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Nice big house in centre of town
Arab store in the old city
Mostly brass ornaments in Arab market
On a junction towards the Kotel.
Tag Archives: Jews
Worship event on the Haas Promenade
The Haas Promenade, close (1.5km uphill from my house) also known as the peace park had a special event on the sunday before last.
A worship event was on with several churches and Christian organisations jointly together. There was a speech by the Mayor of Jerusalem, and one of the city’s chief Rabbis, and this was filmed on God TV. There was speakers from different Christian charities here and also a few Arab believers too.
This was a really good event, although I had to leave part way through, as it overlapped with the normal service at my regular church at 6pm.
Yom Kippur in and around Jerusalem
This week I had my Christian friend John come to visit, John is an older gent also from Portsmouth UK, but originally from Malta. He has Jewish roots, and his family came from Armenia.
He is here to see the Feast of Tabernacles which is coming up soon which is hosted by the ICEJ, International Christian Embassy of Jerusalem.
So I got to show him a lot of sites around here, a few days ago it was Yom Kippur, a holiday, in which Jews fast for a day.
We went around the UN headquarters at the end of my street and around the forest overlooking the city, then made our way into town.
There are no cars around the centre of town. None at all. I might see a police car once an hour or so. This is normally a busy street.
This was unusual. There were a lot of Arab families in the park picking some of the wild olives. This man and his son was smarter than the others, as a large tarrapaulin was laid out to catch the dropped ones. Funny as in the year I have been here, I have never seen anyone pick fruit from trees in public places here.
The world famous King David hotel. Top right. This nice wooden counter just had one Arab chap manning the desk, as everyone is observing Yom Kippur. As well as the beautiful decor here, there is a Sukkot (tent/shed type structure. Bottom right. Some of the staff from the kitchen are taking a break chatting on the tables as no-one will be eating until about 6.30pm.
John got chatting to a elderly Canadian couple there, who have lived in Jerusalem for 30 years now. This chap was talking about a nearby building called ‘Yimcer’ then I realised he meant the YMCA, which is opposite the King David 🙂 He told me off as I was drinking some water from a bottle, I didn’t realise the fast included water from then! oops. For me as a foreigner I think its unwise to fast from water, as the extreme heat can make you feel very unwell if you do. But I did use this day to do some praying and abstain from food from darkness Wednesday till Thursday. I had a whole chicken in a slow cooker for when we came back home to my flat. I am a recent convert to slow cookers, just the thing when you want to come home and have dinner more or less ready. 🙂
Leviticus 23 : 27 says more about this event.
The outside of the YMCA. Although the ‘Y’ is a Christian organisation and originally a Youth Hostel. Its now a proper hotel and owned by Muslim, but still known as the Jerusalem YMCA. Sadly I didn’t see anyone do any comedy dancing either. Not that it would be a appropriate with most people fasting that day. 🙂
Walking along the walls with Dutch Christian couple who mentioned on earlier post ‘never be silent’.
The really interesting thing about John’s Armenian Jewish and Maltese background is the Maltese language is a mixture of mostly Arabic and some Hebrew and Italian, so this meant he could converse with the Arab taxi driver who took us home later. 🙂
The Jews have a generous amount of feasts and holidays in their calenders, next one is Sukkot, a kind of religious campsite outside your house, more soon….
“Never be silent” – the modern day Watchmen of Jerusalem
Last sunday morning I went on a prayer walk on the walls of the old city.
Bart and Joan Repko have been doing this walk 6 days a week (except Shabbat) for some years now, alternating between each half of the edges of the wall, as you can start from either side of the Jaffa gate and finish just behind the Al Asqa Mosque. You can get a ticket for 16 Shekels and its valid for two days so you can do the other half the next day, just need to start just inside the Jaffa gate.
The aim is to pray over this city and for the frequently volatile atmosphere here. Often when we are here we can hear the sound of the minarets (Islamic prayer towers) boom out loud voices from different parts of the city.
These steps are quite hard work especially with the fierce midday heat here and it is quite easy to slip as they have hundreds of years of wear…
My friend Marcel is often on this tour. Check his blog here.
Stunning views into and out of the old city are guaranteed….
Its quite amazing doing this walk as you get to see over into yards, gardens and roofs of all kinds of places. People in both Arab and Jewish cultures use their roofs as yards, and usually characterised with satellite dishes, old sofas, solar panels (used to run hot water tanks) and various junk.
Gardens are quite popular, whether its a handful of hanging baskets or something quite a bit ambitious, here this person has their own vineyard, think it belongs to an Arab Christian. I often see orange and lemon trees too.
