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Jerusalem: The heart of Israel
Israel’s destiny as the Promised Land, as Zion, as Eretz Israel, or simply Ha’aretz, The Land, is writ in stone. And nowhere is it more apparent than in Jerusalem, where the streets and alleyways, having witnessed history, have chosen to live in it. Municipal laws dating back to the beginning of the 20th century, when Jerusalem was planned, stipulate that all buildings in the city be faced with local ‘Jerusalem stone’, a pale limestone reminiscent of meleke, the stone of the holy Western Wall. So Jerusalem, the largest city and the seat of the Government of Israel, today looks every bit what it is: a city of tradition and identity, the cultural and religious nerve centre of the Jewish people since it became King David’s capital 3,000 years ago.
Time, it would seem, has stood still in the hills and valleys of Jerusalem. At the entrance of the city, however,...the Jerusalem Chords Bridge, a steel-and-glass cantilever cable marvel designed by Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava, cuts a steep arc across the urban landscape—and through time—with its mast soaring above the boulevards and the traffic of a busy junction and heralding a modern Jerusalem.
One of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world, the Old City of Jerusalem—with its cobbled alleyways, ancient paving stones and broken colonnades from the Roman Cardo that later became an Arab-style marketplace, and walls and gates built over the centuries—tells yet another story, one of integration across cultures and faiths.
Danny Brody, a guide and an American Jew settled in Jerusalem, says, “Legend has it that it is possible to walk above the central souk along the rooftops of the city. People say Jerusalem is united by its rooftops.” Indeed, peer down at the Ottoman walls of the Old City from a rooftop, across the...Jewish, Armenian, Christian and Muslim quarters, and you see a Jerusalem sacred to three monotheistic religions—a unity framed by the Dome of the Rock, a shrine built on the spot where Prophet Mohammad is said to have ascended to heaven; the Western Wall, a remnant of the ancient Holy Temple; and the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, the site of Christ’s crucifixion.
“Since the reuniting of Jerusalem in the year 1967 under the leadership of the then Defence Minister Moshe Dayan, it has been redeveloped with an amazing infrastructure of transportation, social and cultural amenities,” says Ralphy Jhirad, Vice President, Federation of Indo-Israel Chambers of Commerce, an Indian Jew who visits Israel regularly.
“Jerusalem is a microcosm of Israel,” Emmanuel Witzthum, artistic director of HaMa’abada, or The Jerusalem Performing Arts Lab, one of the centres of creativity in the city. “You can find everything here—hate, peace, history, modernity, Ethiopians, Arabs,...
Jerusalem: The heart of Israel
---------- Post added at 05:39 PM ---------- Previous post was at 05:38 PM ----------
Tel Aviv, Israel’s most cosmopolitan city
: A hundred years ago, Tel Aviv wouldn’t have made it to anyone’s travel itinerary. A settlement of 60-odd immigrant families, it was a mere suburb of Jaffa, one of the great port cities of its time. Today, Tel Aviv is Israel’s second-largest city and its financial capital, encompassing whatever is left of Jaffa, once known as the ‘bride of the sea’.
In City of Oranges, a history of Arab and Jewish families in Jaffa, Adam LeBor writes, “Jerusalem was Palestine’s religious capital, but Jaffa was its cultural and commercial centre. With its British, French, Italian and Arab language schools, artists and writers, three newspapers and many printing houses, the city was proud of its vigorous intellectual life. The city was scented by its orange groves, the fruit of which was famed across the world for its quality. Its mosques, synagogues and churches dated back centuries.”
