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Pre-State Vaults and Ancient Cisterns Provide Shelter for Jerusalemites under Siege
(Times of Israel) Zev Stub - Jerusalem municipal architect Sharon Dinur was talking about the city's public bomb shelters when the early warning for a missile attack sounded. "Now we'll get to see one in use," she said, as hundreds of workers in the municipal complex hurried underground. Minutes later, we resumed our conversation inside a heavy steel vault built nearly a century ago by Barclays Bank - a room once used to safeguard treasures belonging to Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie during his exile before World War II. We visited another shelter nearby, in what was once the morgue of one of Jerusalem's earliest hospitals. In a city where thousands of buildings predate Israel's founding, residents often improvise, turning ancient cisterns, bank vaults and forgotten basements into places of refuge when sirens sound.