A beautiful building at the entrance to the Rehavia neighborhood in Jerusalem, named “Villa Leah,” is a monument to an unusual love story from the early twentieth century – one that gives us insight into discrete social realities of the “Holy City” apart from oftrepeated historical narratives. Nassib Bey Abcarius, the grandson of an Armenian bishop, born in Beirut, arrives in Jerusalem after years studying law in Paris, working for the British army in Cairo, and becoming a judge in Khartoum, and enjoys a lucrative career as a private lawyer. At the age of 54, he falls in love with Leah Tennenbaum, the daughter of a Jewish real estate agent. During World War I, the teenaged Leah had become a focus of celebrity scandal, as the reputed concubine of Cemal Pasha, the Ottoman ruler of Greater Syria. After the war, she had a brief marriage to an officer in Britain’s Jewish Legion with whom she had a son, and returned to Jerusalem after her divorce. Nassib and the 30-year-old Leah wed in Paris in a civil marriage, settled in Jerusalem and quickly had two daughters. Five years into the marriage, the Bauhaus-styled Villa Leah was inaugurated but the couple lived in it only a few short years before Leah escaped with her children to Cairo in 1937, never to return. She died in 1967 in Montreal, surviving Nassib by twenty-one years.
