People who come to Israel for the first time [or any time, for that matter] need to have an open mind about what they are going to see here. It is important to set aside your expectations of what you think or believe Israel SHOULD be like, and instead just take in what Israel actually IS. Why? Because your experience here will be so much more authentic and based upon reality. If you don't open your mind, you will find things you didn't expect and instead of embracing them as part of Israel, you will want to reject the experience. I know people who have come to Israel and didn't want to see whole regions of the Land because those regions didn't fit their previous vision of what Israel was supposed to be like. To me, they are not only shortchanging themselves of a true Israel experience, but also it reveals that they love their vision of Israel more than the real Israel itself.
Why do I bring this up? I was thinking about the Chords Bridge, which many tourists say they don't like. They say it looks out of place in Jerusalem, the ancient city where King David lived and the Temple stood. Yes, Chords Bridge does not "fit" in the Old City of Jerusalem to be sure, and it would never have been built there anyway. But it is a feature of greater Jerusalem and most tourists see it first before they ever see the Old City since it is positioned at the entrance of the greater city.
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I took this picture while standing in the middle of Chords Bridge and looking up.
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I took these four pictures of the Chords Bridge in Jerusalem awhile back, but still hadn't shared them on my blog yet, so I thought I would share them now. I looked up information about this bridge on a website and want to share this information, too.
This information is quoted from:
The Jerusalem Chords Bridge or Jerusalem Bridge of Strings, also called the Jerusalem Light Rail Bridge, is a cantilever spar cable-stayed bridge at the entrance to the city of Jerusalem, Israel, designed by the Spanish architect and engineer Santiago Calatrava. The bridge is used by Jerusalem Light Rail's Red Line, which began service on August 19, 2011. Incorporated in the structure is a glass-sided pedestrian bridge enabling pedestrians to cross from Kiryat Moshe to the Jerusalem Central Bus Station.
The bridge was designed to add a defining visual element to the Jerusalem "skyline" at the entrance to the western city, and to carry a light rail system, expected to solve some of the city's traffic problems. For Calatrava the bridge is "also the excuse to create a major plaza, to give character and unity to this delicate place".
Similar to Calatrava's Puente del Alamillo in Seville, Spain, the bridge makes use of an angled cantilever tower to absorb some of the load and reduce the number of cable stays needed. The bridge consists of a single pylon counterbalancing a 160 metre span with lengths of cables, making a dramatic architectural statement. While this is Calatrava's 40th bridge, it is the first he has designed to carry both train and pedestrian traffic.
A striking feature of the bridge is a single 118-meter high mast supported by 66 steel cables arranged in a parabolic shape which develops three-dimensionally in space, making it the tallest structure in Jerusalem at the time of its completion. The exterior of the bridge is mostly clad in Jerusalem stone, with steel, glass and concrete detailing. Dubbed "Jerusalem's first shrine of modern design" by Time Magazine, the bridge has become a tourist attraction.
The form of the bridge resembles a tent in the desert or a harp, with the cables as the strings, symbolising King David's harp, according to Calatrava. Others interpret the looming pylon as the bust of a long-necked bird, a human arm or an arrow caught in a bow.
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| Chords Bridge |
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This is the pedestrian walkway on Chords Bridge. You can see someone riding their bike along it before it curves to the right.
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| Chords Bridge |
Below is a picture I took of a sundial on Yafo Street in Jerusalem. The sundial is on the top of the building of a synagogue where it looks like a face. The two "eyes" of the face are clocks, and the "smile" of the face are the numbers for the sundial. The style [the pointy thing that casts the shadow] of the sundial is hard to see in this picture because it appears slightly below and almost parallel with the power line which crosses in front of the picture. If you look closely you can see that the shadow from the style is at about a quarter after 3 in the afternoon.
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| Zoharei Chama Synagogue with sundial at top |
Here is some information I got from Wikipedia about this sundial:
Zoharei Chama Synagogue (which means "Sunrise Synagogue" in the Hebrew), colloquially known as the Sundial Building or the Mahane Yehuda Clock Tower, is a four-story building on Jaffa Road in Jerusalem, Israel, which features a huge, 5 meters (16 ft) diameter sundial on its facade. The building, constructed in stages by Rabbi Shmuel Levy from 1908-1917, was built to house a hostel for immigrants and a synagogue. It was damaged by fire in 1941 and partly restored by the Jerusalem municipality in 1980. Today it still houses the Zoharei Chama Orthodox synagogue, which has prayer services throughout the day for local businessmen, residents, and tourists. The sundial is still accurate to within 15 minutes.
