Jerusalem Archives - Page 164 of 199

Israel’s Three-Year Tourism Plan

Tourism Minister Stas Misezhnikov presented his ministry’s three-year plan to boost tourism at a press conference in Tel Aviv on Wednesday. The plan, which aims to bring in an additional one million foreign tourists by 2012, focuses mostly on attracting tourists who come to Israel for religious, historical and cultural purposes. According to Misezhnikov, the boost in numbers will garner NIS 4.5 billion in income and create 40,000 new jobs, especially in Jerusalem and the periphery. "The Tourism Ministry is an economic portfolio," he said. "As such, it is measured according to two main parameters: creating jobs and balancing income with expenses. For every 100,000 tourists, 4,000 jobs are created and NIS 450 million are invested in the Israeli economy." The plan calls for the branding of Israel as a destination for dahat tourism, a Hebrew acronym for religion, history and culture. Misezhnikov said his office had identified Israel’s central role in Judaism and Christianity and its rich historic and cultural legacy as the main attraction for tourists. "We have no relative advantage over other countries in terms of vistas, beaches or leisure," he said. "On the contrary, we are at a disadvantage compared to some of our neighbors because of our troublesome security situation, our relatively high prices and our image of being inhospitable to tourists." [. . .] The US was the largest country of origin for incoming tourism, with 550,000 visitors, or 21% of all incoming tourism. Russia was second, with 400,000 visitors; France was third, with 260,000; followed by the UK, with 170,000; and Germany, with Thirty-nine percent of incoming tourists were Jewish, 54% Christian and the remainder either from other religions or with no religious affiliation. Nearly half of the tourists were visiting Israel for the first time. Nearly a quarter of the tourists said the purpose of their visit was for holiday and leisure, 31% for pilgrimage and 6% for touring and sightseeing. The average foreign tourist expenditure in Israel in 2009 was $1,083, including overseas expenses. The average daily expenditure was about $100.

The full story is here.

Tagged Jerusalem, Tourism

Coptic Crypt or Secular Cellar?

Haaretz reports on a battle between an Old City shopkeeper and the Coptic monks of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher.

In the next few weeks, between making decisions about the deal for captive soldier Gilad Shalit, the settlement freeze and renewal of negotiations with the Palestinian Authority, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will have to make another fateful decision: Is the cellar beneath Abed Hirbawi’s East Jerusalem shop holy ground?
The decision will supposedly put an end to a strange, 13-year-old affair. Hirbawi and his landlord, Abdullah Buderi, claim the basement belongs to their shop, and that Coptic monks have invaded it. The Coptic Church says it was Muslims who invaded the cellar, which used to be a sanctuary belonging to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in the Old City.
Both sides have submitted a wealth of documents to the courts – and to a lawyer, on behalf of the prime minister. The documents include an order from Muslim general Saladin, sharia court rulings from the late Middle Ages, ancient maps, Turkish deeds of ownership, scientific articles and sworn declarations from Israeli experts on archaeology, theology and history.
Hirbawi, a well-known businessman, relates that in July 1996, he heard noises beneath his shop. When he peeked though the floor, he saw several dozen monks digging under his feet. According to associates of Mutran Anba Abra’am, the metropolitan of the Coptic Church in Jerusalem, they were innocently carrying out work in the church-cellar when Hirbawi and others attacked them with knives, injuring a monk.
[. . .]
Yehoshua says the cellar served as a quarry during both the First and Second Temple periods, but during the latter, some of it was used as a burial cave. A structure was built on top by the Crusaders in the Middle Ages, and subsequently a plant for grinding sesame seeds was erected on the premises, which dumped its waste into the cellar.
These were all secular uses, emphasizes Yehoshua. The place was never used for ritual purposes and therefore cannot be considered holy. Moreover, according to the lawyer and his client, since the cellar had been filled with waste since the 12th century, it was not used at all – until the monks showed up under Hirbawi’s feet 800 years later.

The full story is here.

Tagged Jerusalem

Mary’s Gate Renovation

In a follow-up to the previous posting on the IAA’s work on the western gate (“Mary’s Gate”) of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, Craig Dunning sends along a few photos.

The first photo shows the gate at the beginning of the month. Note the stone on the bottom right (with a blue stripe).

