Two domes, one crescent and one cross

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In honor of Ramadan, which begins on Thursday, here is a favorite shot of the Dome of the Rock.
It is a Muslim shrine (not a mosque), built in 687-691 by the ninth Omayyad caliph, Abd al-Malik.
I took this picture in December 2008 from the roof of the Ecce Homo Convent.
The grey dome with the cross belongs to their church. 
On the left of the photo is the Mount of Olives.
All the houses of worship and the holy places are packed together in Jerusalem's Old City, area less than one square kilometer.
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(Linking to inSPIREd Sunday.  Lots of nice churches at the meme; have a look.)
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Jerusalem of White

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A friend who lives in Jerusalem started out early in the morning yesterday to capture all the beautiful snow-clad places, and now she graciously shares them with you and me.
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Click and then click again to enlarge her photos. 

The tram had its first baptism of snow!
And to encourage people not to attempt to drive on the slippery roads, the tram was free of charge for a few days. 

The yellow JCB doubled as a snowplow.
The Municipality was ready with tons of salt to spread, too.
They had fifty vehicles dedicated to the one rare snow day.

We got about 25 cm or 10 inches of snow.
The palm trees at Safra Square, City Hall, took it well. 

Everybody was excited about our snow.

Families worked together to build snowmen, this one near Jaffa Gate.

People kept on praying.
The Western Wall is never alone.

From the rooftops of the Old City, the gorgeous view of a white Mount of Olives and the golden dome of the Dome of the Rock powdered with snow!
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Thank you, Friend, for these rare photographs.
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Pictures of my white village in the snowy Jerusalem Hills are in yesterday's post.
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Dean and Dina do archaeology

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It's National Archaeology Day today in many parts of the world.
Click on the map to find activities to attend  in your area.

Israel is not participating but that's OK--every day is an archaeology day in The Holy Land! 
I'll show you what grandson Dean and I did when he came to visit in July.

We rose with the sun, took two buses to Mount Scopus, and walked way over to these stairs.
At the bottom, in Tsurim Valley, you see our destination, the long black tent.
On the horizon to the left is the Dome of the Rock on the Temple Mount.

Please click on the photos you want to see in closer detail. 

I had booked (and paid for) Dean and me to work four hours at the sifting project, officially called the Temple Mount Antiquities Salvage Operation.

Just one Swedish family showed up; but on some days a big group or dozens of volunteers will come to work. 

First a nice staff archaeologist welcomed us and talked about the history of Jerusalem and about the sad need for such a sifting project.

In what at first looked like the Western Wall, "stone" by "stone" was rotated to reveal posters full of information for our guide's lecture. 

Each one chooses what he hopes to be the lucky bucket and pours the wet material onto the screen.

 Dean loved hosing it down with a pressure sprayer.
Wet sifting (see video!)  is much more revealing than the old method of shaking the dry material back and forth in the sifter.

I was proud of how my 8-year-old patiently and conscientiously examined each piece, looking for interesting finds.
Into the white plastic cups at the edge we sorted any pieces of pottery, plaster, glass, bone, metal, mosaic stones, and worked stones.

We didn't find any coins, seals, or jewelry, but the warm personal encouragement and teaching from Yuval was a treasure in itself.

 Everyone would combine their finds into sorting buckets.

 Then at the end of each 2-hour stint we all gathered at the exhibition tables and compared our finds of the day to pieces that had been found during the past ten years.

Orderly arrangement from First and Second Temple periods to Roman, Early Islamic, Mamluk and Ayyubid, Crusader, and Ottoman periods, all the way to Israel statehood days. 

Despite the heat, Dean wanted to continue till early afternoon.
We each took home a nice certificate to remind us of Dean's first initiation into archaeology.
I'm hoping he will want to work in the field when he is a bit older, just like his grandmother.

