Based on a report (in Hebrew) by Ranit Nachum-Halevy, The Marker – 23 Sept 2009
www.themarker.com/tmc/article.jhtml?ElementId=skira20090923_1116227
Elias Mughanam's Talbiyeh house - Jerusalem
Anyone looking for an antique house from the 1920s in the Talbiyeh neighborhood of West Jerusalem can find one, priced at US$9,000,000. The house is owned by the widow of professor Dan Patenkin, the founder of the Economics Department at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.
The house was built, in great luxury, in the late 1920s by the Christian Palestinian family headed by Elias Mughanam, a lawyer who was the secretary of the Palestinian Congress. The two-story 300 square meter house is on a parcel of 580 square meter; it has a tile roof and arched windows.
Today, Talbiyeh is West Jerusalem’s most desirable neighborhood, with very expensive properties, beyond the reach of most Israelis. The neighborhood is dominated by Arab houses built before 1948 – all of them lost to their original Palestinian owners. Among them is the house of Edward Said’s family.
US$9,000,000 is not a bad return for what was, 61 years ago, a free or nearly-free house for the professor.