The group’s name ‘Never be silent’ is taken from Isaiah 62 : 1 “For Zion’s sake I will not keep silent, for Jerusalem’s sake I will not remain quiet, till her righteousness shines out like the dawn, her salvation like a blazing torch.”
See more about the Never be silent old city prayer tour walks here: www.neverbesilent.org/en/
Sderot in Israel, Gaza’s nextdoor neighbour
Where as Gaza is getting plenty of attention in the news of late, there isn’t so much sympathy for the people of Sderot, an otherwise seemingly quiet town with neat gardens at the side of the roads but has to put up with regular Katusha rocket fire from terrorists in Gaza.
Meaning Boulevard in Hebrew, Sderot is a place I visited last September during my first season in Israel, not part of my normal job, but when given the chance to go there I thought it would be interesting to see a place closer to conflict than Jerusalem and to see things as they really are without the aid of television or internet.
Getting there we would be met by a local man who is actually in British but has lived in Israel for 30 years and in Sderot for most of that time. He played this audio track of some wailing on his mobile phone, this was the sound to expect if there was a rocket attack, when this happens the people in this town have 15 seconds only to get to a bomb shelter. People are allowed to drive their cars without seatbelts in Sderot to give them a chance to get out and run to a shelter (on bus stops) next to a street if necessary.
Outside the police station here in Sderot, most of the rockets are collected and are on display for people to see. A lot of these are thought to have been manufactured in Iran. There are some larger more sophisticated ones which have hit a large radius like the neighbouring cities of Ashdod and Ashkelon. Without adequate security around Gaza, much more powerful weapons would get in (and probably do through the tunnels) and threaten the whole country and could hit Tel Aviv or Jerusalem, which is why roadblocks and strict inspection of trucks is a very necessary business.
Here this town is otherwise very pleasant and clean looking place, the regular threats seem to give people a more community spirit I guess.
This a typical bomb shelter, a public one. Some of these you see attached to peoples houses as a home improvement, not unlike people getting a conservatory built back in the UK.
Because of the regular attacks here, although deaths or serious injuries from rockets do happen but not that often, children cannot sleep in fear, and mental health disorders are common, as well damage to people’s houses and cars. Unemployment is high here, but no Olympic sized swimming pools or fancy restaurants which Gaza has.
The Katuysha rockets are fairly crude by modern day weapons in the fact they are not accurate, and so fired indiscriminately not at a specific target like a military installation. In fact we were told that often the most common time the rockets happen is during children going to or from school. At least a basketball ground here as a concrete roof on top, just like this school here on the left.
Our aim was to help decorate some peoples houses here and as Christians show love to this neglected community. The first people we helped was a large static caravan which was on a farm which was in quite poor condition which we painted up. The next was for a young Orthodox man who was about the same age as me and was disabled, we painted and plastered his house. I got a chance to learn and practice plastering holes in walls which is quite fun and easy once you get used to it. Later once we finished painting, we got a chance to watch a movie ‘Don’t mess with the Zohan‘ a comedy filmed in Israel starring Adam Sandler.
Without being hasty and under the expertise of our local friend, he took us out in his car up to the border with Gaza, this was a very interesting visit that no normal tourist would ever get to see.
Here there is a small military base to watch for rockets and other terrorist activity. A small blimp (Zeppelin type balloon, not pictured) is up high tethered to the ground, this is not manned but has a camera and solider on the ground is alerted if a rocket is fired and the alarm is sounded to warn the people in the town. On the right is an interesting peace monument (sorry I can’t remember who provided it) in the form of a musical instrument. The buildings in the background is Gaza. There is also a water reservoir close by.
Really no community in the world would ever put up with rockets fired on them regularly over the last few years, I think Israel shows a lot more restraint that many other nations would if treated like this.
If you lived or been to my home city of Portsmouth UK, Sderot and the Gaza strip are as close together a Gunwharf Quays and Gosport, this is less than a mile in between.
Before we went home on the last day, the man we stayed with took us out for a meal in a restaurant on the pier on the nearby biblical city of Ashkelon.
This was an interesting weekend and I would like to do it again sometime this year maybe.
As this is a sensitive subject please note hateful or provocative comments will be deleted and reported.
At work, the Talpiyot food bank team, replacing LCD screen on Acer Travelmate laptop
Work has been busy this week, actually I am not often not busy, but had some trouble with a PC that sits in the Talpiyot food bank that is supposed to back up everything off servers, this essential running box was showed as off on my Spiceworks console, and after I went over and replaced the power supply, the next day it did it again. The PC had to be replaced and took good few hours to get it running the same.
Talking of such, its been very very hot in Jerusalem, temperatures have been up to 37c (thats 100F) so cycling 4 miles to the office in scorching heat is pretty tiring!
