Holy Cats! Jerusalem's Strays and Their Unsung Guardian | National Geographic

It's so sad to see kitten suffering and dying in the streets that I cannot stand it. It will affect my mental health. I can't pass by a kitten on the street and not rescue it because I know it's going to have a horrible life until it dies.

Holyland cats that walked in the footsteps of the kings and prophets of Israel; it's a bit of a surprise for everyone who comes here. You know that first they'll see one cat and they'll say, "Oh look, a cat!" and then they start seeing a whole lot more cats—like not a normal number. Until people realize that there are a huge number of stray cats, not just in Israel but the entire Mediterranean basin, where it's warm weather and the winters are very mild.

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I never leave the house without a large bag of cat food in my pack. I make a certain sound to call them for food so they associate the sound that I make and me with food, and they come running. They recognize me when I call them. I try to keep a very low profile; a lot of my neighbors really don't get animals at all. The attitude in Jerusalem towards stray cats in general—I would say that the non-religious Western Jews are the most involved in animal welfare issues.

And I'm a religious Jew. I became religious as an adult and I have tremendous respect for each group, but the more religious the group is, it turns out that they have the least experience with animals, and that tends to be a fear of them, so they're not involved with them.

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Let me pet you. What is it there? I have run into some people in the middle of the night, like in the Muslim quarters and the Christian quarters. You know, resident Arabs in the old city, and some of them are curious. They ask me what I'm doing and I explain it to them. You see the wheels turning in their head and they start to smile and they nod their head and then they say, "Good for you."

I work on the head at ala Sufi. My home is a revolving door. I can't pass up any kitten on the street because I know it's just having a horrible, horrible time and they all come from different places, different stories. You're delicious. This is Grace. Grace was almost dead when I found her in the Christian quarter, very close to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.

Yeah, hi! Nora. Noor is the sweetest. She has a neurological problem that's permanent. When she was a tiny kitten, something hit her in the head. I don't know what, but that's what the doctor said. She still falls over a lot, but she's a very happy cat.

The classic problem is that there's a lot of people who are putting out a lot of food for a lot of cats, but they're not spaying them. So they wander off, they get hurt, they starve, they die of disease. There's only a limit to the amount of food available for these street cats. You know, people think, "Oh, they'll manage; there's plenty of garbage." Well, there isn't. You know, if you check any garbage can, more often than not, there's nothing for a cat to eat in there.

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But no, we try to do the best bit for them here. Overcrowding is very, very unhealthy, physically and emotionally for cats. It's very stressful. But if there's one message I think I could give to people, it's: some spay and neuter your cats. Spay and neuter cats in the street.

Since the year 2009, when I started keeping count, I've been prowling the streets of the old city, laid it like slepping big traps. It's just an enormous amount of work. It sort of means like being always on call. Like, you could just get cozy in bed and just want to unplug, and the phone rings, and it will be someone saying that there's a sick cat in the Muslim Quarter; come and get it. You know, and all it takes is a few cats to reverse all the work that you've done—a few cats having kittens, and then having kittens.

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There was a rabbi who lived about a hundred years ago in Germany named Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch, and he said that it's not enough to not cause pain to animals. That if you see an animal suffering, even if it's not your own and even if you didn't cause the suffering, it's up to you to do something to rescue it.

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