An even more full day (Israel, Day 4, morning)

[rhu]

First, a picture of candlelighting from last night:


And (sorry for the motion blur, if I can take this again at a faster shutter speed I will):

Pizza Obama, on Derech Chevron, Talpiot, Jerusalem, Israel

And now, on to today. You thought Thursday was full?

The day started with worry. The kids all kept each other up way too late last night, and when we awakened them this morning, Alissa was so exhausted that she threw up. We let her go back to sleep, and decided to pile her in the car and see how she felt when we got to J'lem. Fortunately, when she woke up at 8:30 in the car, she was happy and cheerful and full of pep.

We parked in pretty much the same open-air shopping mall as on Thursday. The kids posed underneath the Israeli sevivon decoration and chanukiyah:
 

8:45am We had made arrangements for a private tour guide for the day. We met our guide, the wonderful Dani Barkai, on the pedestrian bridge into Yaffa Gate. From there, you can see the Montifiore windmill:



(I'll interject that we used Dani on our previous trip to Israel, and highly recommend him.)

So, because of the Israeli defensive attacks on Gaza, there was a general strike today by the Arabs. Which meant that the shuk, which had been crowded and bustling on Thursday, was deserted today:

  
 


9am Our first main stop for the day was the Church of the Sepulchre.

 

While we were standing outside, listening to Dani give us the history of the site, the Greek Orthodox procession left the church:

[Video in Picasa album]

I'm not going to write much about the Church itself, since you can read up on it elsewhere. And I don't think we had any particular experiences or insights there beyond the standard tourist reaction.


Golgotha


An old graffito, etched into the stair railing.

 
I was particularly taken with this representation of the fifteen Stations of the Cross on the wall of the Roman Catholic chapel.

After the Church of the Sepulchre, we walked back towards the Jewish Quarter. Here you can see the Cardo where it transitions between the Christian Quarter (which is closed for the strike) and the Jewish Quarter, in the distance, which is lit and open:



9:45am The Cardo was the main Roman street running through the city. (Most Roman cities had one.) After the Israelis recaptured this part of the city in 1967, the archaeologists got to work. They identified the walls of the city from the First Temple time, the Second Temple time, and layered above that were stones from the Roman Cardo (which was built after the Romans sacked J'lem, tore down the rubble, buried it, and built a brand-new city called Ælia Capitolina. That was later built upon by the Byzantines, the Ottomans, and after the archaeologists were done, a new shopping arcade was built, with windows showing the older parts. So in one spot, by looking down and around, one can see....


First-Temple period wall fragments (near the bottom of the ladder, 586 BCE)
Late Second-temple wall (to the middle of this picture, 66 CE)

 
Roman period wall segment (c. 150 CE) [left photo and foreground of right photo]
Byzantine columns [background of right photo]


Ottoman arches (lower, c. 17C CE)
Modern Israeli wall (upper, c. 1970 CE)

We walked along the Cardo; the far end of it has been preserved as an archaeological exhibit, rather than a shopping mall)


Heather, Alissa, Tani, and Dani; in the background you can see some of the recovered columns (half-height), the reconstructed columns (to the rear) supporting a roof as they would have 2,000 years ago.

10am After this, we looked at the Churvah synagogue, which is being reconstructed. Dani told us about the history of the building, which basically amounts to: Sephardic Jews were getting along well with the ruling Turks; Ashkenazic Jews weren't. The Ashkenazim wanted to build the biggest synagogue ever found in J'lem, even though it was bigger than they needed and more expensive than they could afford. (Sound familiar?) They ended up borrowing from the Turks, who turned into loan sharks and basically foreclosed on the building, tore it down, and banned Ashkenazic Jews from J'lem; any who were found would be arrested and ransomed to pay down the loan. (But the Turks remained on good terms with the Sepharadim.) Because the synagogue was destroyed, the site became known as the Churva (=ruin); when it was later rebuilt it retained the name, as well as the too large and too expensive bits. Then, in the 1948 War of Independence, the Jordanians blew up every synagogue and yeshiva they captured in an attempt to break the Israeli's spirits. The Churva was again in ruins. When the Israelis recaptured it in 1967, they restored a single arch. Now, once again, it's being restored, still known as the Churva. It's still too expensive, and there's not a local community to fill it, but the hope had been that it would serve as a synagogue for large programs such as Project Birthright. Unfortunately, with the Madoff collapse, Project Birthright is probably going to be canceled, and so the Churva will once again be unaffordable and unneeded.

 

A block away is the Broad Wall. This was part of the wall that was hastily erected in the 7th century BCE when the Assyrians threatened to capture Jerusalem. It worked, although probably because the Babylonians were threatening the Assyrians back home. In any case, the prophet Isaiah complained that the construction of the wall had subsumed the houses of the poor --- and when the archaeologists excavated the wall...