The sundial was designed by Rabbi Moshe Shapiro, a watchmaker in Mea Shearim and a self-taught astronomer who had learned the science by studying the pertinent writings of Maimonides and the Vilna Gaon. A long wire sticks out to measure the sun's progress along a half-circle marked at each hour, with sub-markings at 15, 30, and 45 minutes. For cloudy days, Levy installed two mechanical clocks on either side of the sundial, one set for European time and one for local time.
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Yafo Gate looking outwards from the Old City
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In this article, the first picture of Yafo Gate was taken from the persecutive of standing outside the wall and gap and looking into the Old City. The author, Robby Berman, demonstrates throughout the article that in fact this gap in the wall is due to a moat that surrounded Herod's Tower which is on the other side of the gap from Yafo Gate. It is a fun article to read.
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| Hurva Synagogue in Old City of Jerusalem |
Whenever I go to the Old City, I love passing by the Hurva Synagogue. It is so beautiful both during the day and at night when light shows through its stained glass windows near the top of the dome. I can't resist taking a picture of the synagogue almost every time I pass by it.
I found some interesting information about this synagogue revealing how important it is from this website:
Perhaps no single location embodies the turbulent history of the Old City's Jewish Quarter as fully as the Hurva Synagogue. It was once the grandest synagogue in the Land of Israel and the quintessence of the spirit of the small Jewish community that tenaciously clung to the Holy Land during the long years of exile and dispersion. The Hurva was reduced to rubble in 1948 by the Jordanian Legion, who, fully cognizant of the symbolic import of the building to Jerusalem's Jews, wanted to demonstrate that the Jewish presence in the Old City was permanently consigned to the past.
Work began on the synagogue in 1700 at the behest of Ashkenazi Rabbi Yehuda Hachasid, after permission was gained from the Ottoman bureaucracy (who could generally be bribed into ignoring the Pact of Omar, a Moslem law which stated no new churches or synagogues could be built in lands under Moslem control). However, money ran out, and 20 years after construction began, the unfinished synagogue was torched, after which it gained its current name (meaning "ruin").
It remained a ruin until the mid-1800s, by which point the rapid growth of the Ashkenazi community had necessitated the revival of plans to build the synagogue. With the aid of major donations from both the Ashkenazi and Sephardi benefactors, including the Rothschild banking clan and Moses Montefiore, the synagogue was finally finished, its grandeur giving the Jewish Quarter its riposte to the Christians' Church of the Holy Sepulchre and the Muslims' Dome of the Rock. The Hurva remained the focal of the Old City's Ashkenazi community until its destruction. After the Old City was recaptured by the Israeli army in 1967, a temporary commemorative arch was raised over the ruins of the site, and 40 years of bureaucratic wrangling over rebuilding efforts commenced. Big name architects were consulted and summarily ignored, ultra-modern plans were considered and rejected, until finally in 2005 it was decided that the synagogue would be rebuilt according to its former plan.
In March 2010, work on the reconstruction was completed, and the Hurva was rededicated in a gala ceremony as an active synagogue and center of study, aligned with the Ashkenazi Charedi branch of Jerusalem Orthodoxy. The building remains open to visits by tourists during the hours between worship services, but visitors should keep in mind that the Hurva is now a functioning synagogue, not strictly a tourist site, and should be treated as such.
This last picture I took on the way while walking down to the Kotel. In the foreground are ruins in the Jewish quarter and in the mid-ground is the southern end of the Temple Mount with its invasive Al Aqsa Mosque dome, and in the background is the Mount of Olives. I don't have an interesting article to share about this picture, although I would like to learn more about the ruins in the foreground. I think it might be the remains of an ancient hospital from the 12th century, but I don't know for sure if I am correct. But for now, I am posting this picture simply because I like it.
That's all for now, folks. I hope my readers who have never been to Israel will consider visiting some day. You will be so happy you did. And when you come here, don't forget to keep your mind open to what you might find. Israel is a bottomless treasure chest that does not quite fit anyone's presuppositions.
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