Today we were off on the bus at 7:45 am after breakfast at the hotel. Our hotel, the Prima Royale Hotel has a fantastic spread of foods for breakfast ranging from what we would consider conventional for breakfast to middle eastern. I've taken a liking to to halva, a sesame paste candy. You would be hard pressed to leave hungry after visiting their breakfast dining room.
Our first stop today was at the Mount of Olives, also known as Mount Zion There we saw the
Chapel of the Ascension, a Muslim holy site that is open to Christians, where Christ ascended into heaven. In the Muslim faith, Jesus is regarded as a great prophet. The complex began as a Christian church in the 4th century, rebuilt in the 7th century, destroyed by the Muslims, reconstructed in the 12th century by the Crusaders, and then destroyed after the Muslim's conquest of Jerusalem in 1187. It was rebuilt as a mosque and then opened to permit Christians to visit, as they are today. In the walled enclosure around the chapel, there are three altars - Coptic, Armenian, and Syrian.
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| The Chapel of the Ascension on the Mount of Olives |
Then we walked over to the Church of the Pater Nostre that is built over the cave where tradition says Jesus taught the Our Father, or Pater Noster in Latin. On the walls surrounding the church are dozens of the Our Father prayer in a multitude of languages including Cree. We visited a grotto underneath the church where the cave is located.
The road that goes by this and other holy sites on the Mount of Olives was full of travel buses resulting in heavy traffic. The road was not sized to handle the number of buses resulting in buses stopping briefly to let pilgrims out and tempers fraying and horns blaring from the drivers of the local vehicles using the road.
The road overlooks the Old City of Jerusalem. You could clearly see Temple Mount and the Dome of the Rock, Beneath the road was a large Jewish cemetery and across the valley was the large Muslim cemetery just outside the eastern wall of the Old City. Our group lingered several minutes to see the vista and take pictures.
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| View from the west of the Eastern Wall of the Old City |
Walking we passed by the tomb of Absolom (at least that's what the sign on the wall said), David's son that rebelled against him. Next we briefly stopped at a burial site from the first to fourth centuries CE with Judeo-Christian ossuaries (stone boxes containing the bones of a person which were collected from a temporary grave after a period of time to allow the flesh to decay away) of the first and second centuries. From the sidewalk, the building over the burial site had a semicircular arch with a grating that allowed us to see twenty or more ossuaries in the excavation.
We then walked a short distance to the
Dominus Flevit (translated "the Lord wept") Chruch - the place where Jesus, on his way to Jerusalem was overwhelmed and wept prophesying the destruction of the Temple (
Luke 19:37-42) on Palm Sunday. The church dates back at least to the 7th century, CE and has a mosaic floor from this Byzantine era. The modern church, built during the 1950's was designed by Italian architect
Antonio Barluzzi, who designed a number of churches in the Holy Land between the 1920s and 1950s (many of which we have seen). The design of the dome was built to resemble a tear but I personally couldn't associate the shape with a teardrop.
Next was the Garden of Gethsemane where Jesus prayed with his disciples before he was arrested and taken to see the High Priest. The
olive trees in the garden are very old and said to date back to the time of Jesus. They are very gnarled and have hollow cores. Our guide noted that when the Romans destroyed Jerusalem in 70 CE, they cut down all the olive trees in and around Jerusalem. A more thorough discuss of the pedigree of these olive trees is found in the
previous hyperlink.
Adjacent to the Garden was the Church of All Nations, or the Church of the Agony, Dating back to the fourth century CE, it enshrines a rock where Jesus prayed before his arrest in the Garden. The current church was built in the early 1920s (and designed by Barluzzi) with funds from twelve nations (hence its name) and features brilliant mosaics in the ceiling domes and in the apses (or niches at the front and side of the church).
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| View to the front of the Church of the Nations |
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| One of the domes in the church ceiling |
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| Windows along one side of the Church of the Nations |
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| Mosaic over the entrance to the Church of All Nations |
We then boarded the tour bus to take us to the Church of St Peter in Gallicantu (meaning cocks crow), where Peter denied Jesus 3 times in the house of the High Priest Caiaphas. This church, on Mount Zion, dates back to the fifth century CE and went through the destruction/rebuilt cycle of many of the ancient Christian churches in the Holy Land. This beautiful church features a number of beautiful art works. We were fortunate to be able to celebrate Mass in the lower chapel which features a hole that it is said that Christ was lowered through into the dungeon below.
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| Main altar of the Church of St Peter in Gallicantu |
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| Cross in the ceiling of the Church of St Peter in Gallicantu. |
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| Fr. John celebrating Mass with our group of pilgrims |
The
Church of the Dormition, also on Mount Zion and also dating back to the fifth century CE, is believed to be the site where Mary was assumed into heaven after she died. The church's lower crypt has a carved horizontal wooden statue of Mary with a mosaic of Jesus with his arms outstretched and the women of the Old Testament in the dome above the statue.
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| Jesus (center) with Women of the Old Testament Surrounding Above the Horizontal Statue of Mary |
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| Statue of Mary after her death before her assumption into heaven |
Unfortunately, time is running late so I will have to be terse concerning our next visits.
Following the Church of the Dormition we bused over to the site of the
Upper Room where the Last Supper was held, as well as the room where Jesus first made his appearance to the disciples, and later when Pentecost occurred. The link above describes the room as well as the problems with the politics of administering it for Christians and Muslims.
"Above it [i.e. the upper room] is the minaret of a Muslim mosque; immediately beneath it is the Jewish shrine venerated as the Tomb of King David (though he is not buried there)."
Since the
Tomb of David, as venerated by some Jews, was beneath the upper room, we briefly toured the site. The tomb area is divided into two areas - one for men and one for women. The men could wear a kippah (in Yiddish it's called a yarmulke) or skullcap. We were not allowed to take pictures.
Following this we went to a nearby Kibbutz that features a hotel and large cafeteria for a late lunch.
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| Entrance to the Kibbutz Ramat Rache hotel/cafeteria complex |
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| View of the large cafeteria at the kibbutz |
Following this, we dropped by the new United States Embassy in Jerusalem. Despite much controversy, the United States Government moved its Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem in
2018. Only the U.S. and Guatamala have their embassies in Jerusalem. The security guard that met us when we clambered out of the tour bus indicated that no pictures were to be taken of the embassy as a whole, or any parts of it except for the great seal and the dedication, or the green apple sculpture sitting out in front of the embassy. When I started taking a picture of the signage (below), the guard quickly came up to me asking me to put the camera down. When I indicated I was only photographing the sign, he relented and allowed me to take the photograph. While the move to Jerusalem was widely criticized by the rest of the world, it did mean a lot to the state of Israel.
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| The great seal of the U.S. with dedication stone beneath it. |
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| Sign in front of the U.S. Embassy. Note the small sign and the dedication of the square by Israel to Donald Trump |
Following this we snapped some pictures of East Jerusalem across the valley from the embassy.
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| View of the Mount of Olives |
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| View of the Russian Orthodox Church of Mary Magdalene. Our group only glimpsed the gold onion shaped domes of the church through the trees from higher on the Mount of Olives. |
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| Close-up view of the Dome of the Rock and the Al-Aqsa Mosque |
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| Left to right: Our tour organizer, Miki, Fr. John, our Israeli guide, Etty. |
We ended our day at about 3 pm back at the hotel.
Bringing this to a close I wish you good night from Jerusalem.
