JERUSALEM — Teddy Kollek, the legendary Jerusalem mayor who presided over the reunification of the city after the 1967 Mideast war and tried to balance the needs of its split Jewish and Arab populations, died yesterday at the age of 95.

Kollek died of natural causes, according to the Jerusalem Foundation, a charity he founded 40 years ago.

Kollek needed all his celebrated energy, will, and mastery of public relations in the nearly three decades that he was mayor, walking a tightrope between Israeli and Palestinian national aspirations and between rival religious and ethnic groups within the two communities.

The courtly, portly central European charmer oversaw a city famed for disputes, where even repairing a road can provoke angry arguments between Israelis and Arabs, secular and religious Jews, or differing schools of archaeologists.

He is expected to be buried in a state funeral in Jerusalem on Thursday, Israel Radio reported. Flags over city hall were lowered to half-staff following news of his death.

“The name of Kollek will remain forever a part of the Jerusalem scene,” Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, who in 1993 defeated Kollek in his seventh bid for mayor, said. “The government and people of Israel bow their heads in deep sorrow at the passing of one of the giants among the founding fathers of the state.”

Kollek liked to be called Teddy by all, and during his long years in office, he walked the streets without a bodyguard. Although deemed Jerusalem’s greatest builder since King Herod, his home number was in the phone book for complaints about potholes or pleas for a new playground.

When Kollek took office in 1965, Jerusalem was still divided between Israeli and Jordanian rule, with its center a no man’s land of barbed wire and machine-gun posts.

In the 1967 war, Israel seized all and annexed the Arab eastern part. Kollek became known as a builder, pushing to create museums, gardens, and promenades.

He preached fairness to the city’s Arabs but said Jerusalem should remain under Israel’s sovereignty — despite the Palestinians’ demand that the Arab part of the city become the capital of their would-be state.

“Jerusalem’s people of differing faiths, cultures and aspirations must find peaceful ways to live together other than by drawing a line in the sand,” Kollek once wrote.

He fought attempts by zealous Jews to move into the Muslim quarter of the walled Old City, but defended the practice of developing Jewish suburbs around the eastern Arab sector to prevent it from escaping Israel’s rule.