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Edmonton Journal, June 13, 2009
Awestruck in Jerusalem
Somewhere in the Muslim Quarter
of Old Jerusalem—in the shadow of the Temple Mount—I wandered into
a shop chock-a-block with icon paintings.
The proprietor told me that immigrating Jews had brought most of the luminous, hand-painted works from Russia. I eyed one featuring two old-world religious figures, and asked the price. $150, he said. I’d be back, I vowed to myself.
Jerusalem’s Old City, while less than a square kilometre in area, is labyrinthine. Inside a four-kilometre-long wall built in the 16th century—with seven open gates, from Jaffa Gate in the west to Herod’s Gate, facing Arab East Jerusalem—are four districts of “quarters”—Christian, Jewish, Muslim and Armenian.
To an outsider, the quarters seem to morph into one another. A square or plaza opens into a byway that ends in a quiet residential enclave, or segues into a subterranean avenue or “cardo” used by the Romans. Suddenly, you’re looking at the Temple Mount with its golden Dome of the Rock, and the Western Wall, lined with Jews at prayer.
Excavated tunnels will guide you under the Temple Mount, then onto the Via Dolorosa—the route purported to have been used to Jesus on the way to Calvary. Yet—even with its 14 Stations of the Cross—this evocative series of cobblestone alleys runs smack through the Arab marketplace.
With more than 3,000 years of history, and built almost entirely of a gorgeous whitish limestone, Jerusalem dazzles. And confuses. Best to leave the map in your bag, and just walk. If you get lost, you’ll ultimately come out near one of the gates.
But there’s more to Jerusalem than the historic sector. All around it ripple dry hills dotted with cypress trees, and exploding with newly built (if controversial) Jewish neighbourhoods. Between these hills extend deep, verdant and desirable valleys.
To the south lies the City of David, believed to have been an ancient Canaanite settlement, and the oldest part of the city. East Jerusalem, part of Jordan before the Six-Day War of 1967, remains predominantly Arab.
The Mount of Olives—where, according to the Old Testament, the Messiah will return to raise the dead, and thus a favoured burial ground for Jews—offers fine views of the Old City. This “mount” is also the site of numerous churches and tombs, including one associated with the Virgin Mary.
From the lovely Jerusalem Forest in the west of the city, emerges Yad Vashem, the Israeli museum devoted to the six million Jews who died at the hands of the Nazis.
Designed by architect Moshe Safdie, the building is dramatically stark and modern. Inside, a series of “chambers”— each with exceptional historic photos, grainy film strips made at the time, and other artifacts—cover each phase of the Holocaust.
At the end you enter
the Hall of Names, where photos of 600 Jews who perished line a 10-metre-high
inverted dome. Surrounding shelves, all black, serve as a repository of files
that document the fate of three million victims. Still empty shelves speak of
those who remain unidentified.
We dined one night at the Olive & Fish Restaurant in the German Colony, named for a messianic German Protestant sect that settled here in the 19th century, and now an affluent neighborhood. As is common in trendy Israeli restaurants, the meal included a beguiling array of Middle Eastern tapas dishes, followed by a meat or fish entrée, and finally a shared spread of deserts.
And near our oh-so-gorgeous David Citadel Hotel, close to the Jaffa Gate, I found chic little shops in the luxury Mamilla centre. But the Old City always beckoned.
Enter at the Dung Gate, so-named for the fact that it was once a rubbish dump, and you’ll approach the Temple Mount—topped with the glittery Dome of the Rock.
Jews consider this giant slab of rock—the site of Solomon’s First Temple, and once containing the Ark of the Covenant, then by the Second Temple, destroyed by the Romans in 66 AD —the foundation of the world.
After the 7th century, the conquering Muslims built the Dome of the Rock, today both one of the holiest Muslim of places and a shimmering symbol of the city, and the adjacent Al-Aqsa Mosque, with enough space for 5,000 worshippers.
All that’s left of the Second Temple is the Western or Wailing Wall. And from dawn to dusk, Orthodox Jews—mostly men in long black coats and broad-brimmed, round-crowned hats, curls of hair falling by the ears, but also women in old-fashioned dress—chant and bob before the wall, mourning or “wailing” their historic loss.
Orthodox Jews resent Muslim control of the top of the Temple Mount. Many Muslims feel similarly about Jewish excavations underneath.
Today you can join a tour through the tunnels that run the length of the Wall, burrowing down to streets and cisterns dating to the era of King Herod. At a spot along this interior, believed to be near the heart of the former Jewish temple, young devotees worship. Meanwhile, outside the exposed south wall of the Temple Mount, a platoon of young female Israeli soldiers set aside their automatic rifles to eat lunch in the sun.
Needless to say, the entire precinct elicits a certain, well, intensity.
The Church of the Holy Sepulchre, famously co-managed by Christian Orthodox, Armenian and Roman Catholic orders, is a thousand years old. Step inside this evocative matrix of chapels, alters, arcades and steps that descend to what is believed to be the site of Jesus’ crucifixion, and you’re in another time zone.
On a first visit, the crowds and darkness threw me off. But on our final day in Jerusalem, I found the lineup into the central mini-chapel of two small rooms, the second containing what’s said to be the tomb of Christ, reasonably do-able.
While a Russian tour guide bellowed at her waiting charges, a big bear of a Greek Orthodox priest, patient and warm, invited us—three or four at a time—to enter the tomb though an opening so low that you had to stoop.
In the inner sanctum, two pilgrims knelt and prayed, while my friend and I simply stood awestruck at the glittering icons and Byzantine décor.
