Glo has a gallery of several dozen Easter images available for free download (in high-resolution).
These include photographs (including a few of ours), as well as ancient and modern works of art. It’s probably too late to use for this year’s teaching, but they could be handy for future years. Glo is available from Amazon for $57 and includes many thousands of images like these.
The Passover celebration began last night, and yesterday afternoon police arrested a man allegedly preparing in an illegal way. From the Jerusalem Post:
Jerusalem District police officers detained extreme right-wing activist Noam Federman Monday afternoon, after he was caught driving his vehicle with a kid – a young, male goat – in his car.
Federman is suspected of intending to ritually slaughter the animal in the recently renovated Hurva Synagogue located near the Temple Mount in the Old City.
Police said right wing activists threatened repeatedly this week to come up to the Temple Mount and conduct ritual slaughter there during the Pessah holiday. They also suspect Federman was planning to slaughter the animal on the Temple Mount proper, and not in the synagogue.
Federman was taken in for interrogation and the innocent animal was transferred to the Agricultural Development Unit in the Agriculture Ministry.
This article raises several questions in my mind. How did police know the goat was in Federman’s car? Is there a law against having a goat in your car? Is there a law against having a goat in your car with certain intentions in your mind? How does the reporter know that the animal is innocent?
The full story is here.
The LandMinds show at Israel National Radio (Arutz-7) has two interviews this week that may interest readers. Each interview is 48 minutes and may be downloaded in mp3 format.
James Monson describes his years living in Israel and the creation of maps for students of Bible.
Monson was one of the creators of the long-lived Student Map Manual, and for the past decade he has been creating resources for Biblical Backgrounds, Inc. His influence on students of historical geography can hardly be overstated.
Gabriel Barkay discusses his work over the past decade sifting the material illegally removed from the Temple Mount. He also answers questions on a variety of archaeological subjects.
I don’t have time to listen to these interviews in full before posting this notice, but I expect that both interviews are fascinating and worth the time.
Readers may be interested in following the LandMinds show regularly:
LandMinds broadcasts live on www.israelnationalradio.com every Wednesday evening from 5-7pm Israel time, 10-12 EST, 3-5pm in the UK, and rebroadcast during the week. You can also listen live with your iPhone!
HT: Yehuda Group
The Caspari Center Media Review has two unrelated stories that may be of interest to readers here:
Signposts and directions to the Cenacle [Upper Room on Mount Zion] were defaced by anonymous vandals this past week, adding insult to the injury felt by Christian tourists faced with the piles of refuse and rubbish it contains and making it difficult for them to find their way to the site (Yediot Yerushalayim, March 19).
Other Christian sites are no more attractive to pilgrims, according to a report in Ma’ariv (March 21). According to Yuval Peled, who accompanied a group of Italians who had come to film the Galilee in which Jesus grew up, lived, and taught, “After two or three days of shooting, they abruptly announced that they were leaving. ‘They told us, “You’ve destroyed the story for us, with all the pollution, electricity wires, and infrastructure. This isn’t what we were taught about the place where Jesus grew up,”‘ he recalls. The crew, which had planned to broadcast the film on Italian television – the country considered to be the capital of Christianity – told us that here, in the most authentic place in which the founder of their religion lived, we had destroyed their associations [to it] with pollution and infrastructure. Out of disappointment and despair, they left, and went to shoot the film in Tuscany.”
This sounds like a bit of an overreaction to me. I don’t like the pollution and wires either, but Galilee is remarkably primitive. Imagine what the lakeshore would be like if it was in the U.S.
I can’t say I have ever thought of Italy as the “capital of Christianity.”
The reconstruction of the Hurva Synagogue is not related to the Bible, but it has our interest because it is such a prominent feature in the Old City of Jerusalem. Until 1948, there were two major synagogues in the Jewish Quarter, but my guess is that most visitors today are unaware of Tiferet Israel. The remains of this synagogue lie just north of the main staircase leading down to the Western Wall plaza. Hurva, on the other hand, is well known because of its central and visible location in the Jewish Quarter plaza. Many tour guides would stop and explain the significance of the lone arch before allowing their listeners to buy a falafel or to shop in the Cardo.
This photo below, part of The American Colony and Eric Matson Collection, is a view of the Jewish Quarter from the Temple Mount taken in the early 1900s. The large building on the left skyline is the Tiferet Israel Synagogue. The building with the large dome on the right is the Hurva Synagogue.
The houses in the foreground stand where today the Western Wall prayer plaza is located.
Jewish Quarter, early 1900sWe’ve posted a number of times over the course of the synagogue’s reconstruction, and with its dedication last week we anticipate this will be the final post about it. We conclude with recent photographs taken by Mindy McKinny. We thank her for permission to share them here.
Hurva Synagogue interior
The Hurva Synagogue was dedicated this evening. Located in the Jewish Quarter of the Old City of Jerusalem, prayers have not been held in the synagogue since it was destroyed in the 1948 war. From the Jerusalem Post:
After a nearly 62-year hiatus, the renowned Hurva synagogue inside the Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem’s Old City has been rebuilt and is again an operational house of prayer. Hundreds of people, braving the wind and an unexpected Jerusalem chill, crowded into a courtyard opposite the outer walls of the synagogue on Monday night to take part in an official rededication ceremony for the newly-rebuilt shul – which stands in the exact spot it did before its destruction at the hands of the Jordanian Arab Legion during the War of Independence in 1948. […] Rivlin went on to speak of the Hurva’s history, beginning with its first incarnation in 1701, when it was constructed by disciples of Judah Hahasid. Its first destruction came some 20 years later, when those same disciples lacked the funds to repay local creditors, who in return burned the Hurva to the ground. It was nearly 150 years before the Hurva stood again, but in 1864, after a massive construction project was approved by the Ottoman Turks and funds were procured from Jewish communities the world over, a neo-Byzantine Hurva was soon towering over the rest of the Jewish Quarter. However, that Hurva, which hosted the likes of Theodor Herzl and Ze’ev Jabotinsky before the creation of the state, also met with ruin. The Jordanian army took Jerusalem’s Old City in May of 1948, loaded the building with explosives and set off a blast whose smoke cloud could be seen miles away.
Arutz-7 has posted a 10-minute video of the service (unedited, almost exclusively singing and music). For previous posts on the reconstruction, see here and here and here.