Happy National Archaeology Day from Jerusalem! 
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 The Smithsonian has an article, albeit somewhat misleading and with some mistakes, about how the Muslim Waqf used bulldozers to dig into the Temple Mount and build a new mosque,  illegally.  Tons of  excavated earth was just dumped in the Kidron Valley.   This is why our salvage sifting of it  is necessary.
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The umbrellas of Ramadan

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My two visitors and I went up to the top of the Mount of Olives for the panoramic view!
There were even a few clouds on the western horizon for SkyWatch Friday.
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It was the third and last day of Id il Fitr, the Muslim holiday which closes the month of Ramadan.

This was my first time to see the many rows of folded sun umbrellas and big black sun shades near Al Aksa mosque on Haram ash-Sharif [the Temple Mount].
I assume they had been added to shelter the hundreds of thousands of Muslims who came there to pray from the burning sun.
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Al Arabiya News says that this year over two million came to the Old City for Ramadan, from 48 countries. That can't be right, two million, but it seemed like it in the streets.
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(If you click on the photo, and then click once again, it will be big enough for you to find the umbrellas.)
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Ramadan mubarak

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The domes and minarets and the long flat building are the Al-Aqsa mosque up on (what we call) the Temple Mount.
More than 100,000 Muslims prayed there yesterday, the first Friday (and first day) of Ramadan.
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I wish my Muslim readers Ramadan kareem. (I think kareem means generous, yes?)
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The Atlantic has a new article about religion in space which contains a delightful video of a Muslim trying to pray in the microgravity of the Space Station.

They write

Muslim astronaut Sheikh Muszaphar Shukor had to figure out how, exactly, one faces Mecca during prayers when you are moving at about 17,000 miles per hour and its location relative to you is changing minute to minute, sometimes as much as 180 degrees in the course of one prayer. It was decided that Shukor, who was on the International Space Station during Ramadan, could do no more than the best of his abilities, in trying to face Mecca, kneel, and perform ritual washing.

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Jerusalem by night

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For SkyWatch Friday, the black dome of the heavens above Jerusalem!

The Old City was lit up last week with dozens of dazzling light displays for the 4th International Light Festival.

At the foot of the newly rebuilt Hurva Synagogue in the Jewish Quarter--a whirling "Meetings Composition" with its movements triggered by the location of the spectator.

At the Lutheran Church of the Redeemer--dynamic illumination to nice music.

Illuminated narrow street in the Armenian Quarter.

At Jaffa Gate--the Italian "Cupola."

But even with "just" her normal illumination, the Old City is beautiful, so beautiful.
Here, the Western Wall and above it, the Temple Mount with the Muslim Dome of the Rock and el Aksa mosque.

The Citadel or Tower of David.

Hundreds of thousands walked along the old city wall and entered by various gates.
Enlarge the photo to see the people.
In the sky above the Latin Patriarchate, a big Vatican flag.

The Old City and the new city.

Pray for the peace of Jerusalem.
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Black bird + white bird discuss Mughrabi bridge

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You might have to enlarge the first shot to see that a white bird is looking at the black bird.

The birds are sitting on a ledge of an empty old 2nd-storey room over the women's prayer room at the Western Wall.

Here is the Western Wall (once called the Wailing Wall).

Behind and above it, the Temple Mount which is under the administration of the Wakf (Muslim Trust).

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The place the birds were sitting is under the top part of the big ramp.

It leads up to the Mughrabi Gate, the only entrance onto the Temple Mount for non-Muslims (as explained in a previous post).
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After years of legal battles the Jerusalem Municipality has now given final approval to plans for a replacement bridge.

(It turns out that the old ramp never did have approval. )

See the whole strange story here, in the March 8 Jerusalem Post.

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I'm relieved and happy to read that

"The new bridge is a scaled-down version of the original project, which proposed a massive 95-meter bridge leading from an archeological garden. The original plan prompted an outcry from archeologists worried that such a large structure would not only damage archeological findings, but also detract from the aesthetic nature of the site."