Jaffa today is dwarfed by Tel Aviv’s skyscrapers and nestled in Levantine memories. The Clock Tower, built by Sultan Abdel Hamid II at the start of the twentieth century to show GMT, local time and Muslim prayer time for the benefit of the wagons and camels striding through the city and for pilgrims disembarking from their ships to proceed on foot to Jerusalem, continues to show time—for tourists on conducted walking tours that begin at the piazza. Not just minutes and hours but the centuries that have seen the rise and fall of Jaffa—from the time of Solomon when it served as the port of landing for the cedars used to construct the Temple of Jerusalem to its capture by the Greeks and the Romans, and later, from the Arab and Crusader conquests to the Ottoman rule until Napoleon Bonaparte besieged the town in the late 18th century. Excavations have peeled back all these layers of history and today, Jaffa, is a world unto itself, with the old city turned into a restored artists’ quarter, impossibly elegant and more beautiful than ever.
From the old stone walls of Jaffa to the tree-lined Rothschild Boulevard in downtown Tel Aviv is a proverbial rollercoaster through time and styles of architecture. Home to some of the 4,000 German Bauhaus or International Style buildings—one of the most influential styles in modernist architecture—that form the UNESCO heritage ‘White City’ of Tel Aviv, the two-km street built in 1910, stretches from Habima Theatre in its northeast end to Herzl Street in the southwest. It was at No. 16, Rothschild Boulevard, on May 14, 1948, that David Ben-Gurion declared the new State of Israel. The street is now a wide promenade for cyclists, pedestrians and dog-walkers.
If Rothschild Boulevard is a tribute to the classic, Dizengoff Street, the prime shopping avenue in Tel Aviv which has even inspired a verb, ‘dizengoffing’, is the go-to place for ‘people watching’. Not far from the beach, its chi-chi designer stores, pubs and Wi-Fi cafes have made it an icon in Israel’s most cosmopolitan city.
It’s not easy to sum up Tel Aviv, which seems to live as much in its souks and weekly craft markets as in its museums and galleries. A travel blog says it best: “For a tourist, Tel Aviv is like the story of the blind men touching different parts of an elephant and thinking that they know what it is. Is Tel Aviv the renovated Old Jaffa? Is it the hustle and bustle of the markets or music festivals? Is it the incredible nightlife?”
Tel Aviv, Israel’s most cosmopolitan city
Israel’s destiny as the Promised Land, as Zion, as Eretz Israel, or simply Ha’aretz, The Land, is writ in stone. And nowhere is it more apparent than in Jerusalem, where the streets and alleyways, having witnessed history, have chosen to live in it. Municipal laws dating back to the beginning of the 20th century, when Jerusalem was planned, stipulate that all buildings in the city be faced with local ‘Jerusalem stone’, a pale limestone reminiscent of meleke, the stone of the holy Western Wall. So Jerusalem, the largest city and the seat of the Government of Israel, today looks every bit what it is: a city of tradition and identity, the cultural and religious nerve centre of the Jewish people since it became King David’s capital 3,000 years ago.
Time, it would seem, has stood still in the hills and valleys of Jerusalem. At the entrance of the city, however,...the Jerusalem Chords Bridge, a steel-and-glass cantilever cable marvel designed by Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava, cuts a steep arc across the urban landscape—and through time—with its mast soaring above the boulevards and the traffic of a busy junction and heralding a modern Jerusalem.
One of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world, the Old City of Jerusalem—with its cobbled alleyways, ancient paving stones and broken colonnades from the Roman Cardo that later became an Arab-style marketplace, and walls and gates built over the centuries—tells yet another story, one of integration across cultures and faiths.
Danny Brody, a guide and an American Jew settled in Jerusalem, says, “Legend has it that it is possible to walk above the central souk along the rooftops of the city. People say Jerusalem is united by its rooftops.” Indeed, peer down at the Ottoman walls of the Old City from a rooftop, across the...Jewish, Armenian, Christian and Muslim quarters, and you see a Jerusalem sacred to three monotheistic religions—a unity framed by the Dome of the Rock, a shrine built on the spot where Prophet Mohammad is said to have ascended to heaven; the Western Wall, a remnant of the ancient Holy Temple; and the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, the site of Christ’s crucifixion.
