the Garden Tomb-Yad Vashem-Israel Museum-Italian Food-Cards

Today comprised a more "modern Jerusalem" day. Being that most of the old stuff we looked at had been excavated or moved before we looked at it.
first came the Garden Tomb (aka. Gordon's Calvary). This site became one of the possible places for Jesus' death & burial. It fits some of the necesary geography, and is really pretty, but not probable.
The first reason some folk thought this might be the place was because of an apparent skull in the rockface. This photo was taken in the mid-ninteenth cenutry.
As it appears today
Also lending some creedence to this theory was the discovery of a tomb nearby. It is a rolling stone tomb and well preserved.
I think many protestants (and americans in perticular) would prefer this to be the historic site. This because it isn't encapsulated in a church building- there is a garden around the site. Granted there is a Muslim cemetary atop the hill and a bus station just in front of it. But many of these sites would be different in the states- there would be beautiful grace everywhere, large parking lots with shuttles to the site, nicer cafes and gift shops where you dont need to barter. But i am in the middle east, things are different the the traditional sites were treated as the dominant culture desired at the time. The Church of the Holy Sepulcher is a terrific example of this. It is surrounded by buildings actually connected to it. The purported hill the tomb was in has been cut away (originally the bedrock forming a grotto/sepulchre) and the church surrounds it. Many people today prefer a less formal/institutional place such as the Garden Tomb. The Garden Tomb, however, lacks the persuasive tradition that the Holy Sepulcher holds from the 4th century. Also the skull in the rock has deteriorated in the last century in a half to being hardly recognizable compared to the earlier picture. Now imagine how much a rock face of soft limestone, such as that of this hill, would have deteriorated in 2 millenia. It is widely believed that the clef, where the skull now appears, was cut into the hill during the crusades for better access to the city. That the pictures in the 19th century appear to look like a skull is impressive, however the hill would not have looked like that in Jesus' day. Also the tomb dates significantly before Jesus. Though we cannot know with certainty where the crucifixion happened, between the Holy Sepulcher and the Garden Tomb evidence leans toward the former. To their credit the Garden Tomb workers would never claim this to be the spot, no matter how much they infer it 'looks' like it could be right. Either way we aren't going to find the body, so it doesn't much matter i guess.
All else aside the garden is quite nice.

On to Yad Vashem. This is Israel's Holocaust Museum. We were only able to spend a few hours here which is not nearly enough.
The buildings are wonderfully done. They are fairly recent, mostly concrete and sterile preparing you for what is displayed inside.
The name of the museum comes from Isaiah 56:5, "And to them will I give in my house and within my walls a memorial and a name … that shall not be cut off." A memorial and a name being Yad Va-Shem in Hebrew. As always, it is difficult to learn about the holocaust. There are so many horrible stories of what was done and with so many silent spectators. The Hall of Names is a large cirular room with shelves several stories high containing names and short biographies of two million victims of the holocaust; there is room for all six million. It is overwhelming to see the binders and binders of names in this room- difficult at best to react.

From here it was on to the Israel Museum. Most everything of importance that has been excavated in any of the sites we have visited is stored here. There is a large display for the Dead Sea Scrolls: unfortunately there are no pictures allowed in the museum (as in Yad Vashem), so i have none. Now that i saw a bunch of really old stuff- mostly rock, some early metal.

We returned to Jerusalem and a goup of us decided to skip dinner at the Gloria and find some italian food. It was one of the most entertaining dinners in recent memory. We sat outside, ate some wonderful kosher italian food and were entertained by a singing, joking, gun weilding proprieter from Roma. He talked to us for at least thirty minutes and was great fun to interact with- he also made some darn good food. He'd been to the states a few times for Disney world and said he enjoyed it. Dinner is always a highlight in my life- no one should eat alone, and dinner should last at least two hours. Someday my world will exist outside my head, maybe you will be envited to enjoy it with me, then you will see how nice it is in here.

Someday i'll get a picture of him from one of my companions, but i dont have one now. The story will have to do.