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directly across at the Old City walls and the gateway to the Christian Quarter. Israeli soldiers used the hospital rooftop to keep watch on Jordanian Legionnaires on the Old City wall ramparts 100 feet away. This section of No Man’s Land was one of the most volatile. Coils upon coils of barbed wire stretched along the street. More than one person at the hospital was hit by errant bullets over the years. In the hospital’s church, the stained-glass image of St. Francis of Assisi took a bullet hole right through his heart. Nuns, doctors and patients all entered the hospital from the back. The entrance facing the Old City, with stairs leading right onto No Man’s Land, was closed off. Going out that door could be deadly.
    So when Miriam’s dentures tumbled out a window and into No Man’s Land that day in May, it seemed like a lost cause. It was spring, and Miriam was sitting by a window overlooking the border. She accidentally coughed her dentures into a piece of paper and threw them out the window. The paper fell into the weeds and trash below. By the time Miriam realized she’d tossed her dentures into No Man’s Land, there was nothing she could do. Miriam was distraught. She refused to speak for days. 14
    The nuns came up with an improbable solution: Why not ask Israel and Jordan to declare a cease-fire so the UN could send a search party into No Man’s Land to recover the dentures? In a rare moment of unity, both armies agreed to hold their fire so the UN could rescue the dentures.
    With Jordanian Legionnaires watching from the Old City walls on the other side of No Man’s Land, a French officer carrying a white flag led five nuns and an Israeli soldier into the rubble to hunt for the false teeth. It wasn’t an easy mission. The street between the hospital and the Old City was cluttered with boulders, trash, overgrown bushes, shrapnel and, quite possibly, unexploded mines from the 1948 war. Miriam kept watch on the search from the hospital windows above.
    â€œIt was like looking for a needle in a haystack,” said Rubinger, who took photos of the unusual rescue party.
    Dressed in their white habits with their distinctive Flying Nun –esque hooded cowls, the women picked through the detritus without any luck. As the minutes dragged on, the search seemed futile. Then one of the nuns spotted something in the grass, rummaged through the garbage and hoisted the dentures into the air. Smiling, Sister Augustine triumphantly showed the dentures to Miriam looking down from the window above as Rubinger snapped photos. When the pictures appeared in Life magazine, the French commander who led the search party complained that it made him look like a fool.
    â€œIt is not fitting for a French commandant to be seen looking for false teeth,” the French officer told Rubinger. *
    The incident came to define the hospital and the small ways Israel and Jordan were able to find common ground, at least for some false teeth.
    â€œFor humanitarian reasons, you can do a lot, even in a time of war,” said Sister Monika Duellmann, who took over as director of the French hospital in 2004. “It’s difficult to get a cease-fire that will hold, and they got one for the teeth—because it’s not political and it’s not religious.”
    Rubinger, arguably Israel’s most famous photojournalist, often sought out surreal stories along the jagged dividing line. The photographer went everywhere he could go. One place he always worried about entering was No Man’s Land.
    â€œIt wasn’t very good for your health to go to No Man’s Land,” Rubinger said. “It was easier to get to the moon than it was to get across the border.”
    Seven months after the search for the dentures, Rubinger got a chance to get another look at No Man’s Land. In December 1956, faced with a growing wild dog problem in the city, Israel and Jordan agreed to join forces to lay out