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With just days to go before the 2011-12 school year starts up, Jerusalem's teenagers are making the most of their waning summer freedom. For some Jerusalem youth, that means heading to the nearest pool or spending their days in the comfortably air-conditioned mall. For others, a grittier outdoor sport beckons.

Despite the challenges of construction, safety and an often hostile non-skater population, Jerusalem skateboarders soldier on. A little known subculture that keeps moving along on the city's streets and sidewalks, Jerusalem's skateboarding scene has high hopes for the new skateboard park slated to open in Jerusalem's Liberty Bell Park at some point in the possibly not-too-distant future.

"Skaters in Jerusalem live against a backdrop that is always changing," Gili Levi, proprietor of Gili's Skateboards on downtown's Shamai St. asserts to GoJerusalem.com. "There are times when the streets are not safe, when the security situation is bad. Right now we are in a city that is becoming more and more religious, and the larger population doesn't always accept skating, because it's a very secular sport. In the rest of Israel, cities have built skating parks while Jerusalem still has not.

The shop walls over-crowded with stickers, board parts and racks of tee shirts, Gili's Skateboards serves as the community hub for the skaters of Jerusalem. "The skater community has some Jerusalem-specific issues to deal with," says Levi, "but the community itself is the same - young, slightly alternative. Tt's only the outside circumstances that are different."

Internationally, skaters are generally seen as agitators and outlaws, an image which Levi spins positively. "These kids are rebels, but I don't see anything bad in being a rebel," he says. "I think it's good even. They aren't rebels in the form of anarchists or trouble makers; it's just kids who want to be what they want to be and not what others want them to be. If this isn't a legitimate form of expression, then we don't live in a democracy - we live in Iran."

Skaters and other fringe counter-cultural movements have been feeling increasingly welcome in the Holy City. The Jerusalem city government has, in recent years, become more friendly to youth and has even hosted some "extreme sporting" events.

While many city governments are hated by skaters for being too restrictive of skating venues and safety regulations, the process of planning the new Jerusalem skating park reveals a paradigm shift. "We went through a very long process with the municipality to get them to build a park, and we are very happy about it," says Levi. "There has definitely been a change since [Mayor Nir] Barkat took control. He listens to us, and we have really felt a difference. We hope that the municipality will see the potential with this sport. It's not basketball or soccer, but we need a space as well. Right now there are no real places to skate. There's the street."

With the new park come new hopes for the community, which has seen its numbers diminish in recent years. According to Levi, "Jerusalem's skater community is about 50 people right now. In the past, it was closer to 150, but it's gotten smaller. We haven't developed; skating in Jerusalem hasn't turned into what it is in the rest of the world. We give them support at the store, and we hope that the new skating park will help pique interest in skating again."