Other things I had to do with to set up new members of staff, get a Russian speaking colleague who is based in Karmiel access to a database, he works with immigrants from Russia and ex-Soviet states who live in the north.
But as well as this I managed to put a new screen in a friend’s (ie: not one my work’s assets) laptop. This Acer Travelmate laptop had liquid that got in the LCD from an accident with some olive oil, great for your health but not for laptops, the screen works just has some weird blobs in between the layers of thin plastic inside the screen, this would eventually cause the LCD to fail altogether as they are fragile. When I went back to the UK I ordered a new LCD display and carried it in a box on the plane, so I was a little nervous that this part was all right, it cost me UK£70 ($100) from a specialist laptop spares company in the UK….
Out come the little rubber pads on the screen fascia. Then take out all four screws. Gently prise and flex the screen fascia out, the old LCD is freed from taking out 4 tiny screws from the long steel hinges that give the top section rigidity and also double up as antennae for the wireless card, then the screen can put flat down has the ribbon cable disconnected and two little wires from the inverter that supplies voltage to the screen. The new screen is put in its place and I put the screws in loosely and tighten them up one at a time, as it needs to be jiggled a bit into place….
Hooray it works!!! The volunteer who asked me to fix this gave me a bit of extra money which paid for my Dead Sea trip before I went away, so it was a blessing I could get this fixed for her, and she could provide me with means to do some exploring I did with friends at a weekend a month ago.
The IT workshop has three desks and half a dozen PCs as this room has our database expert (Gilad) sat here, we also had Shirley our American-Chinese IT specialist who took care of a lot of problems at this site, but she has left now (we miss you, come back soon!!) and there is a bench with lot of stuff in pieces to be rebuilt and put back into service. At my main desk in headquarters I just have one PC and few spare parts and a server room I look after…
There is another Acer on the pile of PCs in the background, this has a full hard disk and need some software tweaking to fix it. (change data around the two partitions on it) I am going to order a new power supply for this as the one the volunteer as its a bit unreliable and held together with tape.
The food bank floor team are having a bit of cake and ice cream after lunch (why I look forward to site visits there) but don’t let this deceive you, this team work very hard hauling food onto pallets, several tons a day that are shipped to some of the most poorest and needy Jewish people in Jerusalem. People do come and go fairly often, as people come to the end of their commitment is always sad. Here you can see these pictures shows staff ranges from the US, South Africa, Japan and Finland. We have had people here from every continent.
Overall this week has been extra busy, but got most things done I needed to do and it has been fun.
Dead Sea Odyssey 422 metres below sea level – 1: The snake trail at Massada
( 1 ) – ( 2 ) – ( 3 ) – ( 4 ) – more soon….
My friend Magnus from Sweden who I work with and Marcel from the Netherlands who works for another Christian organisation in Jerusalem decided to spend a weekend on a trip, as Magnus was close to the end of his volunteer time in Israel.
Various different ideas were discussed on a biblical place to go, maybe Jericho (although didn’t manage to fully research safety and security in this place) or more of the Galilee. In the end we decided to check out the Dead Sea. I have been there twice before but not recently, but where as before I went up in a cable car, this time this would be a gruelling climb up the ‘snake trail’ at 3am, a zigzag path that goes right up to the top of the Masada fortress where a Jewish community once lived before tragically committing suicide after being hopelessly surrounded by the Roman army. More information on Masada here.
After the shock of getting up at 3am to get there to see the sun rise and not have the intense midday heat when hiking up the path, this was definitely worth it I think 🙂
( 1 ) – ( 2 ) – ( 3 ) – ( 4 ) – more soon….
Zionism – a bad word to some?
I have always wondered why some people think Zionism is a dirty word.
Many times in the news its kind of used as a slur for the way the way Jews have been returning to Israel from all across the diaspora, occasionally its even Christians, some that have studied all kinds of theology but appear to be perhaps lacking in what was taught in Isaiah and Jeremiah maybe. When speaking to people about my interests and visits to Israel, a couple of times I have been responded “Oh so you are a Zionist are you? ah yes these sorts of people hate Palestinians, Arabs and Iranians…” This is sad when people make rash and quick judgments like this.
There is plenty of authors of books critical of Israel, plenty are on sale on Amazon (even including some Jews, including people like Noam Chomsky, Norman Finkelstein etc) ex-US president Jimmy Carter and former TV newsreader celebrity nutter David Icke like to look at Zionism being the worst kind of evil organisation ever. Likened to the Freemasons or some other paranoid organisation which has a corrupting influence on the world, and that Jews in some way are controlling. Really this is and should be quite laughable. There were famous books printed like the Elder protocols of Zion and founder of the blue oval motor maker, Henry Ford wrote some similar poisonous material, some of these nasty propaganda manuals are still treated as legitimate reference material today, as part of other modern day hatred such as holocaust denial. Its part of what I think make Anti-Semitism a bigger problem than people think and worse than other hatred of any specific racial group.