“Since the reuniting of Jerusalem in the year 1967 under the leadership of the then Defence Minister Moshe Dayan, it has been redeveloped with an amazing infrastructure of transportation, social and cultural amenities,” says Ralphy Jhirad, Vice President, Federation of Indo-Israel Chambers of Commerce, an Indian Jew who visits Israel regularly.
“Jerusalem is a microcosm of Israel,” Emmanuel Witzthum, artistic director of HaMa’abada, or The Jerusalem Performing Arts Lab, one of the centres of creativity in the city. “You can find everything here—hate, peace, history, modernity, Ethiopians, Arabs,...
Jerusalem: The heart of Israel
---------- Post added at 05:39 PM ---------- Previous post was at 05:38 PM ----------
Tel Aviv, Israel’s most cosmopolitan city
: A hundred years ago, Tel Aviv wouldn’t have made it to anyone’s travel itinerary. A settlement of 60-odd immigrant families, it was a mere suburb of Jaffa, one of the great port cities of its time. Today, Tel Aviv is Israel’s second-largest city and its financial capital, encompassing whatever is left of Jaffa, once known as the ‘bride of the sea’.
In City of Oranges, a history of Arab and Jewish families in Jaffa, Adam LeBor writes, “Jerusalem was Palestine’s religious capital, but Jaffa was its cultural and commercial centre. With its British, French, Italian and Arab language schools, artists and writers, three newspapers and many printing houses, the city was proud of its vigorous intellectual life. The city was scented by its orange groves, the fruit of which was famed across the world for its quality. Its mosques, synagogues and churches dated back centuries.”
Jaffa today is dwarfed by Tel Aviv’s skyscrapers and nestled in Levantine memories. The Clock Tower, built by Sultan Abdel Hamid II at the start of the twentieth century to show GMT, local time and Muslim prayer time for the benefit of the wagons and camels striding through the city and for pilgrims disembarking from their ships to proceed on foot to Jerusalem, continues to show time—for tourists on conducted walking tours that begin at the piazza. Not just minutes and hours but the centuries that have seen the rise and fall of Jaffa—from the time of Solomon when it served as the port of landing for the cedars used to construct the Temple of Jerusalem to its capture by the Greeks and the Romans, and later, from the Arab and Crusader conquests to the Ottoman rule until Napoleon Bonaparte besieged the town in the late 18th century. Excavations have peeled back all these layers of history and today, Jaffa, is a world unto itself, with the old city turned into a restored artists’ quarter, impossibly elegant and more beautiful than ever.
From the old stone walls of Jaffa to the tree-lined Rothschild Boulevard in downtown Tel Aviv is a proverbial rollercoaster through time and styles of architecture. Home to some of the 4,000 German Bauhaus or International Style buildings—one of the most influential styles in modernist architecture—that form the UNESCO heritage ‘White City’ of Tel Aviv, the two-km street built in 1910, stretches from Habima Theatre in its northeast end to Herzl Street in the southwest. It was at No. 16, Rothschild Boulevard, on May 14, 1948, that David Ben-Gurion declared the new State of Israel. The street is now a wide promenade for cyclists, pedestrians and dog-walkers.
If Rothschild Boulevard is a tribute to the classic, Dizengoff Street, the prime shopping avenue in Tel Aviv which has even inspired a verb, ‘dizengoffing’, is the go-to place for ‘people watching’. Not far from the beach, its chi-chi designer stores, pubs and Wi-Fi cafes have made it an icon in Israel’s most cosmopolitan city.
It’s not easy to sum up Tel Aviv, which seems to live as much in its souks and weekly craft markets as in its museums and galleries. A travel blog says it best: “For a tourist, Tel Aviv is like the story of the blind men touching different parts of an elephant and thinking that they know what it is. Is Tel Aviv the renovated Old Jaffa? Is it the hustle and bustle of the markets or music festivals? Is it the incredible nightlife?”
Tel Aviv, Israel’s most cosmopolitan city
