays and disputes, the Jerusalem District Planning Committee approved a plan to build an ultra-Orthodox Jewish seminary at the entrance to East Jerusalem’s Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood—part of a series of state and settler actions to intensify the Jewish settler presence in the area.1 Sheikh Jarrah has long been a target for forcible home expulsions of Palestinians by settlers, to the extent that for some years, it also drew major Palestinian-Israeli protests and broad international condemnation.2 In the past several years, while protests have largely abated due to wars, expulsions have intensified, and Israel has announced several large settlement plans around the neighborhood, of which the yeshiva is one (see Amid Gaza Genocide, Israel Hones in on Sheikh Jarrah).

While dismissing objections filed by the Sheikh Jarrah Community Association and Israeli rights group Ir Amim, the planning committee approved the building project, which Ohr Somayach Institutions, a Jerusalem-based yeshiva with branches in the United States, Canada, Australia, South Africa, and the United Kingdom, submitted. Ohr Somayach received a tender to build the yeshiva from the Israel Land Authority (ILA) through a closed-door process (without a public tender) in 2007 (see Israel Expanding Settler Footprint in Sheikh Jarrah with Yeshiva). The municipality is also a developer on the plan.3

The school complex, to be called the Glassman Yeshiva, will be located near Ohr Somayach Yeshiva’s existing campus on Shimon HaTzadik Street. The building will be 11 stories high (3 of them underground) and will include dormitories for hundreds of religious students and faculty. According to its website,

The planned yeshiva will enjoy five dunams of land at the foot of Sheikh Jarrah, currently a parking lot just across from the Sheikh Jarrah Mosque and a newly expanded Israeli war memorial.

The Jerusalem Municipality seized the area where the yeshiva is to be located from the Nashashibi family in the 1980s5 and designated it for “public use,” such as the construction of schools for the neighborhood’s residents. Despite guaranteeing it for the neighborhood, the municipality relinquished the plot in 2007 to the ILA to build a yeshiva.6

The plan stalled for years after the Jerusalem Municipal Planning and Building Committee’s initial approval in 2014 over objections to the development.7 Specifically, the project was paused after Ir Amim submitted data to the Jerusalem District Planning Committee in 2020 emphasizing the shortage of classrooms for Palestinians in East Jerusalem and stressing that the land should be allocated for the construction of a school to serve the local Palestinian community.

“In Jerusalem, you don’t have [a lot of] schools for the Arab people, for us,” Saleh Diab, a prominent Palestinian activist and Sheikh Jarrah resident whose house has also been marked for seizure, told Jerusalem Story.8 “In the Old City, they close the schools . . . They closed the UNRWA schools . . . and they don’t give the children of East Jerusalem [a place to learn].”

Diab is referring to the government’s closure of all schools run by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) in the Shu‘fat refugee camp and the East Jerusalem neighborhoods of Silwan, Sur Bahir, Wadi al-Joz, and Qalandiya (see Israel Closes All UNRWA Schools in East Jerusalem). Meanwhile, Israel is also cracking down on private Palestinian schools in East Jerusalem (see New Israeli Rules Send the City’s Palestinian Private Schools into Crisis).

“What has happened here is . . . the coming together of interests,” Aviv Tatarsky, a researcher at Ir Amim, told Jerusalem Story.9 “Ohr Somayach wanted land to build a yeshiva, and Israeli authorities want to Judaize Sheikh Jarrah.”

“It just shows how easy it is for the Israeli state to profit from being involved in the settler enterprise,” Tatarsky added.

How fast the yeshiva will be built is not known, but Tatarsky noted that Ohr Somayach faces no hurdles with construction.

“In terms of bureaucracy, there’s no limitations now; Ohr Somayach needs to ask for a building permit, which is a technical thing, and there might be some professional planning work that they need to do and that will take a few months,” Tatarsky said. “But there’s no lengthy approval process, there’s no mechanisms of intervention. If in their priority they want to build it quickly, they could get the building permit approved by the end of the year.”

Tatarsky elaborated on the likely impact the yeshiva will have on the community once it is built: “The yeshiva, its building, is not pushing anyone out directly. Still, it’s a ridiculous idea in and of itself. And it will be very dangerous for the residents of Sheikh Jarrah,” he told Jerusalem Story. “When hundreds of Jewish young men that live in a Palestinian neighborhood go out of the yeshiva, as we know from past experience, they will be part of the harassment of their neighbors,” he added. “Maybe not all of them . . . but we know how these things work, be it that some of them will have the racist, nationalist ideology. Some of them will [inevitably] be pulled in by nationalists who will just incite them.”

“Residents fear this will increase harassment, friction, and daily provocation,” Mahmoud al-Saou from the Shiekh Jarrah Neighborhood Committee told TRT World.10

Israel’s current political climate with leaders like National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, who are openly racist and advocate for the expulsion, torture, and even death by execution of Palestinians, may influence impressionable young men newly arriving from abroad toward a Jewish supremacist mindset.

And in this charged atmosphere, violence against non-Jews is already a growing issue in Jerusalem’s Old City, where ultra-Orthodox Jewish yeshiva students commonly attack Christians (see Bigoted Harassment of Christians in Jerusalem Increased in 2025). Ultra-orthodox Jews and yeshiva students are the main perpetrators of anti-Christian attacks and are also significantly more supportive of spitting on Christians compared to the rest of the Israeli population, according to organizations that monitor such events on the ground. In this regard, a sudden influx of ultra-Orthodox yeshiva students in Sheikh Jarrah could also lead to greater levels of harassment against the neighborhood’s non-Jewish residents.

And with increased harassment, increased police presence would inevitably follow.

“Then, of course, Israeli authorities say they have to keep the peace, keep the order, and that’s a euphemism for more and more restrictions—so-called safety of the yeshiva students will serve as excuses for all kinds of police actions against people in the neighborhood,” Tatarsky said.

With the yeshiva’s approval, Sheikh Jarrah residents are on edge.

“When they finish [with the yeshiva], Israel wants to take all the neighborhood,” Diab said, referring to several other settler and municipal plans to expel Sheikh Jarrah’s Palestinian residents.

These plans include razing the Umm Haroun section of Sheikh Jarrah for hundreds of settler housing units, including two skyscrapers (see Israel Aiming to Supplant Umm Haroun Area of Sheikh Jarrah with Settler Skyscrapers) and building an additional 1,500 settler housing units along the neighborhood’s northern border (see Israel Plans New 30-Acre Settlement to Grab the Northern Edge of Sheikh Jarrah, Completing Its Encirclement). The projects, which the Jerusalem Municipality designated as “urban renewal” initiatives, come alongside ongoing expulsion lawsuits that Israeli settler groups have launched against Palestinians across all of Sheikh Jarrah to seize their properties.

Amid all these Judaization projects swallowing up Sheikh Jarrah, Palestinian residents feel helpless in halting the rapid settlement expansion.

Diab shared that he stopped holding a weekly Friday demonstration against Sheikh Jarrah’s erasure—a decades-long tradition—when Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza started on October 7, 2023, out of fear of settler and police violence against protesters.

“The people are afraid. They worry about everything. Every time, they ask me exactly what’s going on. I tell them, ‘Patience. Just wait. Don’t do anything,’” Diab said. “You can’t fight. You can’t speak. So, it’s not easy, this life now.”