It is a sunny monday morning in April and the Gypsy Community Centre in East Jerusalem teems with activity. The Gypsy flag—a bright red eight-spoked wagon wheel on a background that is half blue (for sky) and half green (for earth)—is displayed outside the beautiful stone building. Inside, the small front room is a gift shop displaying hand-embroidered pillows, hand-knit sweaters and colorful potpourri jars. On the walls hang two rababa, the Gypsy’s traditional stringed musical instrument.

In a long, narrow back room, six women dressed in modest Arab garb—students in a hairdressing class sponsored by the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee and MATI, the Jerusalem Business Development Center—comb, roll, curl, blow dry and spray each other’s hair under the watchful direction of an East Jerusalem salon owner. Two preschool-age girls look on wide-eyed.

The bustling center in the Shuafat neighborhood grew out of the efforts of Amoun Sleem, a 34-year-old jeans-clad Gypsy who lives in the Old City. Although she would love nothing better than to return to her job at a nearby hotel—she has a diploma in hotel management from Notre Dame College in Jerusalem—Sleem has been devoting herself to raising consciousness about her little-known community; preserving the Gypsy culture and language; and improving their standard of living through education.

Sleem, who says she is the only Gypsy working on cultural preservation, finds it a great disadvantage to be a woman trying to effect change in a male-dominated culture. The official community leader, or Mukhtar, Mohammad Dib Sleem—his father and Amoun Sleem’s father are cousins—does not support her work.

Although no official census of the population exists, it is estimated that about 5,000 Gypsies live in Israel, the West Bank and Gaza. Invisible to most Jerusalemites, between 1,200 and 3,000 of them reside inside the Lion’s Gate, in and around Burj Laklak Street. They used to live here and near the Damascus Gate in tents before they gave up their nomadic way of life about 100 years ago. Their numbers have dwindled over the years because many fled to Jordan during Israel’s wars, particularly the Six-Day War in 1967.

The origins of the Jerusalem Gypsy community are shrouded in myth, and their future as a distinct group is uncertain. According to The Dom of Jerusalem: A Gypsy Community Chronicle (Dom Research Center), Gypsies arrived in Jerusalem in the 18th century and settled among the resident Arab population.

To most Israelis, the Gypsies resemble their Palestinian neighbors—and indeed they speak Arabic and most consider themselves both Muslim and Gypsy. But Old City Arabs can distinguish between Arab and Gypsy and refer to them as Nawar (dirty or “nowhere” people); some Arabs even physically attack them.

The use of the slur is proof enough of the Gypsies’ degraded status. “If you do something bad at home, people will say you’re like a Nawar,” says Ayoub Farah, a 54-year-old Arab plumber who grew up inside the Lion’s Gate. “[But] they are good people with good hearts who want to live honorably. I know them well.”

“They are the weakest group I know of in Israel because of the depth of the prejudice against them,” says Anat Hoffman, former Jerusalem city councilwoman and now executive director of the Israel Religious Action Center and a board member of Sleem’s Domari: The Society of Gypsies of Jerusalem (www.geocities.com/doma risociety), which sponsors the community center. “When I walked with Amoun in the Old City, people would spit when they saw her because it’s bad luck to see a Nawar.”

For Sleem and other Gypsies, the awareness of their identity was thrust on them early. “At [public, Arab] school, the teacher treated us differently,” Sleem recalls. “Every morning, she punished us for our dirty clothes. She put us in front of the whole school and said, ‘Dirty Gypsies.’ She would inspect our hair and make us feel ashamed. Many of us hated to go to school…. I stopped for two years because I was scared….

“When I was little, I wasn’t proud to be a Gypsy,” Sleem adds. “Around 13…I started to believe we are like everyone else—and I wanted to help.”

Seven years ago, Allen Williams, a studies coordinator for the Dom Research Center (www.domresearchcenter. com), a Gypsy research group based in Cyprus, convinced Sleem to set up the nonprofit Domari society, the first such effort in the Middle East. He introduced her to an Israeli lawyer, Omri Kibiri, who helped establish the organization with Sleem as founder and director.

To date, the society has run catering, hairstyling, literacy and computer classes (only 5 percent of Gypsy households have a computer); encouraged women to craft and sell traditional handiwork; organized bazaars and cultural evenings; and completed the majority of research for the books The Dom of Jerusalem and The Domari Cookbook, published by the Dom Research Center. There is also a children’s book in the works; based on a Gypsy folktale, it will be written in Domari (the Gypsy language), Arabic and English.

In March 2005, after operating out of Sleem’s living room for six years, the society opened the community center in the Herbawi building, opposite the Peace Medical Center; the Dom Research Center pays the rent.

One of the hairdressing students is Imen Sleem, 25. (Most Old City Gypsies are from the Sleem, Nemer and Barani clans.) As a child she wanted to be a teacher but had to drop out of school at 12 to help support her family; she worked in a sewing factory until it closed. Now she collects unemployment while attending the six-hour-a-week course. She lives with her parents and six brothers and sisters. Asked what her hopes for the future are, Sleem, smiling shyly, denies she has any. Still, she says, “I’m learning because I want my time to count, and I want a different career. I didn’t like factory work.”

The 2004 JDC-MATI study Gypsies in Jerusalem: A Population at Risk found that 43 percent of women and 37 percent of men have no formal education. Only 5 percent of women and 4 percent of men have a high school diploma. Until recently, none had a college education. The majority of women tend to the home, though several work as hospital cleaners.

A couple of women have nursing degrees, including Amoun Sleem’s sister Zarife, the first Gypsy in Israel to earn a university degree; a cousin received a degree in computer science last year (both studied at Al-Kuds University in East Jerusalem).

