Jerusalem ? Teddy Kollek, the courtly, cigar-chomping mayor whose 28-year tenure oversaw the reunification of Jerusalem after the 1967 Middle East War and championed coexistence of its Jewish and Arab populations, died Tuesday. He was 95, one of Israel’s oldest remaining founding fathers.

Israel Radio said Kollek would be given a state funeral Thursday.

Kollek became mayor of Jewish West Jerusalem in 1965, when the city was divided between Israeli and Jordanian rule by barbed wire and machine-gun posts. After Israel captured East Jerusalem from the Arabs two years later, he presided over the city’s most ambitious string of building and restoration ventures in four centuries.

He practiced pragmatic rule in a city that, through history, has been torn by ethnic and religious rivalries. Guided by a vision of a united city with disparate groups living in separate but equal communities, he lobbied to bring voting rights, access to schools, religious freedom and social-welfare benefits to its poorer Arab minority.

Kollek was the “mayor of all mayors,” said Ed Koch, the former mayor of New York.