In reality these views can be held completely nonsense, when you look at the wide number of ethnic people in Israel, and different types of Jews worldwide. If you look at Aliyah, its true people emigrated to Israel, especially around the early 1990s with going with ideal of all Jews going into one nation closely to what the Torah said, but at the same time many Jews also made Aliyah because they had to, albeit sometimes reluctantly, as persecution in their previous homelands of nations like Yemen, Iran, Kazakhstan, Ethiopia etc, was unbearable or meant they could of faced death. For some other Jewish people the idea to go may have been purely economic, the promise of a job and financial security. For this reason many Israelis I have met can be secular or atheistic.
Where as Israel gets sizable amounts of money from the US government, its no secret so has the Palestinian authority. The Magon David ambulance organisation in Israel has all its fleets of vehicles donated by Jewish organisations mostly in the US but sometimes also from Canada and France. There are many Christian organisations in the US that have supplied money to charities and needy people in Israel, mostly because a good proportion of tax Shekels have to go to the military defending Israel against frequent threats from terrorism or war with its neighbours. Despite this and than poverty in Israel is high, Israel has made a high contribution to the rest of the world in terms of its exports, large amounts of fruit and vegetables, technology (IT, telecoms, renewable power, water treatment, etc) medicine and healthcare innovations are just a small example of these.
I am a supporter of Israel and the Jewish people, this could mean I could be considered to be a Christian Zionist, but would like to clarify things first. I believe God still has a plan for the Hebrew as outlined in the scriptures, that as Christians we are grafted in as his people. Sadly because of the false doctrine of what often known as replacement theology, people assume that Israel in the bible is more of a metaphorical ‘Israel’ for the modern day church. Paul says clearly in Romans 11 : 1 about this common misconception. I believe Jesus will still return to Jerusalem one days as promised in the scriptures, this is why Israel is never not in the mainstream news, as Satan attempts to twist and alter things in order to change unsuccessfully what God is planning.
Christians that support Israel are not always one particular breed or denomination. I have seen quite a few Christians visit Israel, from all over the place including Nigeria, South Korea and Japan. I have even seen a small group of people (they had name tags) at the Kotel recently from the Faeroe Islands, an extremely small little known Nordic island nation between Scotland and Iceland.
As a Christian I think its vital we don’t become complacent, and speak up and pray against hatred and lies spoke in governments around the world and in the media. I think God loves the Palestinian and the Arab and Persian people, its true also in recent times there have been large numbers of people in Islamic nations (do some searches on Youtube) come to Christ, normally this is secret as they can be in extreme danger, for this reason its hard to gauge how many Moslems, Hindus, Sikhs, etc come to Christ each year around the world.
The newspapers in the UK most definitely want to pick someone to blame for current world problems, whether its overpaid bankers, foreign immigrants coming in and wanting to change things to suit them, change the way our children are taught in British schools, worryingly extremist political groups like the BNP or Islam4UK, a kind of ‘bogeyman’ we can all blame. The scriptures in Ephesians 6:12 says “For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms.” Here its sin which can manifest into many different things that causes worry and distress.
For me, I only identify myself as a regular Christian, I may contribute in my church in welcome team, or being in prayer groups in some IT businesses I have worked at and in looking after the computer systems for Christian charity in Jerusalem. I am purely here as a servant to do whatever God leads me into doing, the only incentive or reward being able to see help go to the people that need it, make some new friends and get to study biblical places in more detail. I am not in Israel to convert people as this is greatly frowned upon and is illegal, its more of case of just a loving attitude in terms of me serving out there in terms of the context of my official volunteer job and spending time with some of my native Israeli friends.
When I see other Christians I know volunteer in nations like South Africa, Chile, Uganda, China etc, I don’t usually ask about politics, as its not fair to make assumptions based on what the media say, its not always easy to sum up what is right or wrong from casual observance. I also avoid mentioning political stuff to friends back in the UK (both Christian and non-Christian) due to antagonistic questions I have been asked and such.
For me, Israel is where almost all of the events of the bible happened, and where Christ himself will come again, and many things prophesied in the scriptures have become reality, the reformation of the modern state of Israel, a lot of its neighbours being its enemies, the way the Hebrew language which was something only ever kept for reading religious books has now made it into a usable language in business and every day, all of this in little over sixty years. It is only by sticking to a roadmap of what the Lord outlined in the bible will there be peace, as opposed to any artificial plan created by any other authority.
Brit In Jerusalem 
