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Virtual Israel Experience |
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Jerusalem
When you drive up the main road from the airport and Tel Aviv into the mountains, you might expect some major landmark to welcome you to Jerusalem, but it's not like crossing the Golden Gate Bridge to enter San Francisco, spying the Empire State Building on the way to Manhattan, riding down the Champs-Elysées into the heart of Paris or taking the vaporetto across a canal into Venice. The entrance to Jerusalem is more abrupt; one minute you're on the highway and the next you've been transported to a different world. Almost immediately you find yourself on narrow streets with low-level buildings, many dating back decades. The sidewalks are typically filled with people scurrying about, hasidim in their distinctive garb, students dressed like students anywhere, soldiers with guns casually slung over one soldier and a knapsack over the other. The unparalleled mixture of the ancient and modern, the secular and religious is apparent at once. You feel that something is different and, intellectually and spiritually, you know this is a place unlike any other. One of its many unique qualities is that Jerusalem almost completely shuts down on Shabbat. This is a time of incredible quiet, like nothing you can experience in any other major city, when the observant Jews head for the Western Wall, synagogues and family gatherings, and less observant Jews enjoy their one day off from work, spend the day with their families, relax and take in the breathtaking beauty of the city. A handful of restaurants stay open and people still roam the streets, but most activity ends mid-day Friday and doesn't pick up again until after dark on Saturday. Jerusalem is the largest city in Israel and the nation's capital. It is a place where you can have fun, but it is more spiritual than spirited. Of course, sometimes the spirit moves people a little too far. In fact, psychologists have identified something they call the "Jerusalem syndrome" to describe people who become so intoxicated with the city they act irrationally, sometimes to the point of believing themselves to be the messiah. For purposes of this tour, we’ve divided the city into four sections. The first offers an overview of the city's long and rich history. This includes a discussion of the current controversy over the future of the city. The next stop is the Old City, roughly 220 acres surrounded by walls built by Suleiman the Magnificent in the 16th century. This is the heart of the city and has both political and religious significance. The Old City is divided into quarters — Jewish, Armenian, Muslim and Christian. The holiest place for Jews is the Western Wall in the Jewish Quarter. Two of Islam’s most important shrines, the Dome of the Rock and al-Aksa Mosque are in the Muslim Quarter on the Temple Mount. The Church of the Holy Sepulcher in the Christian Quarter is revered by Christians as the site of the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Here you can imagine life centuries ago and even walk on original 2,000-year-old stones. The neighborhoods beyond the Old City walls include Yemin Moshe, the first Jewish neighborhood built outside the walls, which is identifiable by its distinctive – and unusable – windmill; Mount Scopus, home of the Hebrew University; the Mount of Olives, the site of several important Christian shrines and the cemetery where Jews have buried their dead for centuries and Mea She’arim, an island in time where ultra-Orthodox Jews dress and behave in traditional ways and strictly observe Jewish law. The "new" city is the more modern part of Jerusalem that was mostly built after Jordan occupied the Old City and the rest of the eastern half of the city following the 1948 war. This is where Israel has established most of its government offices, including the Knesset and the magnificent new Supreme Court building. It is also where you can find the world-renowned Hadassah Hospital, with its famous Chagall windows; Mt. Herzl, the final resting place of most of Israel’s leaders and Yad Vashem, Israel museum and memorial to the Holocaust. Most visitors stay in this part of the city, which also has beautiful parks and a lively downtown with clubs, shops and restaurants. For believers, this is the place where the call to God is a local one. For everyone else, it is a place of great beauty and history that is unlike anywhere else on earth.
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Copyright 2008 The American-Israeli Cooperative Enterprise | |||||||||||||||||||||