Some children have higher hopes than their parents. Leila Sleem, 9, has her heart set on becoming a doctor. “Gypsy women feel shy when they go to a man doctor,” she says, “so I’ll be a doctor for the Gypsy women.”

The center currently has two interns. Ariela “Mouna” Marshall, a student at the University of Hawaii, says she has had a lifelong fascination with and passion for all things Gypsy. She paints traditional Gypsy designs on clay vases for fundraisers and is also working on the children’s book and writing a biography of Amoun Sleem. Rena Lauer, a Princeton University graduate and New Israel Fund–Shatil Naomi Fein Social Justice Fellow, works on the Domari society’s Web site.

According to Lauer, the center has become a place where women can relax. “They come here and take off their hijab [head covering],” she explains. “What’s going on here is so important. To take a community that’s never been culturally active and to get them to participate in their own fate is an extremely slow process. People are just starting to get a sense of how to help themselves.”

Moving the community forward is a formidable challenge. As nomads, women helped in the fields, made clothes for the family, sheared sheep, spun wool and told fortunes. Men made sieves, drums and birdcages, raised horses and entertained with animals.

Scholars have argued about the origins of Gypsies for centuries, but most theories point to Egypt, India, Persia and Syria. Gypsies in the Middle East call themselves Dom, which means man. The word became Rom in Europe, hence the reference to some European Gypsies as Romani.

There is some consensus the Dom left India in several migratory waves between the 3rd and 10th centuries before settling in the Middle East. In addition to Israel, the West Bank and Gaza, Middle Eastern Dom can today be found in Cyprus, Iran, Iraq, Kurdistan, Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and Turkey.

In Jerusalem today 80 percent of Gypsy men are unemployed or without steady work. Eighty percent live on less than $500 a month. Those who do work are day laborers, plumbers or sanitation workers for the city. Women and children are often seen begging for money outside Lion’s Gate as crowds leave Al-Aksa Mosque.

The JDC-MATI study revealed the Gypsies’ difficult socioeconomic situation to be the result both of the cycle of poverty and the group’s cultural peculiarities: They live from day to day, don’t plan for the future and remain a closed group that fears any change will harm their unity and way of life.

Discrimination also impedes their efforts to find and keep a job. “Many of the Dom hide their identity in order to avoid the problems that so many Dom have experienced,” says Williams. “[In one case], when their ethnic identity was discovered, their employers refused to give them the promotions they deserved, as well as changing their work assignments so they had the worst schedules and tasks. All of this was done…to force them to resign.”

Extended families—parents, several children and grandparents—rent or own apartments; rooms and units are added helter-skelter to accommodate a new family. Seventy percent of the families (and 90 percent of those with nine or more children) live in one or two rooms. Many cook on a single burner while seated on the floor in a room that serves as kitchen, bedroom and living room.

The larger Dom communities in Gaza and Jordan have kept many of their traditions: Their colorful clothes are in evidence when they visit Jerusalem; women tell fortunes and perform the traditional songs and dances. But the Dom in Jerusalem gave that up, with the exception of the traditions of festive, weeklong weddings and monthlong community meals after a funeral.

The Dom prefer using natural remedies rather than conventional medicine and believe the land provides everything necessary for life and healing. Amoun Sleem remembers her grandmother gathering plants for herbal treatments every winter. The Domari Cookbook (which includes a history of the community) mentions using anise for colic and indigestion, orange-flower water for encouraging sleep, cardamom for colon spasms, cinnamon against the common cold and coriander to ease nervous tension.

While former generations married primarily within the tribe, young people are just beginning to venture outside the clan to find a mate. But most Arabs won’t marry Gypsies. Many adults, Amoun Sleem and her three sisters among them, remain unmarried because they understand the genetic risk of marrying other Gypsies—and the social problems of marrying Arabs.

“When you marry out,” Sleem says, “if something goes wrong, they say, ‘Ah, it’s because you are a Gypsy.’” Her three brothers, however, are married to Arabs.

There is tension in the Gypsy’s dual identity. Sleem says those who oppose her work want to forget the Gypsy ways. The Mukhtar, she says, “wants us to be seen as Palestinians. We are not Palestinians. We are not even Arabs.”

Sitting ramrod straight on a couch under a domed plaster ceiling in his small, windowless living room, the 71-year-old Mukhtar pulls out yellowed files that hold old, cracked photographs and documents, one of which is his grandfather’s 1928 appointment by the British as “Mukhtar of the Gypsy Tribe.” He and his family say there’s no prejudice against them and that they are “just like everyone else.”

They accuse Sleem of raising funds and not using them to benefit the community. She counters that the center’s books and activities are open to the public.

“We are like the Arabs, exactly,” says Aida, one of the Mukhtar’s daughters, as she brings sage tea to visitors and tends to her niece.

When asked if they are Arab, the Mukhtar, who is wearing the traditional checked Arab kefiya on his head, hesitates, then says, “We are Arab. Also Gypsy.”

But the Mukhtar clearly retains pride in his heritage. He says he would like the younger generation to know Domari, and he is working on a Domari-English-Arabic dictionary.

Back at the center, Amoun Sleem is full of dreams for the betterment of her community and believes Gypsies can learn from their neighbors. “Look at the Jews,” she says. “Wherever they are in the world, they concern themselves with being Jewish.”

The community is most responsive, Sleem says, when she has something tangible to give them, like food, blankets or winter clothes.

It’s harder to get women, most of whom cannot read or write, to come to literacy classes. “This is how the older ones live,” Sleem says. “They want to continue in this style. They don’t want change.”

Despite her efforts, it seems likely that the desire of many Gypsies to blend in with the Arab population will continue to erase what small traces remain of their culture.

But Sleem is not giving up. “I keep saying to people, I’m not a leader, I’m a person with a dream,” she asserts. “When we make a good name for the Gypsies, I’ll quit.”