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The new bridge is meant to replace the temporary wooden bridge that has been in use since a 2003 earthquake and winter storm caused part of the original bridge to collapse, leading city engineers to deem it unsafe.

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The authorities have not coordinated this with the Wakf, so I imagine the new ramp will not be finished--or even started--any time soon.

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The sweet birds are for Camera-Critters and the "bridge" is for Sunday Bridges.

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Rooftop sky watching

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Just two days ago the sky was still all happy blue and white, perfect for SkyWatch.
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If you climb up to the rooftops of Jerusalem's Old City, you may feel as if suspended between heaven and earth, between distant past and tenuous present.
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A few residents know how to traverse the whole walled city via the roofs, so I hear.
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From here where the four quarters of the Old City intersect, you look down to the Temple Mount and the golden roof of the Muslim Dome of the Rock and past it to the Mount of Olives in the east.
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Turn north and there are the two black domes and the belltower of the Holy Sepulchre, just behind the minaret of a mosque.
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Through a seriously-spikey fence, the belltower and dome of the Lutheran Church of the Redeemer and freely-floating white clouds are visible.

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Shalom, peace, to Jerusalem and shalom to you.

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Bridge to the Mughrabi Gate

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For the sake of Louis la Vache's Sunday Bridges, I am going to call this weird contraption a bridge.

As a result of the combined effect of an earthquake and heavy snow in 2004, the original earthen ramp collapsed. A new wood and metal "temporary" bridge was put up in 2007.

Enlarge the above photo and you will see both the old and the new, side by side.

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The ramp leads from the Western Wall Plaza up to the Mughrabi Gate.

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This gate is the only opening through which tourists and non-Muslims are allowed by the Muslim Wakf to enter the Temple Mount.

Muslims enter through ten other gates.
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Their gold Dome of the Rock is on the left of the above photo.

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On the right of the Temple Mount is the Al Aksa mosque.

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Just to the left of the ramp is the section of the Western Wall where women are allowed to pray.

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There was an induction ceremony for soldiers the night of this photo, hence all the flags and people.

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This photo from Wikipedia shows the Mughrabi (aka Morocco) Gate from the inside.

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I learn from the BiblePlaces.com blog that Jerusalem District Archaeologist Yochanan Zeligman recently addressed a letter to Israel Antiquities Authority Director-General Shuka Dorfman,

in which he told of several incidents of stones fallling from the Mughrabi Gate and warned that “a danger exists to the crowd in the women’s section of the Western Wall Plaza, as well to those who walk on the temporary bridge, should stones fall from above.”

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That is not good news.

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More:

Good before and after photos of the ramp's collapse

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"The Real Story" of the problems of Mughrabi Gate access by Yuval Baruch, Jerusalem Region Archaeologist, Israel Antiquities Authority
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And also this, the story as written by a rabbi, but his comprehensive photos let us better understand the situation around the problem of the old ramp, the present one, and a possible future bridge.

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Troubles

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The last two weeks have been hard on Jerusalem.

For eights days straight we have had an unseasonable heat wave and several days of bad dust storms (the sand blew over from North Africa).

Then there was the undiplomatic "mishap" when Vice President Biden was here.
And before that, the young Muslim shabab throwing rocks from the Temple Mount down onto Jews praying at the Western Wall.

Trouble is expected tomorrow. If you hear about it on your media, these two photos will help you in your orientation.
The night photo shows the Western Wall on the left.
Behind the wall is the Temple Mount on which is Al Aksa mosque. Its grey dome looks golden at night.
The ramp leads up to the Mughrabi Gate, one of the entrances into the Temple Mount.

Here is a better view of the ramp and Mughrabi Gate.
The golden dome is the Muslim shrine called the Dome of the Rock (on the Temple Mount).

If you enter the Old City wall through the Dung Gate, you pass through the security check at the lower right corner of the photo and enter the Western Wall Plaza.
On the horizon is the Mount of Olives.
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I am worried what tomorrow will bring.
Please friends, pray for the peace of Jerusalem.
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