The photo below was taken last week and shows the area with construction work underway. The stone shown above has been removed.

In this photo, you can see the stone being transported by the authorities.

Evidence supporting the Jordanian official’s claim that the gate has been opened is lacking.

Tagged Jerusalem

15th Annual Conference: New Studies on Jerusalem

Joe Lauer has sent along notice of this conference which will be held in Tel Aviv on December 24, with lectures in Hebrew.

The Ingeborg Rennert Center The Martin (Szusz) Department of Land of Israel Studies and Archaeology The Faculty of Jewish Studies Bar-Ilan University

Invite you to

The 15th Annual Conference of
The Ingeborg Rennert Center for Jerusalem Studies
“NEW STUDIES ON JERUSALEM”

8:20 gathering

8:45 opening remarks:

Prof. Joshua Schwartz, Director of the Ingeborg Rennert Center for Jerusalem Studies

Prof. Avraham Faust & Dr. Eyal Baruch, conference organizers

Session 1 – 9:00-10:55

Chair: Eyal Baruch

09:00 Ronny Reich & Eli Shukron- Channel II in the City of David, Jerusalem: Technical Details, Date and Function

09:20 Avraham Faust- King David’s Palace, a Hellenistic Structure or a Jebusite Fort: A Reexamination of the Large Stone Structure Unearthed by Eilat Mazar in the City of David

09:40 Moshe Garsiel- The Book of Samuel: Compilation Stages and Historical Value for Describing David’s Kingdom and His Capital in Jerusalem

10:05 Ehud Netzer- An opus reticulatum Structure, West of the Old City, Jerusalem

10:25 Ram Bouchnick, Omri Larnow, Guy Bar-Oz & Ronny Reich- Jerusalem Fish Menu from
the Late Second Temple Period

10:45 Discussion

10:55 Break

Session 2 – 11:20-13:10

Chair: Joshua Schwartz

11:20 Michael Ben-Ari- Simchat Beit Sho’eva – The Origins of the Custom.

11:40 Varda Sussman- Shaving/paring of Herodian Oil Lamps

12:00 Ze’ev H. Erlich (Jabo) – What is the ‘Kotel ha-Katan?’

12:20 Amos Kloner- The Damascus Gate

12:40 Yoav Farhi & Oded Lifshitz– A Unique Bulla from the Ramat Rahel Excavations Bearing the Name of Hadrian

13:00 Discussion

13:10 Lunch Break

Session 3 – 14:20-16:30

Chair: Josef Drory

14:20 Yehoshua Peleg- Were the Temple Mount Gates Reconstructed in the Second Century CE?

14:40 Gabriel Barkay and Zachi Zweig- A Roman Period Centaur Relief from the Temple Mount

15:00 Perez Reuven- A Decorated Beam from the Roman Period in the Temple Mount

15:20 Bat-Sheva Garsiel- The Status of Jerusalem in Early Islamic Theological Writings

15:40 Michael Ehrlich- The Southern Quarters of Jerusalem during the Medieval Period: A Multi-
Periodical Overview

16:00 Oded Shay- The Contribution Made by the Jerusalem-based Monk Father Antonin, to Jewish
Studies and to the Research of the Material Culture of Palestine in the Final Years of the Ottoman
period

16:20 Discussion

16:30 Break

Session 4 – 17:00-18:30

Chair: Boaz Zissu

17:00 Amos Frumkin & Boaz Lengford- The Research of a Karstic Cave Used for Refuge in the
Jerusalem Hills

17:20 Boaz Zissu & Roi Porat- A Hoard of Coins and Other Finds from the Bar-Kokhba Period,
Recently Discovered in a Refuge Cave in the Jerusalem Hills

17:40 Guy Stiebel– “On the Edge” – Military Equipment from a Refuge Cave in the Jerusalem Hills

18:00 Hanan Eshel- New Discoveries from a Refuge Cave in the Jerusalem Hills, and their
Contribution to the Study of the Bar-Kokhba War

18:20 Discussion

The conference proceedings (app. 300 pp. including 17 articles in Hebrew, with English abstracts)
will be on sale during the conference

For additional information, please contact the Ingeborg Rennert Center for Jerusalem Studies (see
email address at bottom of this page) or Avi Faust (email address here).

Previous conference proceedings are available for purchase here.