... they found that it was true:


The walls of houses that were intersected by the Broad Wall.

Walking towards our next stop, we saw a Bar Mitzvah celebration that looked a lot more like a wedding:



Water break, ATM break, and we let the kids buy sevivonim. Then up the stairs to see two of the other ruined shuls.

 
The Karaite synagoue. They apparently have a website


A better picture of the "aquarium" chanukiyot

In the middle of the street, where the 1948 ceasefire line is, there's an orange tree. The buildings to the left were not destroyed by the Jordanians; the buildings to the right were completely razed and are new construction.



11 am A story I had never heard. During the 1948 war, there were 1,300 Jews holed up in the Old City. Among them were 200 soldiers. They held off a large Jordanian force for a long time, but eventually they had to surrender. The Jordanians promised that they would imprison the soldiers, and let everyone else free; but when they discovered that they had been held off by only 200 soldiers, they couldn't face the humiliation they'd get back home so they carted off all 1,300 as POWs. There were 48 soldiers who had fallen, and the Jordanians left their bodies lying there. An Arab Moslem snuck into the area that night and buried them in a single mass grave, to at least give them what honorable burial he could. After 1967, the Israelis recovered their remains; since burial within a city is against halacha, the bones (which was all that remained) were moved to a grave in an honored location on the Mount of Olives; what remains where they were was this "Gal Ed", a "stone of witness":



Around the corner is an open yard, which is shared by a Chareidi school and a Dati school. These buildings had been homeless shelters, endowed by the Rothschilds, before 1948. Because they had been homeless shelters, they were in the least prestigious part of the city --- that is, right by the outer walls. And because of that, they were behind the cease-fire line. And because of that, they were among the few buildings that weren't destroyed.

 
Kids playing soccer on their day off from school (video) [left]
The Rothschild shield atop the entrance to the homeless shelter [right]

Next, we walked through some narrow streets

 

to the four Sephardic synagogues



These are several hundred years old, fascinating, and gorgeous. (I'd never been to them before.) When the Jews were kicked out of Spain, the Turks basically said "Hey, these people can read and write. We want them to help our economy grow."

The first one we saw is, according to tradition, the bet sefer of Rabbi Yocahnan ben Zakai. Fans of the Dafcast may remember the story of how he escaped from Jerusalem just before its destruction by the Romans. The synagogue was damaged but not destroyed in the 1948 war, and has been restored and is once again in active use.

  

They have a shelf in the window which contains a shofar and an amphora of olive oil. They have a tradition that the Messiah will come from the direction which will lead to their corner of Jerusalem, and they need to be prepared for his arrival, with a shofar to proclaim it and oil to anoint him as king.



The second synagogue we visited in the complex was actually the last one built. It's called the "synagogue in the middle" because it was constructed by covering over the courtyard that separated the other three synagogues. As Dani put it, each of the other three had a constituency with specific geographic origins; they built the "synagogue in the middle" for the "none of the aboves." This synagogue is the only one of the four no longer in active use.

 

The story behind the Aron Kodesh (ark for the Torah scrolls) is amazing. After the 1967 war, a single Israeli soldier was curious enough to wander alone through the Moslem quarter. A shopkeeper said to him, "Psst, Jew. I have something for you." He followed him to the store's storeroom, where the Arab said "I had Jewish friends here before 1948, and when they fled, they left this behind. I know it's important to you. Take it."

The third synagogue we visited in this complex was the Istanbul synagogue (for Jews originally from Turkey.) On the base of its prayer platform, which comes originally from Italy, is a depiction of "the image of the Holy Temple in Jerusalem" which, of course, looks nothing like the Beit Hamiqdash and everything like a typical Italian synagogue.

  

Finally, we visited the oldest of the four, the synagogue of Elijah the Prophet. Tradition holds that when the Jews were allowed back in to Jerusalem in the 16th century, they gathered for prayers on Kol Nidre night and only had nine men. Just as they despaired of getting a minyan, and considered going back to the diaspora, a mysterious figure emerged from the mist, prayed with them, and then disappeared 25 hours later before they could ask his name. They dedicated this shul to Elijah the Prophet, and kept the chair in which the mysterious stranger had sat, using it as the kiseh Eliyahu for all brits. The chair was destroyed by the Jordanians, but they have another old chair now kept in the same place, and used for the same purpose.

 

Noon Back to the Cardo for lunch. Pizza for the kids, and felafel for us. Ooooh, that was good felafel.

This is getting long, so I think I'll break it into two posts.

Comments

[elainetyger.livejournal.com]

Thanks for all the cool pictures.

[530nm330hz.livejournal.com]

I thought of you every time I included a picture of a sign. :-)