I felt, for a fleeting moment, that I’d mastered Old Jerusalem. As for the icon shop that I’d vowed and tried to get back to, I simply couldn’t find it.
The proprietor told me that immigrating Jews had brought most of the luminous, hand-painted works from Russia. I eyed one featuring two old-world religious figures, and asked the price. $150, he said. I’d be back, I vowed to myself.
Jerusalem’s Old City, while less than a square kilometre in area, is labyrinthine. Inside a four-kilometre-long wall built in the 16th century—with seven open gates, from Jaffa Gate in the west to Herod’s Gate, facing Arab East Jerusalem—are four districts of “quarters”—Christian, Jewish, Muslim and Armenian.
To an outsider, the quarters seem to morph into one another. A square or plaza opens into a byway that ends in a quiet residential enclave, or segues into a subterranean avenue or “cardo” used by the Romans. Suddenly, you’re looking at the Temple Mount with its golden Dome of the Rock, and the Western Wall, lined with Jews at prayer.
Excavated tunnels will guide you under the Temple Mount, then onto the Via Dolorosa—the route purported to have been used to Jesus on the way to Calvary. Yet—even with its 14 Stations of the Cross—this evocative series of cobblestone alleys runs smack through the Arab marketplace.
With more than 3,000 years of history, and built almost entirely of a gorgeous whitish limestone, Jerusalem dazzles. And confuses. Best to leave the map in your bag, and just walk. If you get lost, you’ll ultimately come out near one of the gates.
But there’s more to Jerusalem than the historic sector. All around it ripple dry hills dotted with cypress trees, and exploding with newly built (if controversial) Jewish neighbourhoods. Between these hills extend deep, verdant and desirable valleys.
To the south lies the City of David, believed to have been an ancient Canaanite settlement, and the oldest part of the city. East Jerusalem, part of Jordan before the Six-Day War of 1967, remains predominantly Arab.
The Mount of Olives—where, according to the Old Testament, the Messiah will return to raise the dead, and thus a favoured burial ground for Jews—offers fine views of the Old City. This “mount” is also the site of numerous churches and tombs, including one associated with the Virgin Mary.
From the lovely Jerusalem Forest in the west of the city, emerges Yad Vashem, the Israeli museum devoted to the six million Jews who died at the hands of the Nazis.
Designed by architect Moshe Safdie, the building is dramatically stark and modern. Inside, a series of “chambers”— each with exceptional historic photos, grainy film strips made at the time, and other artifacts—cover each phase of the Holocaust.
At the end you enter
the Hall of Names, where photos of 600 Jews who perished line a 10-metre-high
inverted dome. Surrounding shelves, all black, serve as a repository of files
that document the fate of three million victims. Still empty shelves speak of
those who remain unidentified.We dined one night at the Olive & Fish Restaurant in the German Colony, named for a messianic German Protestant sect that settled here in the 19th century, and now an affluent neighborhood. As is common in trendy Israeli restaurants, the meal included a beguiling array of Middle Eastern tapas dishes, followed by a meat or fish entrée, and finally a shared spread of deserts.
And near our oh-so-gorgeous David Citadel Hotel, close to the Jaffa Gate, I found chic little shops in the luxury Mamilla centre. But the Old City always beckoned.
Enter at the Dung Gate, so-named for the fact that it was once a rubbish dump, and you’ll approach the Temple Mount—topped with the glittery Dome of the Rock.
Jews consider this giant slab of rock—the site of Solomon’s First Temple, and once containing the Ark of the Covenant, then by the Second Temple, destroyed by the Romans in 66 AD —the foundation of the world.
After the 7th century, the conquering Muslims built the Dome of the Rock, today both one of the holiest Muslim of places and a shimmering symbol of the city, and the adjacent Al-Aqsa Mosque, with enough space for 5,000 worshippers.
All that’s left of the Second Temple is the Western or Wailing Wall. And from dawn to dusk, Orthodox Jews—mostly men in long black coats and broad-brimmed, round-crowned hats, curls of hair falling by the ears, but also women in old-fashioned dress—chant and bob before the wall, mourning or “wailing” their historic loss.
Orthodox Jews resent Muslim control of the top of the Temple Mount. Many Muslims feel similarly about Jewish excavations underneath.
Today you can join a tour through the tunnels that run the length of the Wall, burrowing down to streets and cisterns dating to the era of King Herod. At a spot along this interior, believed to be near the heart of the former Jewish temple, young devotees worship. Meanwhile, outside the exposed south wall of the Temple Mount, a platoon of young female Israeli soldiers set aside their automatic rifles to eat lunch in the sun.
Needless to say, the entire precinct elicits a certain, well, intensity.
The Church of the Holy Sepulchre, famously co-managed by Christian Orthodox, Armenian and Roman Catholic orders, is a thousand years old. Step inside this evocative matrix of chapels, alters, arcades and steps that descend to what is believed to be the site of Jesus’ crucifixion, and you’re in another time zone.
On a first visit, the crowds and darkness threw me off. But on our final day in Jerusalem, I found the lineup into the central mini-chapel of two small rooms, the second containing what’s said to be the tomb of Christ, reasonably do-able.
While a Russian tour guide bellowed at her waiting charges, a big bear of a Greek Orthodox priest, patient and warm, invited us—three or four at a time—to enter the tomb though an opening so low that you had to stoop.
In the inner sanctum, two pilgrims knelt and prayed, while my friend and I simply stood awestruck at the glittering icons and Byzantine décor.
I felt, for a fleeting moment, that I’d mastered Old Jerusalem. As for the icon shop that I’d vowed and tried to get back to, I simply couldn’t find it.