Tagged Jerusalem, Lectures

Leper Wrapped in Cloth Buried in Jerusalem

The headlines on the web this morning are a little more sensational:

Burial cloth found in Jerusalem cave casts doubt on authenticity of Turin Shroud (Daily Mail)
Jerusalem tomb discovery casts further doubt on Turin Shroud (Telegraph)
Jesus-era leper sheds light on Turin shroud mystery (Haaretz)
Remains in tomb near Old City show first known case of leprosy (JPost)
‘Jesus-era’ burial shroud found (BBC)

The tomb was found nearly a decade ago, and all of the sensational results have been known for years. Two of the excavators, Gibson and Tabor, have both written extensively on this discovery in books they have published.

What is new is the publication of an article in the US Public Library of Science Journal, with the finding that this was evidence of the first human known to have leprosy. That’s good, but it’s not news. Maybe the news is buried in the details, and the publication of this article provides an opportunity to review an important discovery. That’s fine, but it should be noted that news outlets lead you to believe that there are more discoveries than they actually are because they report the same items time after time, particularly during the Christmas and Easter seasons.

If you read only one article, I’d suggest the one in the Jerusalem Post. But the best photos are in the Daily Mail. Here are the important facts:

A man was buried in this tomb between AD 1 and 50.
The rock-hewn tomb was located on the south side of the Hinnom Valley, in a cemetery used by the wealthy.
The man was wrapped in a burial shroud with a different weave from that of the Shroud of Turin.
The deceased suffered from tuberculosis and leprosy. (Apparently even the rich got sick.)
A significant portion of the dead man’s hair was recovered and analyzed (it was clean, short, and lice-free).
The man did not receive a secondary burial in an ossuary, as was typical at the time.

Here’s an important statement in the JPost article:

Based on the assumption that this is representative of a typical burial shroud widely used at the time of Jesus, the researchers conclude that the Turin Shroud did not originate from Jesus-era Jerusalem.

That gives you the basis for the researchers’ conclusion that the Turin Shroud is fake. As long as there was only one shroud maker in town in the first century, we can be absolutely sure that the Turin Shroud is from the medieval period. (I have no interest in or knowledge about the Shroud, but I do care about assumptions necessary for conclusions. The conclusions are in the headlines; the assumptions are always buried if not omitted.)

You can read the rest in the articles linked to above. The books that I alluded to by the archaeologists are these:

Shimon Gibson, The Final Days of Jesus: The Archaeological Evidence
James Tabor, The Jesus Dynasty: The Hidden History of Jesus, His Royal Family, and the Birth of Christianity

UPDATE (12/17): James Davila at Paleojudaica responds to the Jerusalem Post statement quoted above:

That’s not quite what it says in the Daily Mail article quoted in my post yesterday. The claim there is that “[i]t was made with a simple two-way weave – not the twill weave used on the Turin Shroud, which textile experts say was introduced more than 1,000 years after Christ lived.” That is a more general claim that ought to be verifiable or falsifiable based on the reasonably ample surviving textile evidence from antiquity. If it is true that this type of weave is only attested much later, that would severely weaken any case for the genuineness of the Shroud of Turin. Are there specialists in first-century textiles out there who would like to speak up?

Tagged Analysis, Jerusalem

Jaffa Gate Renovations

The Jaffa Gate area is set to be the focus of extensive renovations over the next year and a half. This may be of particular interest to those who are planning to visit Jerusalem in 2010 or 2011. According to a flyer distributed by the municipality, the project includes:

Restoring infrastructure
Improving pedestrian access
Installing “street furniture”
Restoring facades of buildings in the square inside Jaffa Gate

They predict that visitors will be inconvenienced for 18 months, with work proceeding “24 hours a day.” In particular, the following changes will be made:

Vehicular traffic will be one-way from Jaffa Gate to Zion Gate
Loading and unloading access will be restricted
Pedestrian traffic and “access to shops will not be impeded in any way”

Work has already begun and Jerusalem resident Craig Dunning has visited the area and sends some photographs with permission to post them here. He notes that until today work has primarily consisted of the removal of paving stones, and traffic continues to move in both directions.

Work begins in front of Tourist Information Office

Enclosed area next to covered suq

Removal of paving stones next to taxi stand; photo taken this afternoon

Tagged Jerusalem, Tourism